Name Your Poison
By Paul Jacob
Forgive me if I over-imbibe. I tip only one drink per day, but that’s one too many...according to some folk.
I refer, of course, to Coke.
In saner times , you would have thought that I must have been referring to alcohol in its drinkable forms. Any referent switcheroo to Coca Cola you’d’ve discounted as absurd.
But these are not sane times, and today the regulation and even prohibition of big-name “sodas” is all the rage.
Odd? Yes! Soft drinks (as they were once called) were invented as alternatives to (or cures for) the “hard stuff,” alcohol. The health food crowd now lauds wine as a cure-all while blasting Coke and Pepsi as the devil’s own true brew.
Today, the hard stuff is sugar, and we worry about sugar’s substitutes.
But forget aspartame and sucralose: the ultimate sugar replacement is sugar.
I mean, of course, “high fructose corn syrup.” This mad-scientists’ sugar gets stuffed into nearly everything from cakes to colas these days, and it is, according to our most popular health advisors, far worse for us than the refined sugar it replaced.
And its prevalence is in great part because of high sugar tariffs.
Whereas some people now talk about increased regulation of sugar substitutes, I simply advocate ending the sugar tariff. After all, outside of the U.S., refined sugar is what you drink in non-diet soft drinks.
Until we end those tariffs, while others go to Europe for the wine, I’m tempted to travel for the Coke.
This is Common Sense. I'm Paul Jacob.
