City Year's unhealthy corporate ties

By Stephen B. Soumerai and Matthew W. Gillman  |  July 21, 2007

CITY YEAR, the brainchild of Michael Brown and Alan Khazae, is like an urban Peace Corps. Every year, about 1,000 17- to 24-year-old men and women serve at least 1,700 hours in cities and schools, often in low-income urban areas, in the United States and South Africa. City Year volunteers do demanding work like cleaning parks and painting schools and are tutors, assistant teachers, and role models for disadvantaged children.

But City Year is now jeopardizing its hard-won reputation. In the pursuit of better recognition, City Year is putting its name and logo on hundreds of millions of Pepsi cans in an advertising campaign planned for January 2008. An advance look at the can on promotional T-shirts gives the distinct impression that City Year endorses the soda inside -- a chief culprit in the epidemic of childhood obesity.

Like many non profits these days, City Year depends on the private sector for much of its funding, and it looks for diverse companies with good business practices. Timberland, an exemplar of socially conscious corporations, provides all the uniforms and shoes for volunteers and is a national leadership sponsor.

PepsiCo, on the other hand, is not doing City Year any favors by adding them to its advertising campaign. Perhaps City Year executives are not aware of the extent of the soda-obesity connection. The CEO of City Year told one of us that PepsiCo doesn't sell soda in the schools. That's a good gesture by Pepsi, but less than 10 percent of US children's consumption of sugary drinks is from schools, and it does little to stop the heavy consumption of soda by children. Even a cursory look at the Pepsi website and TV ads -- showcasing rap music, sports cars, and young models -- makes it obvious that its prime targets are young people.

Ironically, the school children who look up to City Year role models may interpret the "cool" City Year/Pepsi can as a reason to drink more soda. The best medical studies now show that soda and other sweet drinks are primary culprits in the childhood obesity epidemic. Childhood obesity is now rampant in our country -- about one-third of US children are overweight or obese -- and rates are highest in very low-income and minority communities in which City Year does its most important work. Obesity in childhood causes social problems, depression, high blood pressure, reduced liver function, and perhaps most concerning, diabetes, which can ultimately lead to blindness, amputations, heart disease, and death. Sadly, type 2 diabetes, historically a disease of overweight adults, is now affecting American children.

Most children don't realize that when they drink a 20-ounce Pepsi, they are downing 18 teaspoons of sugar. One study estimates that the calories in one added can of soda each day explain the entire rise in childhood obesity in the past decade.

There may still be time to stop City Year's ill-conceived plans. The leaders of City Year should accept PepsiCo's sponsorship as an act of good will and leave it at that, with no endorsement of soda. In this way City Year can protect its credibility and, more important , continue to safeguard the health of the children in its charge.

Stephen B. Soumerai is professor and Matthew W. Gillman is ass ociate professor and director of the Obesity Prevention Program in the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.