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Georgia Today
Senate runoff; Ga. better than natl. average on inflation report; Coca-Cola book
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Welcome to the Georgia Today Podcast. Here we bring you the latest reports from the GPB newsroom. On today's episode, early voting begins in parts of Fulton and Cherokee county for a special state Senate runoff election. Georgia fares slightly better than other states in recent national inflation reports, and a new book explains Coca Cola's efforts to downplay the harmful health effects of sugar.
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It's been a consistent habit of Coca Cola is to find and support the research that makes the habit of sugar sweetened beverages appear to be more benign than it is.
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Today is Monday, September 15th. I'm Sophie Gradas and this is Georgia Today. Today is the first day of early voting in a special election to fill the seat of former state Senator Brandon beach, an Alpharetta Republican drafted by President Trump to become U.S. treasurer. Georgia Democrats hope a win in the deep red district means their party could make gains in 2026. Deborah Shigley won almost 40% of the vote in the primary election. She'll face Republican Jason Dickerson, who came in second. Democrats say the election reflects widespread discontent with President Trump, but it's unclear whether it means a coming blue wave in the area. Democrats have performed well in low turnout special elections in recent years, and parties typically perform better locally when they aren't in control of the executive branch, as Republicans are now. Georgia Republican party chairman Josh McCune noted that the GOP picked up ground in the 2024 presidential election, and he says he's confident voters still largely back the president. Statewide after about 300 Koreans were detained in a massive immigration raid on a Georgia Hyundai plant. They were sent home last week. Lawyers and social workers say the nearly 200 non Korean workers ensnared in the crackdown remain in legal limbo. Some Some workers are still unaccounted for. Rosie Harrison is the manager of the Southeast Georgia nonprofit Grow Initiative, which connects immigrant and non immigrant low income families with food, housing and educational resources. She says her organization's phones have been ringing nonstop with panicked families needing help. Many of the families calling say their detained relatives were the sole breadwinners in the household, leaving them desperate for basics like baby formula and food. Harrison said the raid involved federal agents taking workers cell phones and detaining them. Some workers had legal authorization to work in the U.S. a judge has rejected an attempt by the state of Georgia and a local development authority that would have required residents pay legal fees after they unsuccessfully sued to block the Rivian Electric Vehicle plant east of Atlanta. The state and Development authority wanted six property owners who challenged the zoning for Rivian Automotive to pay over $300,000 in fees. Morgan County Super Judge Stephen Bradley says in a ruling filed Friday that the lawsuits weren't frivolous and that awarding fees could hurt citizens ability to challenge government actions. The ruling comes days before a groundbreaking ceremony for the $5 billion plant. Some locals oppose the plant, saying it's an inappropriate neighbor in the largely rural area. Atlanta housing leaders have cut the ribbon on a new senior housing redevelopment in the city's East Coast Lake neighborhood. GPB's Amanda Andrews reports Atlanta now has passed a major milestone in meeting affordable housing goals.
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This $35 million project puts Atlanta over halfway towards Mayor Andre Dickens goal of creating or preserving 20,000 units of affordable housing by 2030. All 149 apartments at Legacy at Eastlake have been renovated and made affordable for seniors based on area median income. Atlanta Housing CEO Terry Lee says their goal is to welcome people who have been priced out back into the community. And so that is the promise and the opportunity to be able to say that as we develop the city, as we develop new affordable housing units we are developing for the persons who have labored and have been in these communities for years to come. This project includes new electrical and plumbing as well as upgraded amenities. For GPB News, I'm Amanda Andrews.
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A record breaking $26.3 billion flowed into Georgia for the fiscal year that ended in June as companies expanded or established new locations. Governor Brian Kemp's office released the number on Monday, saying the growth will translate to 23,000 new private sector jobs over the next few years. Company expansions at existing locations and international investment were the major drivers of continued growth. 77% of the investments were made outside of metro Atlanta, but the 10 county metro region remains a business hub hosting major companies such as Duracell and Mercedes Benz. Recent inflation reports and jobs numbers paint a grim picture of the American economy, but in Georgia, the numbers are a little better than the rest of the nation. GPB's Chase McGee explains why consumers are still feeling pressure.
