How Coca-Cola saved the world

I don't think I've ever seen a 24-can pack. Coke is usually bought in either 2-liter bottles, 20-oz bottles, or 12-oz cans. The cans come in 12-packs, not 24 packs, at most grocery stores.

24-can packs are very common in the grocery stores I go to (and no, I don't shop at Costco or Sam's Club). They've been around since the '80's when I used to have to shelve them at the SuperValu store I worked at. In my experience they tend to be less common in the city, where grocery stores are smaller and shelf space is more expensive.

...and in some rare places its made with real cane sugar rather than refined sugar.

Last I heard, sugar was still coming from cane. What's the difference between "real" and "refined"?


However, getting back to the topic at hand: the primary problem with Aspirin in Coke is the Reye's syndrome, as already mentioned. The syndrome would probably have been discovered earlier, and would have led to an early ban on it (as well as a much earlier ban on Children's Aspirin[1]). You might have even successfully brought the soft drink industry to it's knees this way, and American's would now be drinking fruit juice if not water. Or, the industry quickly reformulates and comes up with poorer tasting cola formulas which U.S. consumers reject, and cola loses it's dominance as a soda flavor. Similar things happened to Root Beer when they found out that Sassafras is carcinogenic.

[1] And, of course, without the link between Aspirin and blood pressure, companies can't convert their "Baby Aspirin" over to "Heart Disease Aspirin", which kills a few smaller pharmaceutical companies.
 
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Last I heard, sugar was still coming from cane. What's the difference between "real" and "refined"?

In the US, most soda is made with corn syrup, not cane sugar. In fact, in the US corn syrup is used in a somewhat horrifying array of products. On average, a person in the US consumes about 200 calories of high-fructose corn syrup per day. The peak in 1999 was 214 cal/day but (thankfully) seems to be slowly dropping. (USDA data)

Table sugar still generally comes from sugar beets or sugar cane. The average person in the US eats quite a lot of that, too. Both are made into refined sugar.

From wikipedia: "Cane sugar and beet sugar are both relatively pure sucrose. While glucose and fructose, which are the two components of HFCS, are monosaccharides, sucrose is a disaccharide composed of glucose and fructose linked together with a relatively weak glycosidic bond."
 
However, getting back to the topic at hand: the primary problem with Aspirin in Coke is the Reye's syndrome, as already mentioned. The syndrome would probably have been discovered earlier, and would have led to an early ban on it (as well as a much earlier ban on Children's Aspirin[1]).

I am not a medical expert, but IIRC while the Reye's-Aspirin link is generally assumed, it hasn't been proven, and Reye's cases do occur without consumption of aspirin. Experts typically suggest avoiding giving aspiring to children and teenagers who have fever-inducing illness. While panics, recalls, boycots, etc. don't need any messy facts getting in the way of hysteria, the soda industry wouldn't necessarily be destroyed. Adults, and non-ill teens and children, can still drink all the aspirin-laced soda they want no matter what.
 
Adults, and non-ill teens and children, can still drink all the aspirin-laced soda they want no matter what.

Well, as long as they don't drink 50 bottles of it, but even I think that's insane.

24-can packs are very common in the grocery stores I go to (and no, I don't shop at Costco or Sam's Club). They've been around since the '80's when I used to have to shelve them at the SuperValu store I worked at. In my experience they tend to be less common in the city, where grocery stores are smaller and shelf space is more expensive.

But I don't live in the city, I live in suburban Massachusetts with numerous major grocery stores (Stop & Shop, Price Chopper, Shaw's, Big Y, etc) surrounding me. I've still never seen one.
 
Well, as long as they don't drink 50 bottles of it, but even I think that's insane.

(Sigh) Yes, though that's a problem whether there's aspirin in it or not. I had a roommate in college who drank multiple 2-Liter bottles of Mountain Dew every day. I wonder how he's doing now...
 
(Sigh) Yes, though that's a problem whether there's aspirin in it or not. I had a roommate in college who drank multiple 2-Liter bottles of Mountain Dew every day. I wonder how he's doing now...

It really depends on metabolism. Some people can actually take that. Though 50 bottles would be 600 ounces, going by the math someone did earlier in this thread - roughly 8.87 2-liter bottles. The guy wouldn't die of heart disease or stroke, he'd drown if he drank that many.

But anyway, take me for example. I've been drinking Coke at the rate I do since I was about 18. I am now 23. That's five years. What's happened over those five years?

Well, I'm an inch taller and ten pounds heavier. But that still makes me 5' 10'' and weighing ~180 lbs, which is only somewhat overweight for my height and build. My heart rate is 84 beats per minute, which is well within the average for adults (60-100 bpm).

So some people can actually drink phenomenal cosmic amounts of soda and be perfectly fine.

