Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/08/coca-cola-is-paying-dietitians.html
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In an ironic twist, I might be able to leverage my disgust for this kind of bullshit to let me quit drinking soft drinks, where “this is bad for you but tastes so good” didn’t work.
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Kicking the caffeine monkey at one point in my life did it for me… I seriously was drinking two colas a day and that went down to none. Now I have one cup of regular coffee and that is my limit.
And I now got down to little to no sugar in my coffee or other things like that. It is amazing how sweet sodas are when you don’t have them all the time. Heck how sweet some fruit is I can’t eat more than a bite or two of some apples now as they are too sweet for me.
I still love cola and other sodas but they are monthly treats rather than everyday drinks.
ETA
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I’m glad someone is finally doing this.
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Two colas as in two cans, two 20-oz bottles, or two 2-liter bottles? The latter would be a bit excessive, but two single-serving bottles of cola is not unreasonable.
I am down to one cup of strong coffee per day. Down to one from double digits 
I’m seriously glad I cut down.
Starbucks ruined coffee. All these fancy mocha and latte drinks, no fat half caf whatever… even so-called regular coffee has cream and sugar. I grew up with the high test black sludge that my grandparents brewed on the stove top percolator. Even today, I only drink high test.
The Cadbury egg thing was spot on. I drink sugary soft drinks maybe once a month. It feels like eating a full meal. I can never do that on a regular basis.
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12oz cans, the 20oz bottles were not the default for vending machines and such yet. That is still twice the amount of sugar an adult should be having a day so still not good for you in the long run.
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You have my admiration! I’ve quit things that are are far worse, but I have never been able to beat my caffeine addiction. The best I’ve been able to do is get it back to a manageable level. I can live on about 100 mg a day, but less than that and I have muscle spasms and a killer headache that is untreatable with OTC meds, lasts for days, and doesn’t go away.
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My state doesn’t tax food, which includes bottles of soda. Strangely, beer is taxed, which is funny because it has much more nutrition than soda and is ontologically much closer to food than soda happens to be.
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what i find 10x more annoying about soda manufacturers is their resistance to the sale of seltzer. walk into 99% of convenience stores and you’ll find 50+ flavors of soft drink, and not a single bottle of seltzer or sparkling water.
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It took about two months of cutting down the daily amount slowly. Then I met @JemmieDuffs and fell off the wagon just keep up with her. She still walks seriously fast. I did mostly limit myself to two cups of regular coffee after that and now down to one and can go without for a day or two or conversely have a bit extra when I go out for breakfast or such. I still love coffee but just very good at remembering to get unleaded outside my daily dose.
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The most awesome recent trend I have noticed is seeing much more of it at least in supermarkets. I love the Safeway brand stuff. While I gave up regular soda intake I do love fizzy drinks and a lime or orange seltzer is the perfect amount of flavor/sweet/bubbles.
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When I order seltzer in Canada, they ask me if I know it’s not soda.
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Just like the Internet E-fairness “Level the Playing Field” sales tax small business supporters. Paid. The rabbit hole of “hey, you could use a few grand to let us use your picture and put words in your mouth” paid op-eds, and astroturf is incredible. It goes so much deeper and further than 98% of the populace realizes. PR firms run the country.
Who pays them?
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Yes and no… while I cringe at the fancy flavored it really isn’t coffee anymore drinks (and there has always been a market for stupid flavored coffee anyway) they are what made it possible to get a good espresso drink almost anywhere in the world. Yeah they are now basically the McCoffee but if not for them we wouldn’t have the plethora of independent places to drink better coffee and relax with a book, boardgame, laptop, etc. that we do now. I can live with that.
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Good point. I don’t like what they’ve done to coffee, but I like what they’ve done to coffee culture. Before Starbucks came around, there weren’t really any coffee shops here in flyover country except around college campuses. One could always get coffee at a diner or donut shop, but there was no place to enjoy coffee while reading, studying, working, etc
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Actually that predates Starbucks. I remember being a kid and being told that “coffee, regular” meant cream and sugar. “Coffee, black” meant just coffee.
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Aside from availability, I’ve always been amazed at how adding a cocktail of sweeteners, colors, and flavors to a quantity of water can actually reduce the price.
Given bottling and distribution costs, a bottle of water obviously isn’t going to compare favorably on price with what comes out of the tap; but when you can produced canned/bottled water and seltzer with exactly the same infrastructure as soda; just omit either all the ingredients or all ingredients except the CO2 injection; it’s hard to understand why the water wouldn’t be priced at least at parity, potentially slightly cheaper, than the soda.
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Do you like chai? I found a store that sells ‘chai spices’ in the bulk section, which is chai without the tea (and it’s all big chunks of cinnamon, seeds, and unground spices). I started throwing a tablespoon of that in per three tablespoons of good quality beans (I grind the beans, then dump the coffee and unground spices into a small saucepan of boiling water that I just took off the burner and steep for five minutes before pouring through a ceramic pour over stand with a paper filter), and it is the most amazing cup of black coffee I have ever had, and I am a huge coffee snob.
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On the plus side, modest amounts of caffeine are pretty low on the list of harmful habits. Yes, it’s hardly ideal to face the prospects of fatigue and headaches if you don’t get your fix; but despite years of study aimed at finding some terrible downside to a popular drug(drugs just have to have consequences, right?), its bill of health remains pretty clean.
What will get you is if your preferred delivery mechanism is coffee/tea with epic sweeteners and copious cream; or soda; since you can end up consuming a pretty impressive amount of sugar and fat to get a very modest dose of caffeine.
I mostly just drink coffee and tea these days; but back in HS I used to like caffeinating my seltzers. Cool, refreshing, bubbly, maybe a dash of one of the fruit flavors; add enough caffeine to approximately match a cup of coffee or a soda; and you end up with something that has exactly the same kick; but is pretty much just water for caloric purposes.
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Yeah, that’s why I haven’t put more effort into it. I did talk it over with my doctor and basically I decided to live with it. It’s not illegal and not harmful, and it’s available everywhere, and I like coffee. Given my history, I don’t really like being dependent on it, but so far I haven’t been able to put the willpower and effort together to end it. And RatWoman is more addicted than I am, so there’s that! 
I seldom drink soda, and when I do, it’s diet versions. Regular soda is too sweet for me, and the HFCS in USian soda is really evil. I drink my coffee with lowfat milk and Splenda, so there’s really not much bad there. (For the first time in my life, I find myself actually having to think about what I eat; since overdoing it in July, I’m about four kilos over my usual weight, and now that I’m going to be sitting at a desk more, I need to solve that problem immediately.)
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