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Beverage consultants laugh at “health and wellness” brand launches from Coke and Pepsi.

This is the chocolate factory that is home to the real brand of Tava. It's located in Kandos, a small town in New South Wales, Australia.

Stung by decreasing sales of traditional soft drinks, America’s biggest beverage companies are naming new brands of carbonated sodas they hope will distance them from claims that soft drinks are a chief suspect in the spectacular increase in obesity and diabetes over the last two decades.

Coca-Cola is introducing Diet Coke Plus and Pepsi is countering with Tava, which hopefully will not be confused with Tava, a chocolate company in Australia that produces fair trade chocolate grown by South Pacific islanders.

With American people gravitating towards healthier drinks, Coca-Cola’s CEO E. Neville Isdell, sees the company fitting right in. “Diet and light brands are actually health and wellness brands,” he said recently, presumably with a straight face.

A question about these new corporate brands: “This is a joke, right?”

But Tom Pirko, head of Bevmark, a food and beverage consulting company, begs to differ. He thinks it is a “joke” to sell artificially sweetened soda as a healthy drink. He points to consumer research that says people view diet soft drinks as anything but healthy, even if they are fortified with vitamins and minerals.

Last year, Cadbury Schweppes caused quite a stir when they came out with 7Up Plus, a low-calorie soda “fortified” with vitamins and minerals. They actually called it “100% natural,” which raised the hackles of a nutrition group, which pointed out that high-fructose corn syrup is considered to be extremely dangerous to your health when consumed in large quantities. Now the health claims have been downgraded to “100% natural flavors,” and as you might have guessed, the product is not exactly racing off the shelves.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest also weighed in on the subject. They have called regular soft drinks “liquid candy” and they are not too excited about these new offspring. The head of the center, Michael F. Jacobson, says people are better off getting their nutrition from real food, and of course, Coke and Pepsi are not exactly in that business.

The public has healthy doubts about these new brand strategies.

It would appear that this is not the growing edge of the beverage business. A study by Morgan Stanley found that only 10% of people think that diet colas are good for you. The study also reported that 30% of the people they talked to are scared of artificial sweeteners, up significantly from just a couple of years ago.

Coca-Cola in particular has a lot riding on these new marketing efforts. Soft drinks and energy drinks account for roughly 80% of their sales and it was only recently that they began to seriously look beyond the carbonated soft drink business. Pepsi is a much more diversified company with only 30% of their sales in the soft drink arena.

Start your day with this nutritious breakfast: soda?

The senior vice president for Coca-Cola brands, Katie Bayne, predicted that clever marketing will get them out of this fix. And with the help of people like Dr. John Foreyt at the Behavioral Medicines Research Center in Houston on the Coca-Cola payroll, they may even convince a few nutritionally-unaware people that “soft drinks have been unfairly targeted in the efforts to turn back the obesity tide.”But with 50% of Americans over age 4 drinking four sodas a day, including at breakfast, you are looking right there at half the extra calories that are directly responsible for increased weight problems. At the present rate of increase in obesity, one out of every three children can be expected to develop diabetes. African American children are at even greater risk with one out of every two kids developing diabetes.