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Georgia's unemployment rate is hovering around 4%, just a little better than the national average of 4.3%. Esfandormasoomi is the distinguished professor of economics at Emory University. He says this could be due to Georgia's investment in healthcare.
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Jobs and healthcare has proven to be an anti recessionary, well to do segment.
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Of the economy, but prices for things like housing still weigh heavily on Georgians. Misumi says. We're still dealing with high prices set around the time of the COVID pandemic.
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So inflation rate is low but affordability has declined quite a lot relative to incomes.
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That's driven up debt for consumers in the state. For GPB news, I'm Chase McGee.
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A new report from Emory University shows that certain mental health conditions can increase the risk of developing heart disease by as much as 100%. GPB's Ellen Eldredge has more.
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The study also found the healthcare system often fails to connect multidisciplinary providers of mental and cardiovascular health. Viola Vaccarino is a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory. She says people with mental illness should also be screened for cardiovascular disease and vice versa.
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But also, having a heart attack or stroke can trigger a mental health condition, particularly depression and ptsd, and this creates a spiraling of risk, bidirectional spiraling between the mind and the heart.
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She says strategies to increase access to care are needed on both policy and clinical levels. For GPB News, I'm Ellen eldredge.
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In the US nearly 3/4 of all adults are either overweight or obese, according to the National Institutes of Health. Diet and exercise play a role in maintaining a healthy weight, but there is one substance on the market that features prominently in the American sugar sweetened beverages. Atlanta based Coca Cola has dominated that market for decades. A new book by journalist Murray Carpenter explores Coca Cola's efforts to minimize sugar's role in the proliferation of chronic diseases associated with obesity, such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. The book is called Sweet and How Coca Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick. Murray Carpenter spoke with GPB's Peter Biello.
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So what made you interested in looking at Coca Cola's role in shaping Americans health?
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This book actually grew out of an earlier book I wrote about caffeine called Caffeinated. And in writing that book I realized that the caffeinated beverage that we consume most by volume is actually sodas. And when I realized that, I started looking into sodas and their health risks and that that sort of led me down this road also because after I wrote that book, a lot of people asked me, you know, is my caffeine habit healthy? And basically my answer was, you know, if, if you're consuming it in, in coffee or tea and you don't suffer from insomnia or anxiety, then knock yourself out. But if you're consuming it in the form of sugar sweetened beverages, you may have some problems.
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So your book chronicles a variety of ways that Coca Cola spreads disinformation, which is distinct from misinformation because disinformation means it's deliberate. They know it's wrong, but they will say it anyway. So that's quite a claim. One of the ways you say it wants to mislead the public is by minimizing the harm of the sugary products by paying for research that does exactly that minimizes the harm of sugars. Can you give us a few examples of how Coca Cola subsidizes research that makes sugar look better than it actually is?
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It's been a consistent habit of Coca Cola is to, to find and support the research that makes the habit of sugar sweetened beverages appear to be more benign than it is. You know, it's hard to say if, if, if they were, if their research minimized the, the health risks of sodas because they were being paid. You know, I wouldn't say that, but I would say they found researchers who were of a similar mind and supported that research.
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And what about the question of disclosure? Generally speaking, we want to know when an industry is funding a study of something that is related to that industry. To what extent do we know when that is happening with respect to Coca Cola?
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This varies a lot. So in some cases that, you know, because they have funded an awful lot of research, in some cases there is the kind of disclosure you would expect to see at the end of a, a published paper. You know, this, this, this research was supported by Coca Cola, et cetera. In other cases that was omitted and was later added if someone found that as a, as a correction or a clarification later. So there's quite a variety, but certainly the most impactful research that has sort of exonerated sugar sweetened beverages has often not disclosed that. And there's a separate but related aspect of this that we could talk about, which is their support of nonprofits that are bolstering these claims.
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Can you name some of those nonprofits? Because I suspect listeners will have heard the names but not really known that they were funded this way.
