http://healthbolt.net/2006/12/08/what-h … right-now/

That is some interesting science right there. Makes me glad I've been drinking Vitamin Water, tea and Hawaiian Punch all week.

Coke's good for your house plants though!

Wow, that's the third time I've seen that link thrown around in the last hour.

Vive l'internet. *head, desk*

Now what I want to know... is what about diet coke?

Some of the replies to that story mentioned that the body has a similar reaction to artificial sweetener as it does to sugar.  I always knew that the sugar was the reason Coke makes me feel so good!

*sigh* You know you're a geek when your intended short response ends up being 3 paragraphs.

Anyway, based on what I've studied about addiction and dopamine, I would vote that the sugar (natural or artificial) is simply enhancing the "high" caused by the caffeine.  The only likely difference for the diet Coke is that you could also experience some unpleasant side effects depending on your physiology (e.g. constipation, nausea) since natural sugars are much easier for your body to metabolize.  I guess that's how they cut the calories in artificial sweeteners: they make it to where your body cannot harvest as much of the energy potential and thus the calories are "wasted" after the partially-digested sweetener is excreted from the body.

heh, the olestra saga comes to mind

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra

thanks, science, for making tasty things that our bodies have no idea what to do with.  bleh.  I've never had that stuff, never want to.

Aspartame in Diet Coke is digested by the body:  http://home.howstuffworks.com/question536.htm

Well, unfortunately it seems to make methanol in the process.  Hence the yucky side effects in certain people. 

The only significant by-product of glycolysis (the process that breaks down glucose, the most common naturally-occurring sugar) is carbon dioxide, which can be easily exhaled or sent into The Citric Acid Cycle/Kreb's Cycle (but that's a whole different metabolic process).  Methanol, just like any other alcohol, is toxic and pretty tough on the liver and kidneys.

Well, whatever the deal with Coke is I still thank them for Coke Zero. I was able to stay on a Cyclical Ketogenic Diet for 3 months, lose 4 inches (35 to 31), maintain my weight, gain muscle and still drink delicious Coke without the carbs. No way I could have gotten through that insane diet without something sweet.

My general feeling on food/drink is that the less natural it is, the worse for you.

The way I look at it, it took evolution about 3.5 billion years to get us to where we are today, and we were designed to eat things which are natural and thus healthy for us.  Artificial ingredients almost always have some negative effect on the body, even though it may take years for it to emerge.  As an example, I read an interesting article by Ganmaa Davaasambuu, a Radcliffe Fellow (see:)

http://www.radcliffe.edu/fellowships/cu … =2006-2007

who said that the milk we drink these days is very different than what our ancestors drank, and she believes this difference (ie many more hormones, especially in milk and cheese prodcuts in the US -BGH and all that crap) might have led to a large increase in certain types of cancer.  Of course the human body is very complex, but I tend to believe her because she has some hard facts (if I can find the article I'd post the link) and it makes intuitive sense to me (ie natural is good).  Eat well

-avatar!

From the article:

Hawaiian punch has the same amount of sugar as Coke. Caffeine content of tea varies widely, but some kinds of tea have more caffeine than Coke. No phosphoric acid, but that seems to be a fairly minor issue anyway.

High fructose corn syrup has fructose in equal parts with glucose in hfcs drinks; how well does fructose and HFCS metabolize?

Fructose is common sugar that is found in fruit and it is actually processed in a manner similar to glucose.  Fructose is able to enter glycolysis after having a couple of modifications made to it through enzymes in the fructose phosphate pathway.  I don't know the nitty-gritty details, but the gist of it is that a kinase enzyme adds a phosphate group to the first carbon of fructose which then allows it to enter glycolysis. 

I'm not quite sure exactly what high fructose corn syrup is composed of but if it is mainly fructose and glucose, then it should be easy for the body to break down.  I guess HFCS has a bad reputation because if you don't use the energy that is harvested from these sugars, you end up storing the calories as fat.

Here's a question.  An 8 oz. serving of Coke has 27g of sugar, which is, I presume, mostly in the form of sucrose or fructose.  An 8 oz. glass of orange juice has 22g of sugars, though I don't know which sugars are in there (I would guess fructose).  So, if Coke has such a detrimental effect on your body's sugar balance, wouldn't orange juice have pretty much the same effect?

