
Medicinal Soft Drinks and Coca-Cola Fiends: The Toxic History of Soda Pop (2014) - samclemens
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-toxic-history-of-soda-pop/
======
subcosmos
To this day, almost all aluminum cans carrying soda are lined with a resin
that inhibits the insulin signaling pathway, and is associated with Type 2
diabetes. Most of the manufacturers make claims that it's harmless.

[https://www.coca-colacompany.com/contact-us/faqs](https://www.coca-
colacompany.com/contact-us/faqs)

Despite what they say, the scientific consensus is opposite, really, with the
vast majority of academic papers suggesting quite harmful effects :
[https://medium.com/@InfinoMe/diabetes-time-to-resort-to-
plas...](https://medium.com/@InfinoMe/diabetes-time-to-resort-to-plastic-
measures-500cdf1fe528)

~~~
milesvp
I was under the impression it's all aluminium cans that need a chemical buffer
to prevent aluminium from leeching into the fluids. Long term Aluminium
poisoning is probably worse than diabetes since it tends to eat away at your
brain.

Either way I'm not particularly fond of the flavor that aluminium cans seem to
impart on drinks, and have been starting to avoid them more as I get older.

~~~
subcosmos
Yup - bisphenol-a containing resins are the precise lining that is used to
prevent the aluminum from getting eaten by the carbonic acid.

There was also this fascinating study showing that BPA drove liver fat
accumulation much more profoundly than fructose, which I find interesting.
Both are clearly bad, but futzing with hormones is especially bad :
[https://ars.els-
cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0300483X120036...](https://ars.els-
cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0300483X12003617-gr3.jpg)

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AdmiralAsshat
I switched to OpenCola[0]. It tastes pretty close, given that it's based on a
reverse-engineered/prototype of the Coca-Cola recipe. I like knowing what goes
into it. Plus I put about half the sugar into it that the recipe calls for.

There's a UK vendor that sells the concentrate of oils premade. I keep about a
liter of the syrup (concentrate + water + sugar) in my fridge and add a
tablespoon of so to 8oz of seltzer/mineral water when I want a soda:

[https://cube-cola.org/](https://cube-cola.org/)

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_\(drink\))

~~~
elboru
There must be a market for less sweet sodas. I don't like excessively sweet
food nor excessively sweet drinks, I like sweet stuff but not on the level
must products are. It's really difficult (at least in my city) to find
balanced stuff, most of the time I only have two options: regular soda or
zero-sugar soda (even sweeter).

~~~
milesvp
You'd think that there'd be mote of a market for less sweet drinks, but it
probably depends on where you live. I really like honest tea's peach tea,
which has almost half the sugar of most bottled drinks, and I can't find it
anymore in the stores near my house that used to stock it. I'm guessing the
distributor just couldn't sell enough in my neighborhood and didn't want to
pay for the shelf space anymore, since it disappeared from a bunch of
disperate stores within a week or two.

I'd also really be curious about how the seattle soda tax is effecting honest
tea in general. I was mildly annoyed by the tax since it claimed to be a sugar
tax but charged by the oz rather than per gram of suger, and also didn't
effect starbucks sugary drinks.

------
DoreenMichele
_While the dosages were small, they were certainly habit-forming, and soda
fountains stood to profit from such consistent customers._

People typically eat breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. You might even say
_habitually._

 _Around that time, it became obvious to the medical profession that there
weren’t any health benefits to carbonated water on its own, so people started
selling it as a treat_

With my first pregnancy, I threw up morning, noon and night for eight months.
Carbonated water was one of the things I could keep down and it helped make it
vastly more bearable.

Keep in mind these fountain drinks with stuff added for "medicinal purposes"
existed at a time when, no, you couldn't go to Walmart and select from a wide
assortment of reliable OTC drugs without a prescription. If your medicine
cabinet at home has multiple different OTC pain killers and cold medicines, my
feeling is you really don't have a leg to stand on for scoffing at such
practices from a hundred or more years ago.

