So this is curious: Last week, Coca-Cola kicked off an ad campaign that handled the delicate subject of obesity. The cynical among us might scoff that of course a corporation with enough gall to profit off of the obesity epidemic would also try to profit off of fighting the obesity epidemic. But it’s a serious question: Why would a profitable corporation invest so much time and energy in burnishing its decades-old reputation (a reputation that doesn’t seem to have taken any significant hits as of late)? There are a few potential answers, including a) someone in the Coke marketing department finally watched Food, Inc.; b) someone in the Coke marketing department has a crush on Michelle Obama; and c) there’s something a little more complex going on here. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume it’s the third.

But first, let’s take a look at the ads that have caused such a stir. The longer one, called “Coming Together,” features old-timey shots of folks drinking Coke from long-necked bottles, clips of people recycling cans, and a lot of back-patting over the company’s low- and no-calorie options and its new policy of listing calorie content on the front of bottles. Of course, there’s nary an obese person in sight. The second ad is called “Be OK,” and has a rather bizarre premise — it’s basically about all the fun ways you can burn off the 140 calories in a Coke can, like walking your dog, laughing loudly for 75 seconds, or doing a victory dance after bowling a strike. That last item is especially notable since, in my limited experience with bowling alleys, they don’t tend to attract the sveltest and most fitness-oriented cross-section of the population; an old college professor of mine used to recommend students take bowling to fulfill their PE requirement since it was the one form of exercise you could get while drinking and smoking. But I digress.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of the campaign, though, is the precarious line it’s forced to walk — between blithely ignoring the potential negative health consequences of drinking gallons of soda every day and discouraging potential customers from buying Coke’s product. The campaign seems to aim to navigate that Scylla and Charybdis by bragging about its comparatively healthier options and encouraging people to exercise. That’s nice of them, I guess, but it doesn’t seem like it would be especially nice for their bottom line. So what does Coca-Cola stand to gain from this strange new spate of ads, besides more of the same nose-snubbing from Bittman types?

Patrick Basham of the Cato Institute has a theory. He holds that this supposedly voluntary public-health campaign is a bit more coerced than Atlanta might let on. Basham is an obesity-epidemic denier (and argued his case in his 2007 book Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade), but holds that even if America’s weight problem is as grave as it sounds, government pressure on food companies is still problematic. And he argues that there’s plenty of that pressure to go around. In this case, he theorizes that the corporation has put out the new ad campaign, changed its packaging, and tried to encourage soda-drinkers to exercise because if it doesn’t, the regulatory consequences will be worse.