Saturday, January 12, 2013

Coke

By Uncle Hans

Lots of stuff in the news lately about soft drinks and removing them from schools, and limiting the size of mega-drinks in NYC by law, and on and on. The problem is, according to the experts. the high-fructose sweeteners in the soft drinks.

So I did some checking and research. Coke is my drink of choice 4-5 cans per day for the last 40 years (did I mention I have missed one day of work due to illness in that 40 years?) ( did I mention I have had one new cavity in those 40 years--and 12 cavities before I started drinking Coke?) Coke, as you can see, has 39 grams of sugars in a 12 ounce serving. They use the so-called “high-fructose” corn syrup in coke. What is that? Well it is some combination of glucose and fructose (both 6 carbon simple sugars) that is 55% fructose and 45% glucose.

Ordinary table sugar is sucrose, which is 50% glucose and 50% fructose. So, it turns out, the poisonous “high fructose” sweetener in Coke is only slightly higher in fructose, 5% higher if you do the math, than table sugar. A slight change that hardly rates the alarming name “high fructose”.

I suppose it rolls of the tongue a little smoother than “slightly higher fructose”, but it is harder to condemn and outlaw some product for “slightly higher”, now isn’t it?

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Now let’s get down and dirty and take a look at one of the nutritionist’s darlings:

Orange Juice.

A quick check of the computer shows us that orange juice has 30 grams of sugar in 12 ounces, and that it is 50% fructose. But we all know that orange juice is good for us and not poisonous like Coke.
But the nutritional difference is minimal. Hmmmmmmmmmm

I will criticize the soft drink industry, however, as it is high time they brought us a product that is half sugar and half artificial sweetener. Whenever I am at a fast food joint and they hand me a glass to fill my own soft drink, I make it a 50-50 mix of regular and diet Coke. I cannot tell the difference.  The companies are experimenting with Pepsi 10 and other timid moves in this direction. But they should stop fooling around and score a PR coup on the nutritionists:

Try Coke 50.......healthier than an orange!!!

By Uncle Hans

1 comments:

Wanderin' said...

When we made the swap from regular Coke to diet Coke, we mixed our drinks at half and half. Eventually, we transitioned over to the diet and noticed very little difference doing our own mixing. Now we're sugar free and have to be that way because of diabetes but my husband drinks tons of diet Coke and Pepsi.