“Kill Your Children” With Sugary Drinks, Manifesto Charges

Thanks to marketer Seth Godin, who e-mailed me information about a provocative, 12-page manifesto, "Kill your children: Facts about Coke by Tyler Lackey," which warns that sugary drinks don’t make us full and therefore we consume more calories than we need, get fat and die at an early age.

While I prefer not to use the same ominous tone as this document, it does raise some valid points, even if they’re sensationalistic, simplistic and not properly referenced.

In fact, current medical research does show that Lackey’s claims have some validity, as I reveal in my upcoming book, SUGAR SHOCK!, but for a topic as incendiary as this, it’s only appropriate to cite sources.

Even so, Lackey — whose manifesto appears on the ChangeThis website created by Godin — cleverly argues: "It may not be politically correct (yet) to stop serving sugar to our kids, but hey, it took decades to make smoking socially unacceptable. How long will it take parents to stop poisoning their children?"

Evidently, as his brief paragraph bio states, author Tyler Lackey wrote the manifesto, because he’s a former soda drinker, whose family offered only Coca-Cola and no water at the dinner table. The filtered-tap-water drinker — who needed "years of beverage therapy" to quit soft drinks — now knows that "Coke free is the way to be," and he allows his two, fit, trim, young children only one Coke a month.