SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Coca-Cola sales surge after Diet Coke reboot
Coca-Cola Co beat Wall Street estimates with quarterly results on Tuesday, citing more demand for Coke Zero Sugar and new flavors under its Diet Coke brand as overall revenue topped expectations by around $300 million.
[...] The company said the launch of its popular low-calorie Diet Coke in sleeker tins and flavors including ginger-lime and feisty cherry drove Diet Coke volumes up 3 percent, marking a return to growth for the brand in North America.
[...] The strong results come as Coke diversifies its portfolio to include more low-sugar drinks with fewer calories to appeal to consumers reaching for healthier produce, while simultaneously spending more on marketing its core Coca-Cola brands.
Meanwhile, at Experimental Biology 2018:
Increased awareness of the health consequences of eating too much sugar has fueled a dramatic uptick in the consumption of zero-calorie artificial sweeteners in recent decades. However, new research finds sugar replacements can also cause health changes that are linked with diabetes and obesity, suggesting that switching from regular to diet soda may be a case of 'out of the frying pan, into the fire.' [...] The team fed different groups of rats diets high in glucose or fructose (kinds of sugar), or aspartame or acesulfame potassium (common zero-calorie artificial sweeteners). After three weeks, the researchers saw significant differences in the concentrations of biochemicals, fats and amino acids in blood samples.
The results suggest artificial sweeteners change how the body processes fat and gets its energy. In addition, they found acesulfame potassium seemed to accumulate in the blood, with higher concentrations having a more harmful effect on the cells that line blood vessels. "We observed that in moderation, your body has the machinery to handle sugar; it is when the system is overloaded over a long period of time that this machinery breaks down," Hoffmann said. "We also observed that replacing these sugars with non-caloric artificial sweeteners leads to negative changes in fat and energy metabolism."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 25 2018, @01:59PM (4 children)
Hmm yeah a couple hundred (thousand?) miles south and on my desk is a can of "Runa Organic Clean Energy Drink Lime flavor" and it is a bit of an acquired taste. To some extent that's why I like it, my wife and kids can not stomach the taste, so I don't have to buy 4 cans in order to drink one of them. The taste can't really be described in words.
Ingredients list is brewed tea, lime juice, lime flavor (WTF), Citric acid, Natural flavor (WTF?), Ascorbic acid (aka vit C supplementation), one of the few highly processed products you can buy where the ingredients list matches the marketing, it is literally tea with lime and a dash of extra vit-C.
Its the only caffienated canned drink I have ever found where there's both no sugar and no sweeteners. You can buy thousands of products with one or the other, never neither with this sole exception. All caffeine comes with choking levels of sugar or aspartame with this sole exception.
The good news is amazon sells it for about half the price of my legacy brick and mortar store, but only in 24 packs so you're paying almost forty bucks for the experiment.
I drink home brewed black looseleaf tea at home, and it'll stay boiling hot most of a day in my thermos, but sometimes I need a can of caffeine for whatever reason and this is the only purchase option I know about other than maybe no-doz caffeine pills or dark chocolate bar.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday April 25 2018, @02:41PM (3 children)
I like to brew a gallon of black or green tea (4-5 small tea bags) and then add ~4 of these [truelemon.com]. Amazon sells them in boxes of 500. I wait for it to cool down a bit and then stick it in a gallon dispenser in the fridge, and any overflow in a plastic bottle to toss in the freezer (so it can be enjoyed sooner). Seems effectively similar to that product of yours, and really cheap: $2-4 gets you 100 tea bags, and the lime packets cost about $0.05 each. About $0.28-0.30/gallon or maybe $38 for 125 gallons.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 25 2018, @03:51PM (2 children)
I would endorse that although its weird that the market is flooded with ridiculous convenience items like pre-hard-boiled eggs or frozen pb&j sandwiches for those who can't figure out the recipe, but one simple recipe thats darn near actively censored from the marketplace is can of caffeine without gross syrups or artificial sweeteners and flavorings. A world where you can buy iced coffee because the recipe is too ambitious to make at home, should sell a much larger selection of plain tea products.
I have read the FDA is cracking down on powdered sales of caffeine because of idiots killing themselves with it, perhaps the non-gross canned tea situation is related to some regulation that disgusting drinks are self limiting but nice tasty strong tea on tap would result in idiots drinking three gallons per day then stroking out and suing people and the government, or the only available legal product being decaf which makes it pointless, just drink water then. That would be an interesting approach to prohibition, both the dumb idea of the 30s and the dumb idea of drug prohibition, sure sell all the weed you want as long as its mixed with skunk dung or something to make it self limiting. Maybe mix weed with mesquite bbq wood to make consumption self limiting... hmm.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 25 2018, @04:35PM (1 child)
You both make good points. I think the key is in what the parent wrote: make it in bulk. There isn't much time difference in making 5 gallons vs. 1 gallon, so make 5 gallons at a time.
What we're really buying when we buy the hard boiled eggs, the pre-made PB&J, etc., is laziness and dependency and a whole raft of chemicals that may or may not be destroying our health one serving at a time.
An externality is a general death of our own creativity when it comes to the machinery of daily life. That creativity is our greatest birthright as humans and also our greatest resource. The Coca-Colas of the world should be paying us millions to surrender that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:44PM
What you're really buying when you buy the hard boiled eggs, pre-made PB&J etc. is time. You are paying a convenience factor for the time spent in cooking the product and packaging it until you eat it (if applicable), and if buying it on-the-go the time spent figuring out you want X, putting it on a shopping list, finding it at your purchase point, and again taking it and storing it (if on the fly). Why should I waste 15 minutes of time (or 6-7 minutes actually actively spent) hard boiling a single egg, rinsing it and letting it cool, if I have other things to be about doing if I can afford the convenience price?
What you do with that time..... that's your lookout. Maybe I need the extra 15 minutes sleep because I'm overworked but get paid more multiple of egg convenience during that overwork. Maybe I want to spend that time intentionally caring for my family or a pet. Maybe I need to veg in front of the TV to cope with an otherwise bleak and meaningless existence. Or maybe I just want to be lazy.
This sig for rent.