A Coca Cola Observation
Thursday, September 26, 2013If you've known me for a while (college and before) you know that I was a huge Coca-Cola drinker. I would literally drink about a 3 litter a day. I knew it was bad for me. I saw the ads with sugar cubes and such. I even saw the specials on TV showing me how you could fight rust using Coke. I was still hooked and continued drinking it, I'm not sure why.
I'm not here to talk you out of drinking it, you'll have to come to that conclusion yourself or suffer the consequences. Like anything else in life it's 100% up to you. All I want to do is make an observation to all of the Diet Coke, Coke Zero and Vanilla Coke drinkers out there.
First off Diet Coke and Coke Zero. We drink it because the marketing claims better health. These products have less calories and less sugars then the real thing but the 'same' taste. Of course with that logic why even sell the original but I'll keep moving on. So in order to give you less calories and make a product healthier I would assume the product would take out some ingredients right? Let's take a look...
Website with full list of products https://parks.livepositively.com/parks/NutritionConnectionFacts.pdf
Between regular Coke and Diet Coke High Fructose Corn Syrup (sugar) has been taken out and Aspartame (sugar substitute), Potassium Benzonate and Citric Acid have been added. If you drink Diet Coke it would be worth your while to look up those ingredients. Ok... so less calories... more ingredients... hmmm.
Now going on to Coke Zero we have added and replaced some ingredients I can't pronounce but sound like something I used in my high school Chemistry class. If this doesn't set off some alarms I don't know what does.
So in order to loose a few calories I am replacing those calories with some kind of chemicals? I know how I feel about this but the real question is, "how do you feel about this?" And are those chemicals worth 140 calories?
Well what about regular Coke and Vanilla Coke, let's compare those two! Vanilla has a few more calories, less sodium, more carbs, and more sugar. I understand that, I mean it is only Coke with some Vanilla flavoring in it right? But no major nutritional difference there. What about the ingredients? What is in the vanilla flavor? That's weird the ingredient list is exactly the same for the two products isn't it?
For me, that again raises some red flags. At least before I could research these new ingredients and come to my own conclusion, now I can't. Maybe those natural flavors aren't so natural?
Conclusion
I don't mean to pick on Coke here. There are plenty of other products out there that do this exact same thing. I chose Coke because it's one of the most popular brands and because I was hooked for so many years. The point is READ THE INGREDIENTS. In my opinion they are more important then calories! Which is the reason you switched in the first place. You can read more about that in my past blog here.
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