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Yeah, so I mean, I think the big one that they, that Coca Cola actually got sort of exposed about and got into trouble was the Global Energy Balance Network, which was a company, a nonprofit that they funded with, you know, more than a million dollars that was sort of generating this, this idea that a calorie is a calorie calories and calories out. Don't worry so much about what you're eating as how much you're eating. So Coke, Kale, Cashews, you can over consume anything. Coca Cola worked very hard not to have their name on that group. So they they wanted it to appear to be an independent group. There's another way that Coca Cola and its allies in the beverage industry, Pepsi, the American Beverage association, do this. Support groups that are, say, opposing soda taxes and using again, a benign name that doesn't immediately seem to be industry related.
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Well, help me break down the key piece of disinformation that you're describing here. The calories in calories out argument. I mean, on its face it seems like it makes a whole lot of sense, right? Your weight will stay the same, roughly if you are expending as many calories as you consume and over consuming anything, whether it's 140 calories in a can of Coke or as you write in the book, 140 calories of almonds. If you eat more than you burn off, you're going to gain weight. So why is Coca Cola misleading the public here?
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Well, so this is something that research has really advanced on in the past 20 years because yes, what you're saying is sort of true, like if you over consume calories, you're going to gain excess weight. But what research is increasingly finding is that a calorie of sugar is metabolized quite differently than other products that also have some fat or protein or fiber in them. And so a calorie of sugar is rapidly metabolized and you know, has some of, some of the fructose is going into your liver, you know, the glucose is going into your bloodstream quickly. It has different effects on your body than again, say a calorie of almonds.
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So what to make of a solution going forward? I mean, is it that Coca Cola or the sugar sweetened beverage industry needs to peel back on its advertising or change the makeup of its beverages? What would you say advocates are in favor of here?
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First of all, I don't think that the industry is going to do anything. I mean, they're doing exactly what they need to do, which is sell more product. And so I think the assumption consistently that, that any solutions would come from, you know, Coca Cola are naive as, as were the ideas that solutions would come from the tobacco industry. In terms of what advocates can do, we know that there are things that, that work to reduce the consumption of sugar, sweetened beverages, soda taxes work and warning labels work and that, you know, that's been proven in other countries as well. And so I think that's what people are investing efforts into is, is trying to get more of those. Sorry. It's worth noting also that, you know, one of the big national things that's going on is Bobby Kennedy you're talking about.
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F.
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Kennedy Jr. Really has an animus towards sugar and towards sugar sweetened beverages. And one of the things he's done that researchers had long hoped to see is he has promoted waivers from SNAP from food stamps so that states can disallow the purchase of sodas with food stamps. And we don't know that that will reduce consumption. The assumption is yes, because it's, you know, probably $8 billion that we're spending through food stamps on those. But at very least now we're up to a dozen states that have requested waivers. At very least, you know, in a year or two years we will know if that has made a difference.
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Well, Murray Carpenter, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me about your book. I really do appreciate it.
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Thank you for your interest. It's been fun.
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Murray Carpenter's book is called Sweet and How Coca Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick. And it's the subject of our latest episode of Narrative Edge, GPB's podcast about books with Georgia connections. Find that podcast wherever you get your podcasts and now on YouTube and in Georgia sports In soccer, Atlanta United was knocked out of playoff contention after a dramatic 54 loss to the Columbus Crew in Atlanta on Saturday. The Five Stripes were down 50 after an abysmal first half and a late game rally fell short. Atlanta United has two more home games, the next a first ever match against MLS expansion team San Diego FC. In basketball, Alicia Gray and Ryan Howard scored 20 points apiece as the Atlanta Dream beat the Indiana Fever 80 to 68 in Atlanta on Saturday. It was the first game of the best of three first round playoff series. Atlanta can advance to the second round with a win in Game two on Tuesday in Indianapolis. And in college football, kicker Aiden Burr made a 55 yard finish field goal as time expired and the Georgia tech upset number 12 Clemson 24 to 21 in Atlanta on Saturday. The home crowd rushed the field. Georgia Tech will pay a $50,000 fine for that. After the win, the Yellow Jackets rocketed up the AP Top 25 poll to number 18. That's it for today's edition of Georgia Today. Thank you for listening. If you would like to learn more about these stories and hear more, visit gpb.org news if you haven't yet subscribed to this podcast, you can take a moment right now and keep us current in your podcast feed. If you have feedback, we would love to hear it. You can email us@georgia todaypb.org I'm Sophie Gradas, and we will see you tomorrow.