The holiday comes to us: deadly poison disguised as a safe drink

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Why is the most popular drink in the world harmful, and why there is so little information in the media about the danger it carries.

"A holiday comes to us!.." Who among us, who grew up in the 90s, does not remember this elegant New Year's Eve advertisement with shining garlands, ringing bells and red trucks with Coca-Cola. It is to this, in our own way, a genius creation of marketers that we owe the fact that in our country the fizzy American drink has become almost as iconic and popular as in our homeland.

Coca-Cola is one of the first multinational companies to conquer the post-Soviet market. It now plays a key role in the production of soft drinks in Russia.

Coca-Cola is the world's leading soft drink manufacturer with operations in over 200 countries. Its portfolio includes over 500 brands, including Coca-Cola, Sprite, Fanta soda, Nestea tea, Dobry and Rich juices. Coca-Cola's capitalization is $ 182.71 billion

The media can easily find information about billions of rubles invested by the corporation in Russian enterprises, and hundreds of millions of taxes paid by it to our state. It is much more difficult to find data on the volumes of profits withdrawn from our country, and it is certainly almost impossible to find official, scientifically supported data on the harm caused by its products to consumers.

Formula for Success: Sugar Plus Acid

The main complaints about the Coca-Cola branded drink, expressed by doctors in private conversations, boil down to the fact that it contains an insane amount of sugar and phosphoric acid. According to the data posted by the company itself on the labels of classic cola, 100 milliliters of the drink contains 10.6 grams of sugar. This means that 106 grams of sugar are dissolved in each liter, and 212 grams in two liters.

Is it a lot or a little? The World Health Organization (WHO) states that a relatively safe daily intake of sugar is 20 to 50 grams. In other words, one half-liter glass of cola contains a two-day norm of sugar consumption, if you count on the lower limit of the amount recommended by the WHO, or daily, if you mean the upper limit.

It is easy to calculate that drinking a two-liter bottle of cola is like eating sweets for eight days, including tea and coffee with sugar, cakes, sweets, and in general everything that somehow contains glucose.

To consume sugar syrup of such a concentration and in such significant quantities, a person in its usual form is not capable. The body recognizes the threat and turns on the gag reflex. To prevent this from happening, cola producers add phosphoric acid to the drink: it suppresses the taste buds of the tongue and allows liquid to slip into the stomach.

Orthophosphoric acid is the second most likely health problem for lovers of the “great American drink,” as the producers call it. The aggressiveness of this compound is such that it is brought to Coca-Cola factories in containers made of corrosion-resistant materials. Conventional steel tanks are not suitable for this purpose.

It was the presence of acid that brought Coca-Cola extraordinary fame in narrow professional circles - plumbers, mechanics and American police officers: it excellently removes rust, corrodes blockages in pipes and washes blood from asphalt. At the same time, according to the assurances of the company, "without affecting" the health of consumers.

The next component of the effervescent, which also cannot be beneficial to people who use it, is sodium cyclamate. A synthetic sugar substitute with a sweetness of about 30 to 50 times that of natural glucose. In the food industry, this additive is designated by the code E952.

In the mid-60s, it was recognized as a carcinogen: experiments carried out showed that cyclamic acid and its salts accumulate in body tissues and cause oncological diseases of the bladder in laboratory rats. In 1969, the US Federal Food and Drug Administration banned sodium cyclamate from use in the food industry. In the same year, Canada introduced a similar ban, in subsequent years - Singapore, South Korea, Japan and some other countries.

However, in 1979, the unexpected happened: WHO "for no reason" recognized the substance as harmless. And Coca-Cola again legally began to use E952 in its products.

Biochemistry in action

What happens to the body, into which the "taste of the holiday" has been poured? Unfortunately for Coca-Cola lovers, nothing good.

For the first 10 minutes, the body actively absorbs sugar from the drink. Glucose enters the bloodstream, and the body perceives it as a gratuitous source of energy. This is the reason for the vigor effect that can be experienced by taking a sip of cola after hard work.

20 minutes after consumption, the blood is saturated with sugar, but glucose continues to flow. The pancreas begins to hastily produce insulin, a hormone that binds free glucose. An insulin jump occurs. The liver is involved in the conversion of sugar into fats. Most of the lipids produced will actually go to the formation of subcutaneous deposits (hello, obesity!); the smaller one will settle on the walls of blood vessels (hello to strokes and heart attacks).

In parallel, the body reacts to the caffeine contained in the drink. The consumer receives an additional charge of vivacity, drowsiness disappears, but at the same time blood pressure rises. About an hour after consumption, phosphoric acid begins to bind calcium, magnesium and zinc. The lack of ions of these substances in cellular fluids is compensated by their release from the bones. Acid-bound trace minerals are sent to the bladder. The body seeks to get rid of the solution saturated with salts, and the person wants to go to the toilet.

Over the next hour and a half, the body gets rid of most of the water taken in the form of a fizzy. And the consumer immediately has a desire to pour the next portion of liquid into himself.

