Personal Project Update: The Evils of Soda...and Maybe Something Slightly Less Evil?

So let's talk about soda, something I drink a decent amount of. Not a huge amount...but enough. Say, three to four sodas a week. Okay, when I actually say it that sounds like kind of a lot. But I've known people who drink a lot more, so I guess that makes me feel a little better. My soda of choice is Dr. Pepper. It's the 23 flavors. I mean, really, how can it get any better??? (Twenty-four flavors would just be overkill.)

Anyway, we hear lots of stories about how soda is bad for you. So I decided to go out and look for why and how soda might be bad for me. The first thing I did was take a look at the ingredient list on a bottle of Dr. Pepper. First on the list: water. Everyone likes water. Good. Second on the list: high fructose corn syrup. Ah, crap. I've hard of this stuff. Supposedly it's bad for you. So I went looking to find out what it is and why it's bad for me.

Check out this link from The Learning Channel that discusses high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). In a nutshell, the problem with HFCS and many other artificial sweeteners is that they're the epitome of empty calories. What's more, sweeteners actually make us hungrier. I guess something that has basically no nutritional value AND makes me want to consume even more calories is probably not the best thing to be consuming. That's probably why so many studies tend to link soda to obesity. As the TLC article states, we're getting more of our calories from sweeteners like HFCS, and we tend to not count calories from drinks as part of our total daily calorie intake. So the more soda we drink, the more calories we consume, and the more food we want to consume. A vicious cycle to be sure. The problem is, these sweeteners are in practically everything we eat these days, which just makes things worse.

There is also an environmental aspect to HFCS. As the name implies, HFCS is made of corn. We grow an awful lot of corn in the U.S.: 72.7 million acres of it, according to the EPA. I mentioned in my previous post about the movie "Food Inc." that corn farmers receive huge subsidies for their product, which means they are going to grow as much of it as possible. Generally, that means more land used up for corn production, and more pesticides and other crap sprayed on it to make it grow. All of this contributes to global warming, erosion and loss of soil productivity. So in other words, it's basically bad all around.

So what is a soda drinker to do? Well, there are alternatives out there that don't use these artificial sweeteners. This week, I decided to give one of them a try.

Blue Sky Organic Cola is something I found at Bloomingfoods and decided to give a try. It contains no HFCS or other artificial sweeteners. Instead, it is made with organic cane sugar. The taste is pretty good; they don't seem to have a Dr. Pepper equivalent, but they do have a regular cola flavor, and it's not bad. The problem is, it's still soda, and it's still sugar. Still not the best of things to be drinking, I guess: there's 40 grams of sugar included in a can. I don't know for sure, but that sounds like a lot.

So I guess the moral is that moderation is best when it comes to soda, even if it's an organic soda with no artificial sweeteners. Can I handle moderation? That's another story.