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A nutrition expert at Health Canada, that nation’s health ministry, has charged that Coca-Cola Company misleads consumers into thinking its Vitaminwater line of drinks is a healthy beverage option.

“I find calling these products ‘waters’ is misleading,” said the official, “given that they have sugars added to them. Perhaps the word ‘waters’ could be put in quotes.” Vitaminwater contains 32 grams of sugar per 20-ounce bottle. Earlier this year, Canadian law firms in Calgary and Vancouver filed class action lawsuits against Coca Cola for misleading advertising of Vitaminwater. In January 2011, the Advertising Standards Authority, the ad regulatory agency in the United Kingdom, said Coca-Cola broke ad rules when its ads described its popular line of flavored water products as “delicious and nutritious.” The Authority ordered Coke to stop making that claim.

A new report by GRAIN, a global nonprofit group, called Food safety for whom? Corporate wealth vs. people’s health examines how “food safety” is being used as a tool to increase corporate control over food and agriculture and what people are doing about it. “Corporations are increasingly in the driver’s seat because they set the standards and implement them while governments merely frame the rules and clean up the mess,” says GRAIN Director Henk Hobbelink. “These food and agriculture standards are spreading everywhere and are being used by Wal-Mart and other corporations to organize markets according to their interests.”  Genetic Resources Action International, or GRAIN for short, is an independent non-profit foundation with its headquarters in Barcelona, Spain.

According to the Guardian, the UK government’s public health partnerships with junk food and alcohol companies have come under attack from two of its own advisers on obesity.

In a recent article in the British Medical Journal, Professors Tim Lang and Geof Rayner, who sit on the government’s advisory committee on obesity, write these partnerships risk being a “smokescreen” for “publicly endorsed marketing.” They warn that the strategy could become “collusion between the state and corporations to hoodwink consumers. At least nannies are overt.”

Last week the Federal Trade Commission proposed sweeping new guidelines to restrict television food advertising to children.

According to the New York Times, “the guidelines are meant to be voluntary, but companies are likely to face heavy pressure to adopt them.” The Center for Science in the Public Interest praised the proposed guidelines as “strong and sensible” and urged food and entertainment companies to adopt the standards.  Dan Jaffe, a lobbyist for the Association of National Advertisers, called the guidelines “sweeping and, in our view, overly restrictive.” “Despite calling these proposals ‘voluntary,’ the government clearly is trying to place major pressure on the food, beverage and restaurant industries,” he said.