Friday January 3, 11:45 am ET Pepsi's New Challenge By Melanie Wells, Forbes Magazine The beverage and snack giant has grown huge by making the rest of us fat. Now it's coming out with "healthy" foods. Clever preemption--or hypocrisy? PepsiCo President and Chief Financial Officer Indra K. Nooyi is riled. Outside her third-floor office, snow is piling up around the company's famed sculpture garden in Purchase, N.Y. Nooyi, though, is oblivious to the weather. She's thinking about America's love-hate relationship with food--junk food, that is. Lay's potato chips and Doritos, she insists, aren't responsible for turning people into "fat slobs." Their uncontrollable habits--and their increasingly sedentary lives--do. "The problem is the couch, not the can," she says. "That's the problem. All right?" You can understand why Nooyi, 47, is a little emotional. PepsiCo (NYSE:PEP - News) itself has gotten fat by peddling many of America's best-known nibbles and drinks--Gatorade and Pepsi, and that sonorous trio of snacks, Cheetos, Doritos and Tostitos--last year earning an estimated $3.5 billion on revenues of $25 billion. It's a great success story. Except for the fact that PepsiCo has triumphed by taking it out of the hides of Americans--or, more accurately, by adding a great deal more to those hides. There is no denying that as a nation we are tipping, if not actually breaking, the scales. Today, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 61% of all U.S. adults are considered either overweight or obese; the rate for kids aged 6-19 is 15%. Granted, most of us don't spend a lot of time burning off calories by trying to bag a mastadon, as our distant forefathers did. Or even tilling the soil, like our more proximate ancestors. Still, we're spending billions of dollars every year on exercise equipment, health clubs and spas--and just seem to get fatter and fatter. Who's to blame? If you believe Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C., it's clear: corporate America. A suit on behalf of a New Yorker who claimed that fast-food companies contributed to his obesity, heart disease and diabetes was dropped. But a class action against McDonald's (NYSE:MCD - News) on behalf of overweight kids is pending in U.S. district court--and is scaring the bejezus out of the food industry. "Whatever anyone thinks of the lawsuits against fast-food companies, they are a wake-up call to everyone," says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University and author of Food Politics, a critical look at the food industry. "Companies are desperate to get an edge." Even more desperate now that the Food and Drug Administration is expected, as early as this year, to require food makers to add artery-choking trans fat--found in dairy, meats, cookies and fried foods--to labels spelling out nutrition facts. PepsiCo isn't about to cave. Not to a meddlesome federal agency, not to health-food cranks. "Nobody asked you to drink Pepsi...(or) eat Lay's potato chips morning to night," snaps Nooyi, who is known for her feisty candor, as well as strategic brilliance--and may one day be in line for the top job (see sidebar, "A General in Waiting"). Chief Executive Steve S. Reinemund, 54, makes a more measured, but no less insistent defense. "Look at our product," he says, throwing down a couple of packages of chips. "If you look at the back of this bag, there is no question what you're getting." For a 1-ounce bag of Lay's Classic: 3 grams of saturated fat, 180mg of sodium, 150 calories. "You don't get that on a burger." Not yet, anyway. But Reinemund and Nooyi aren't ignoring the signs, either. An empire built on fat and sugar, PepsiCo is massively repositioning itself, trying to strike a healthier pose, rejiggering its product mix with snacks and bev