Then again, I don't have a car, which means I walk everwhere, which means my heart and lungs get a lot of exercise, and that may burn off a lot of the negative effects. I also don't eat much: breakfast (usually wheat toast w/ butter and some kind of cereal (MiniWheats ideally) w/ whole milk) and dinner (varies by day and mood), neither of which tend to be large, so I'm not a good example of a "typical" American-style consumption.
 
Nice POD Tailedwinggoat. Do you think that the relatively lower number of cancer deaths compared with OTL would curtail efforts to find a cure to cancer in the ATL, or make efforts to cure cancer in the ATL less prominent?
 
When I was a kid (late 1970s/early 1980s) there was a common myth that aspirin and Coke together was a cheap high. Even my father believed it so this wasn't just some kid myth in school. I tried it once and felt nothing special. Is there possibly anything to it, though, at high doses or something?
 
But I don't live in the city, I live in suburban Massachusetts with numerous major grocery stores (Stop & Shop, Price Chopper, Shaw's, Big Y, etc) surrounding me. I've still never seen one.

Okay then, maybe its a regional thing.

Although, when I was saying the 'city' I was talking about my experience in Suburban Chicago vs the rest of the Upper Midwest. Suburban Massachusetts is the city compared to where I live right now. :)
 
Nice POD Tailedwinggoat. Do you think that the relatively lower number of cancer deaths compared with OTL would curtail efforts to find a cure to cancer in the ATL, or make efforts to cure cancer in the ATL less prominent?

It was Nixon who really got cancer research started. Anything is possible in the world of political will, but cancer is such a huge problem that we wont be able to ignore it just because things are a little better.

Just because Aspirin will reduce your chance of dying from that heart attack, stroke or cancer, doesn't mean you won't eventually succum to it. You may live longer but chances are you'll still die from another heart attack, stroke, or cancer later. Hence it's a never ending fight for better tools to allow people to live even longer.

The biggest killer is heart attack and strokes, responsible for 1/4 of all deaths. The second biggest killer is cancer, totaling 1/7 of all deaths but growing fast and is projected to become the number one killer soon in the future. Compare with the third biggest killer which is motor vehicle accidents, way behind at 1/84 of all deaths. You can see the need for better cancer prevention and treatment is set in stone for humanity.

The neat thing about Aspirin is how cheap it is. If I said we invented a new drug that'll cut deaths from heart attack and strokes, plus increase survival rate of cancer by over 20%, and that it costs one dollar per patient per month, the health industry would be ecstatic. But that's what Aspirin is. If people were already on it for a few generations, we would've already saved untold lives and perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars, at least. That's a real difference.
 
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When I was a kid (late 1970s/early 1980s) there was a common myth that aspirin and Coke together was a cheap high. Even my father believed it so this wasn't just some kid myth in school. I tried it once and felt nothing special. Is there possibly anything to it, though, at high doses or something?

That Myth dated back to the 1930's when it mixed with the Coke would get you high . They change the formula before WWII .

Also in the 1950's my mother and other women in the church group would polish brass at the church with Coca -Cola and if you put a copper penny in a glass of coke it would eat it in a day .
 
That Myth dated back to the 1930's when it mixed with the Coke would get you high . They change the formula before WWII .

Also in the 1950's my mother and other women in the church group would polish brass at the church with Coca -Cola and if you put a copper penny in a glass of coke it would eat it in a day .

I've heard of people even today using it today to clean corrosion off of car batteries.

The aspirin-coke myth was baseless in the 1930's too:
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/aspirin.asp

The formula for the flavor was changed to remove unprocessed coca leaves back around 1900, and hasn't changed much since, except back when they made New Coke. Of course, that formula has nothing to do with the sweeteners used or the ratios of flavoring-sugar-water-co2, which have changed quite a bit I think.

More information on Coke and Coke:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE6D7123BF932A35754C0A96E948260
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/384/is-it-true-coca-cola-once-contained-cocaine
http://www.mindfully.org/Food/2004/Kdrink-Coca-Drink19apr04.htm
 
There is a significant difference between the American relationship with soft drinks and those of the rest of the world. In America Coke and other soft drinks either come in 24 can pack Cosco sizes or self service restaurant fountains, and a small drink is a one liter cup.

For the rest of the world Coke is still a traditional 12 oz bottle which cost as much as a good beer. A 12 oz Coke cost 10 Euros in Europe, and they're never properly chilled either.
Belgium:
standard bottle, plastic, 500ml, ~€2,50(less in supermarkets)
cans: 330ml, mostly sold in 6-packs
standard glass bottle is 200ml and rare as hens teeth outside of restaurants (France has 330ml glass bottles though)
200 or 250ml glass in restaurants/bars= ~the price of a pint of beer (€1,60-1,80)
self-service machines:
-small cup: 300ml
-medium cup: 400ml
-large cup: 500ml

Also, they are more than cold enough, even during a heat wave, and 3-4 ice cubes is more than enough (IMHO, too much even)
If you want icy cold, buy ice cream.
 
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