In India, can an Ad-Campaign turn Soda Pop into the new Tobacco?

India Today July 20, 2009 reports:

"...The health profile of urban India shows an underlying trend toward improving life and health...

Urban Indians are getting slimmer. Excess body fat ratio compared to muscle mass has come down by 11 per cent in the last 10 years.

...the number of urban Indians eating out more than twice a week has dropped by 11 per cent...the larger picture is upbeat..."

Elizabeth Kolbert says in The New Yorker July 20 2009:

"...Eric Finkelstein is a health economist at a research institute in North Carolina. In “The Fattening of America” (Wiley; $26.95), written with Laurie Zuckerman, he argues that Americans started to put on pounds in the eighties because it made financial sense for them to do so. Relative to other goods and services, food has got cheaper in the past few decades, and fattening foods, in particular, have become a bargain. Between 1983 and 2005, the real cost of fats and oils declined by sixteen per cent. During the same period, the real cost of soft drinks dropped by more than twenty per cent...

...Today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States, making them “the number one food consumed in the American diet.” If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less..."

Press Trust Of India reported on July 9, 2009:

“Economist Amartya Sen, business tycoon L N Mittal and Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi are among the members of a high-level panel headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh constituted to advise the Government to draw upon experience of the best Indian minds abroad for a two-way engagement…”

Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi on PM panel...



Artist: Steve Breen January 2003

"Our fries now have 50% less fat"

"Great"...

Will India ever put tobacco-type pictorial warnings on the bottles of soda-pop?