Coca-Cola absolutely contained ingredients with medicinal properties. It's the
one that is probably the best documented. That doesn't mean the others didn't
also have real medicinal benefit. It just means we don't necessarily have the
records of what went in them and the proof that X ingredient absolutely has
medicinal uses.

~~~
brightball
I had a biology professor tell us in college that both Pepsi and Dr. Pepper
were very high in phosphate, which settles your stomach.

I've actually tried it on several occasions when I was sick or nauseous for
one reason or another and it really does work well. Just keep the bottle
around and take a quick sip when you need some relief.

For me it works a lot better than ginger ale, even though that's supposed to
help too.

~~~
village-idiot
Ginger ale was the first soda I tried, specifically because I was vomiting.

While I don’t drink soda anymore, ginger ale is the one exception when I am
very stressed.

------
teslabox
A friend of mine pointed out that all the original sodas were herbal
beverages. Coca-Kola was made to deliver the beneficial properties of two
tropical plants (coca leaf and kola nut [2]), root beers were flavored with
various plant root extracts, Dr. Pepper has 21 natural flavors, etc. The plant
extracts provided anti-oxidants, caffeine, and other medicinal substances.

"Adaptogens or adaptogenic substances are used in herbal medicine for the
claimed stabilization of physiological processes and promotion of
homeostasis." [1] - wikipedia goes on to discuss how the term is not
considered valid today, where something is only a "medicine" if it's highly
purified, entirely isolated from its natural context, and has specific
physiological effects that are understood and described.

I think it important to point out that before the modern era, foods and plant-
derived substances were humanity's best option for improving our body's
function. I've read how civil war soldiers greatly appreciated coffee
(entirely imported from tropical countries).

The Coca-Cola company has a monopoly on coca-leaf flavoring [3]. This
substance is a good source of anti-oxidants. Coca-Kola allegedly has been
found to have more flower extracts than Pepsi-Kola...

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptogen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptogen)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_nut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_nut)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca#United_States)

Sodas were originally consumed in small quantities - 8 to 12 ounces was
typical. Now we're getting plant-free "sodas" (sugar water with artificial
colors and flavors, and without plant ingredients) in 64+ ounce servings.

My poor father buys Coke-zero, not realizing that research has found that
people who consume artificially sweetened beverages actually consume more
calories in total. I think he's desperate for the caffeine (exhaustion), and
doesn't realize the metabolism boost of caffeine is best balanced with a small
amount of sugar (caffeine without sugar -> low blood sugar -> cortisol
release).

I disagree that "soda pop" was originally toxic. I keep a 2-liter bottle of
Coca-Kola around for a small serving (8-ounces) of coca leaf and kola nut in
the mid-afternoon period, after lunch & before dinner.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_I keep a 2-liter bottle of Coca-Kola around for a small serving (8-ounces) of
coca leaf and kola nut in the mid-afternoon period, after lunch & before
dinner._

"Coca-tea" ;)

------
smileysteve
Sodas even became ubiquitous in our offices! And Hackathons!

But to be real; offices having free soda available has its own health
downsides; A cola at lunch can quickly become a cola for lunch and afternoon
snack -- and maybe even a pick-me-up when tired or stressed. Only, it leads to
weight gain through its sugars and the full supressing carbonic acid; acids
lead to bone, nail, and organ side effects; and sugars, hfcs, and phosphoric
acid start leading us to diabetes.

~~~
ginko
I'm mostly with you, but carbonic acid is harmless. If anything it might raise
the pH in your stomach.

~~~
Animats
Coca-Cola uses phosphoric acid. Here's a Coca-Cola bottling plant receiving a
delivery of phosphoric acid.[1] It's marked with a 1805 (Phosphoric Acid,
Corrosive, Class 8) placard. Of course, it's diluted as the product is mixed.
This video shows the ingredients - tap water run through an de-ionizing plant,
high fructose corn syrup in tank cars, phosphoric acid by the pallet load,
flavoring (the "secret ingredient", in bags), and CO2 as a gas.

[1] [https://youtu.be/7V6JO0Rfgas?t=189](https://youtu.be/7V6JO0Rfgas?t=189)

