CSE attacks Shahrukh Khan, soft drink giants

New Delhi, Aug 7 (UNI) The Centre for Science and Environment(CSE) whose study, released last week, found abnormally high pesticide content in soft drinks, today attacked the PepsiCo and Coca-Cola and film star Shahrukh Khan for his alleged remarks in support of their product, saying they were all misleading the public.

The NGO said the two companies have not released information about even one bottle of their product they tested in 2005 or 2006.

The CSE study had found that 57 bottles from 12 states contained residues anywhere between 10-50 times above the final (not notified) standard.

''In this one week, they want us to believe that they are safe because film stars drink their product, or because other food in India is contaminated,'' said the NGO.

Their star endorser, Shahrukh Khan, was today quoted in the media saying, "We are a filthy country." Is he, therefore, implying that we deserve filthy products?'' the CSE asked.

It said PepsiCo has released advertisements in different newspapers today which was clever copywriting full of half-truths.

The advertisement says they are clean because they are meeting drinking water standards. The data they put out in their defence is from the 2004 Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC).

"But they are selectively quoting from the JPC report to mislead us," says CSE. For instance, while the advertisement issued by Pepsi says that pesticides in its Diet Pepsi are "below limit", it conveniently forgets to add that the same sample exceeds the limit for DDT, a banned and deadly pesticide, by 80 per cent,'' the CSE said.

The companies, the NGO said, also use data from two brands to say that they are clean, but hide the data from three other brands, which indicts them for being unsafe because they were not meeting the drinking water standards.

The same report says Blue Pepsi is higher by 5.2 times, Mirinda Lemon by 4.2 times, and Mirinda Orange 3.4 times than the drinking water standards, it said.

It also does not tell that data for individual pesticides is even more deadly. Mirinda Lemon exceeded the safe limit of chlorpyrifos by eight times and that of DDT by nine times. Based on this, the JPC had concluded: "The Committee feels that claims made by the cola companies in their advertisement tantamount to misleading the public as their products do contain pesticides, which have ill effect on human health in the long run." ''CSE would like to know if the companies have been testing their products since then. If they are, what does the data show? And if they are not, then how do they claim that they are still safe? "Where is the evidence that they are right?" it said.

"This is a clever spin and will not fool the Indian consumer," said CSE.

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