[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]The Coke Joke: It’s On You
Coco-cola was first produced in the 1880’s by John Stith Pemberton a pharmacist with a addiction to morphine, he called it ‘brain tonic’ and later had his salesman just add a few squirts of tonic water. The original medicinal formula did have traces of cocaine in its formula, by 1902 it had a ‘mere’ 1/400 of a grain, and it was not completely free until 1929, because they were concerned with patenting the name Coca-Cola. Yes, at one time coke contained cocaine, however at the time it was consider a medicine, a ‘brain tonic.’ Many medicines were made at the time with cocaine, the problem developed when they became an actual beverage. The chemists who worked on Coke at the time did all they could to remove any trace of cocaine from the drink. Today we have the technology to completely have it removed, and it is. But my question was did they just take out one addictive source, to replace it with another ‘natural’ addictive component?
Some of the ingredients that manipulate our minds and body in Coke.
The Coke of today has a couple ingredients that when combined have interesting effects. The first, caffeine, is a stimulant and diuretic that causes you to urinate out more water from your body. Then another ingredient to Coke, is salt. When you add sodium to a body flushing water what you get, is thirstier. This is good for Coke, because then you drink more Coke, but bad for you, because of what they use to cover up that high salt/caffeine content to make it taste good, and that is sugar.
One of the ways sugar is killing us
Dr. Lustig of UCSF did a Coke conspiracy test to see what drinking a coke daily would add in fat intake yearly if a person drank one coke a day. His research found something very interesting. Coke has progressed yearly in size, as most of us know, and thus added to our waist sizes over the years. A single bottle of Coke in 1915 was found to add 8 pounds of fat a year on the waste line (of course not many drank a coke a day then, it was a luxury). The progression goes up, as follows; in 1955, Coke adds another 5 pounds to our waste line a year, in 1960, 16 pounds, in 1992 a disgusting 26 pounds of extra fat yearly. What is worse, back up to 1988, and find that the big gulp 44oz coke serving comes in at a whopping 57 pounds a year of added fat to a human body.
So why if we know it makes us fat would we continue drinking the stuff?
In this question lays the new drug like source of today’s Coke, sugar. So what is the sugar used in most cans of soda today, including Coke? They use high fructose corn syrup. Why? The answer is, because it’s cheaper and has an even higher sweetness level. Sucrose (table sugar, the white stuff) has a sweetness index of 100, high fructose corn syrup has an index at 120. (Even scarier they have extracted fructose out from it’s glucose bond and started using it in soft drinks, this has an index of 173)! Why is this so disconcerting? Because ingesting large amounts of sugar will spike blood sugars and thus cause higher insulin levels. This creates a vicious cycle of extra fats stored and high blood sugars that eventually cause insulin intolerance in the body. This cycle then can lead to other problems including diabetes and obesity. The cycle then continues, because of sugar’s uncanny addictive properties when it connects to the pleasure centers of the brain, releasing dopamine. This makes us crave that feeling when it’s high has disappeared, and has us reach for the next can of coke to get that sweet buzz. Not to mention the incredible amounts of mounting evidence of the many other health problems sugar creates, as can be read about in, “Why Sugar Free.”
The irony
The irony of it all is, the Cokes of yesterday that contained cocaine, did not contain enough to even give a buzz to a fly! While the coke of today creates enough of a reaction between the sugar high and thirst needs to have some of us reaching for as much as a liter or more of coke in a day. This got me thinking, so then who are the smartest drug dealers of today, the pushers on the streets or the ones in the grocery store? Looks like the joke is on us. We are so avidly against the drugs of the street yet we allow it openly to line the shelves of our food markets. Coca-Cola is not the only company to blame for this and honestly they aren’t to blame really either, we are to blame. Because we purchase products like this and feed them to our children and ourselves. If there were no demand there would be no cause for supply. After all Coca-Cola and other companies of the like are in the business of making money. So we should not really be mad at them for doing their jobs, but instead show them the kind of products we would buy and stop buying the ones we no longer wish to see. Like Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
What sugary products did you take out of your pantry and life for good? What made you decide on this change? Share below.
Until next time, enjoy the good life,[/vc_column_text][vc_raw_html]JTNDcCUyMGNsYXNzJTNEJTIyc2lnbmF0dXJlJTIyJTNFQW1hbmRhJTIwSmVhbiUzQyUyRnAlM0UlMjA=[/vc_raw_html][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
References:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/books/review/citizen-coke-by-bartow-j-elmore.html?_r=0
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cocaine.asp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]