For the most part, the only things that I drink are juice (maybe a quart a week), 1% milk (two gallons a week), and water (a few gallons a week).  But if juice screws with my blood sugar, and milk is loaded with hormones, should I just eliminate anything other than water from my diet?

I guess it depends on what kind of juice you drink, Crash.  Check the label and see if it has added sugar (probably 'high fructose corn syrup' in the ingredients since it is a cheaper sweetner) or if it is 100% pure orange juice.  Outside of switching to the latter, which is my opinion, you should consult your doctor instead of us.

Nah, the juice I drink is either Tropicana Pure Premium (+ Calcium) or this stuff:

http://www.bolthouse.com/html/cs_nutrition_ggn.html

Yeah, I should consult a doctor or nutritionist about stuff like that, but since this thread got me thinking about the beverages that I drink, I posted about it here.

The sugar in orange juice is about 50% sucrose, 30% fructose, and 20% glucose. The most significant difference between orange juice and, say, that orange drink at McDonald's, is that orange juice has some additional nutrients. But they'll both mess with your blood sugar, especially if consumed on an empty stomach. A quart a week isn't going to kill you, but the reputation fruit juice has as a health food is largely unjustified.

I've read that soda has too much phosphorus and excess amounts of that can make you lose calcium, which can lead to osteoporosis. It takes many years of drinking soda for your bones to decay, but they'll do that whether you drink soda or not.

Too much soda can harm your kidneys as well. A guy (around age 50) I know had to get a kidney transplant from excess phosphorus. After listening to his dialysis stories, I can do without soda. No problemo.

A teenager I know got a kidney stone from drinking too much Mountain Dew. He said it was the most painful thing ever.

Of course one could argue exactly what "too much soda" is and also if there's a reasonable intake of just water in their diet.

That bolthouse stuff to which you linked has the most random stuff in it.

I agree.  But it's relatively inexpensive at Costco, and I find it to be mighty tasty.

Yeah, I find the bolthouse stuff to be pretty tasty...have you tried the new "Blue Goodness?" I suppose it's better than Coke if only because it has nutrients, but it's still lots and lots of sugar. I agree with the guy who said fruit juices are way overrated as health foods, since pretty much any diet or health guide you look at is going to tell you to cut out sugar first, and they've all got tons, no matter how fancy the packaging. Still, I drink it 'cause it's kind of bland to drink only water all the time. I was looking into finding some fruit-flavored water, but out of maybe 7-8, brands, I've failed to find one made without artificial sweetener, which I find completely unpalatable in any of its forms. I wouldn't mind a small amount of real sugar rather than that stuff. If anyone knows of any, let me know. The company who makes VitaminWater also makes FruitWater, and it looked promising, but I was unable to find that in any stores near me.

Personally, since I've grown used to diet drinks since that is what my mother has always bought I find sugared drinks to be downright disgusting and unquenching---I end up drinking more to fruitlessly wash the sugar away.  I have no problem with the taste of  aspartame, acesulfame potassium, or sucralose.

Cola is actually quite low in phosphorus; according to this list (pdf), a cup of milk has about ten times as much as a twelve-ounce can of cola. You'd have to drink about 20-30 cans of cola to exceed the recommended daily intake of phosphorus.

It's generally a good idea to be skeptical of claims that any one person got a particular disease from consuming too much of some particular food or drink. Most chronic diseases are multifactorial, and the causes are often poorly understood at best. What often happens in these cases, I think, is that someone just picks an unusual lifestyle factor that sounds like a plausible cause.

Although I don't hang out with the Dew drinker, I had heard he would often drink 12 cans in one night. That's more than a gallon, or about 4.5 liters.

  It would be hard to verify the 50 year old man's story as I know no one that knows him. But he looked unusually unhealthy, so there was something very wrong with him, meaning he was probably not joking. Either way, I'm terrified of too much phosphorus and I pay attention to how much I am getting.

  I think if one drinks more soda than water, then that's a problem.