Author Event! Murray Carpenter's "Sweet and Deadly"

Join us on Friday, May 16th as we host Murray Carpenter in conversation with Antonia Noori Farzan to dicuss Murray's latest, Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick. Signed copies are available for purchase.

About the book:

How Coca-Cola makes Americans sick—and makes sure we don't know it.

If we knew that Coca-Cola was among the deadliest products in our diet, would we continue drinking it in such great quantities? The Coca-Cola Company has gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure we don’t find out, as this damning exposé makes patently clear. Marshaling the findings of extensive research and deep investigative reporting, Murray Carpenter describes in Sweet and Deadly the damage Coke does to America’s health—and the remarkable campaign of disinformation conducted by the company to keep consumers in the dark.

Sugar-sweetened beverages are the single item in the American diet that most contributes to the epidemic of chronic disease—in particular, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease—and Coca-Cola is America’s favorite sugar-sweetened beverage, by far. Carpenter details how the Coca-Cola corporation’s sophisticated shadow network has masterfully spread disinformation for decades to hide the health risks of its product from consumers—risks disproportionately borne by Black, brown, and low-income communities. Working from a playbook of obfuscation and pseudoscience that has worked well for other harmful products, from tobacco and trans fats to opioids, Coca-Cola has managed to maintain an aura of goodness and happiness. This eye-opening book finally and fully reveals the truth behind that aura.

About the author:

Murray Carpenter is the author of Sweet and Deadly; How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick (MIT Press, March 2025), and Caffeinated, How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts and Hooks Us (Penguin USA, 2014). As a journalist focusing on science, health, climate, and environmental stories, he has reported for The New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, National Geographic, NPR, and Maine Public Radio. His work has taken him across the United States, and to Guantanamo, the Colombian llanos, and a factory town in China. He holds a BA in psychology from the University of Colorado and an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana, and lives in Belfast, Maine.

About the moderator:

Antonia Noori Farzan is a Rhode Island native who joined The Providence Journal in 2021. She previously worked at The Washington Post and, before that, spent several years at alt-weeklies in Arizona and Florida. Antonia is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Hamilton College. She is a past winner of the George Polk Award and also received a blue ribbon in the agriculture division at the Washington County Fair.