TJ
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Coke and Pepsi have been toe-to-toe competitors for ages, and Coke had always come out on top. Until the early 1980s. Until that time both companies were sweetening their drinks with cane sugar (sucrose). Then Pepsi reformulated their drinks and began using high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The marketing geniuses at Pepsi initiated the “Pepsi Challenge,” in which Pepsi challenged Coke to a blind taste test. If you were around at that time, you would have encountered people offering you a taste of two unlabeled cola beverages. You were supposed to taste, then select the one you thought was tastier. According to Pepsi, the vast majority of people picked Pepsi as their favorite. I took the “Pepsi Challenge” myself at least a dozen times, and each and every time I picked Coke as the better tasting of the two. However, by Pepsi’s accounting, I was in the minority. But I can attest to - at least in my mouth - the “cleaner” taste and better “mouth feel” of the cane sugar sweetened drink.
After this bit of Pepsi bravado the executives at Coke realized that they had a problem. Not only were Pepsi sales soaring at their product’s expense, but their product cost more to make, putting a double hickey on their bottom line. Consequently, the decision was quickly made to change the sweetener in Coke from sucrose to HFCS.
Thus was born New Coke.
What a marketing gimmick! People still argue over whether the resulting hoorah was plotted by the marketing folks at Coke or if they just serendipitously blundered into it. Suddenly no one was thinking about Pepsi any longer; instead they were caught up in the debate over the taste merits of New Coke verses ‘old’ Coke.
Old Coke, made with sucrose, became Classic Coke. But then a funny thing happened over the years. Classic Coke began to morph into New Coke, at least in the ingredients section of their labels. First, the ingredients in Classic Coke changed from: Carbonated water, sucrose, caramel…to Carbonated water, sucrose and high fructose corn syrup, caramel…to Carbonated water, sucrose and/or high fructose corn syrup, caramel…to Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose, caramel…to finally Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel… And, New Coke went the way of the Dodo bird.
In my local supermarket there is only Classic Coke and in the large bottles it is labeled: Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel… In the smaller bottles and cans it is still labeled Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose, caramel…
So, the big question is: who cares? What difference does it make that Coke has finally accomplished what it set out to do in the early 1980s, which is to have its product made with the less expensive HFCS?
It matters because of the difference between fructose and sucrose and what they do to us metabolically.
Plain table sugar, sucrose, is a disaccharide, which is a sugar made of two sugar molecules. Sucrose is made of equal amounts of glucose and fructose. Fructose is a monosaccharide (one sugar). So, if you eat two teaspoons of table sugar you get one teaspoon of glucose and one teaspoon of fructose. If you eat two teaspoons of fructose you get two teaspoons of fructose.
High fructose corn syrup is, like table sugar, made up of both fructose and glucose, but with more fructose than glucose. There are multiple HFCS formulas with the fructose component ranging from 55 percent to 90 percent of the content. If you consume a product containing HFCS you are going to get more fructose than if you consume the same amount of sucrose. Since everything anymore is made with HFCS fructose consumption has increased dramatically since the 1970s when HFCS began to be made in large quantities.
Fructose is not a benign sugar. In fact, many people (yours truly included) believe that the enormous increase in the consumption of fructose is driving much of the increase in obesity, diabetes, and the rest of the disorders making up the metabolic syndrome.
Most nutritionally savvy people (the readers of this blog, for example) know that fructose is a bad actor metabolically; for those who don’t, I’ll lay out the case for why in another post. What I want to stress now is that we’ve all switched from sucrose to HFCS thanks to our fearless leaders in Washington. These are the guys (and gals) who keep the sugar price supports so high that manufacturers in this country have all turned to the much less expensive HFCS to the detriment of our national health. |
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