Silence of the Lambs

It should be noted that society desperately lacks truthful and scientifically based information about the dangers of Coca-Cola. On the one hand, it is quite obvious that a drink with such a chemical composition cannot be beneficial to the human body. Therefore, even schoolchildren who are interested in medicine and biochemistry shoot videos and write scientific (at their level) articles about the dangers of American pop. However, there are practically no really serious scientific works on this topic.

For comparison, in mid-November, the media published information about a study by Irish scientists who proved that drinking coffee during pregnancy is harmful: it leads to a decrease in the fetus. A team of doctors monitored nearly a thousand women preparing for childbirth and recorded their addiction to coffee and tea using questionnaires. After giving birth, the babies were weighed, measured and correlated with the amount of caffeine consumed by the expectant mother. The findings were published in a major scientific journal - American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Another example - in August, the well-known magazine The Lancet published the results of a large-scale study on the dangers of alcohol. 512 experts from 243 medical centers from different countries took part in the preparation of the report.

Of course, publishing such documents is not at all the same as posting videos on YouTube where someone dissolves something in cola. You can love or not love good tea, coffee, whiskey (underline the necessary) as much as you like, but it is almost impossible to ignore the research carried out in accordance with all the rules of modern science. In any public discussion, they would be the decisive argument.

However, we have nothing of the kind about the dangers of Coca-Cola. From time to time, individual researchers or research teams publish reports that the effervescent causes serious illness; however, these warnings are drowned in streams of quasi-scientific PR, which, we dare to assume, is generously sponsored by the corporation.

In general, the scientific community prefers not to notice "Coca-Cola" and its analogues. If information about their dangers and breaks through in the media, then, as a rule, in the form of arguments about the "dangers of excessive use" of the fizzy, which automatically shifts the blame from the manufacturer, who puts harmful ingredients in his product, onto the consumer.

The reasons for such loyalty to the red-and-white brand in 2015 were revealed by the British newspaper The Times, publishing an article written on the basis of an investigative journalism. It reported that Coca-Cola had invested millions of pounds in nutritional research. Scientists working with the company had to “prove” that there was no link between excess sugar consumption and diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. The company wanted to convince the general public that high sugar levels in beverages are not as harmful as lack of physical activity. More than seven million dollars have been invested, in fact, in the falsification of scientific data, and hungry for money nutritionists have become one of the "Coca-Cola" marketing divisions.

Legal looking glass

The commitment of the scientific community is complemented by the fact that the corporation is very good at working with laws. One of the most serious accusations against Coca-Cola is that the composition of its signature drink is classified. Despite the fact that the authorities of both Russia and most other countries require manufacturers to disclose all information about their products, the company simply ignores these requirements.

In 2011, the hosts of the radio show This American Life announced that they had found a recipe for the secret ingredient in Coca-Cola, the so-called Merchandise 7X drug. According to the hosts, the recipe was published in 1979 by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Commenting on the post, Coca-Cola South Pacific Public Relations Manager Susie Crumpton said the main ingredients were not classified. However, in the same year, the company put on a real show with the transfer of the secret recipe from the bank vault to the safe of the Coca-Cola Museum (World of Coca-Cola Museum).

Understandably, recipe games that only a few people on the planet can read are just hype and hype. But Gennady Onishchenko, by that time already the former chief sanitary doctor of Russia, complained about the company's real reluctance to provide comprehensive information on the composition of drinks and the recipe for their preparation.

Gennady Onishchenko. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

Uncertainty about the composition of the drink allows the corporation to get out of the most unpleasant situations. In 2009, the public organization "St. Nicholas Foundation" and the Turkish authorities accused Coca-Cola of using carmine, an extract of cochineal, an insect from the Hemiptera genus, as a dye. Prosecutors argued that the substance was not certified for food use. The company simply stated that it does not use carmine to color the drinks.

Common sense and elementary logic dictate that a product with such a chemical background as Coca-Cola, in an amicable way, should not appear on store shelves. Nevertheless, officials, like scientists, prefer not to notice the peculiarities of "coca-cola" products, and continue to label them as "unhealthy, but harmless."

Freudian slip

Billions of dollars in profits, qualified lawyers and talented advertisers work wonders: Coca-Cola has been successfully running its business for many decades. It is worth giving the management of the corporation their due: they act very flexibly, constantly bringing new brands to the market. Faced with criticism for the classic cola's too high sugar content, the company unveiled a whole line of supposedly "diet" and light drinks. Seeing the fall in popularity of chemical fizzy, she invested in buying up producers of juices, nectars, fruit drinks and fruit purees.

However, Coca-Cola advertisers sometimes make mistakes. In October 2018, the company decided to launch new ads in New Zealand. In her slogan, the creatives came up with the idea of combining English and the language of the indigenous population of the country - Maori, composing the phrase: "Kia ora, Mate", which was supposed to mean "Hello, buddy." The agitators did not take into account only the fact that the English slang mate in the language of the indigenous inhabitants of the archipelago means "death". As a result, bilingual New Zealanders read the phrase as "Hello, Death."

“It's a rare moment when the global giant selling sugary soda was honest,” social media users noted at the time.