It’s little secret that Australians like their soft drink. In 2012 alone, we drank 1.28 BILLION LITRES of the stuff!
With so much science pointing to soft drink’s hugely negative impact on our health, we’re totally gobsmacked by that number. How did toxic sugar water become – and remain – a diet staple in Australia and across the globe?!
Turns out, soda pop has one bubbling mad history behind it.
Soft drink was considered a health food at first!
It originally bubbled up in soda fountains at the local pharmacy in the 1800s, where it was touted to contain the healing powers of natural mineral springs.
These fountains often exploded, and sometimes the sulphuric acid used to carbonate the water leached into the final product. Yikes!
Would you like some cocaine with your soda?
Pharmacists soon started adding herbs, roots, fruits and flavourings to boost soda’s “healing powers”. Alcohol and narcotic drugs also made appearances, offering soda drinkers a very different kind of “pick-me-up”.
Coke officially denies it, but the original recipe is said to have had cocaine in it. And 7 Up contained mood-altering drug lithium citrate until the 1940s. Mind-blowing. Literally.
Sugar becomes soft drink’s drug of choice.
At the turn of the 20th century, governments clued up to the fact that maybe narcotics shouldn’t be used in food and drink. Soda manufacturers – who had began to crop up everywhere as bottling and capping became more finessed – began to rely on sugar to hook consumers.
And as mass production cranked up, companies tweaked their recipes to cut costs, turning to cheaper ingredients like corn syrup and artificial colourings.
Big Soda gets sneaky.
As soft drink sales skyrocketed in the second half of the 20th century, so did the Western world’s obesity rates and incidence of lifestyle diseases like cancer and type 2 diabetes (funny that!). People began to question pop’s short- and long-term health effects, particularly with regards to its major ingredient: sugar.
But then well-established Big Soda wasn’t letting go that easy. Manufacturers began to fund scientific studies to swathe the rising health concerns.
Around this time, soda giants also started adding artificially sweetened “diet” pop to their fridges, catering to more “health conscious” pop drinkers.
Today? Despite the health concerns, we’re still bubbling mad for soft drink.
While (thankfully!) we’ve seen a slight decline in soft drink consumption in recent years, Big Soda continues to find ways to market the lolly water to us pretty successfully.
Cue Coke’s latest creation, Coke Ginger (sorry Coke, adding ginger to your recipe does not a healthy beverage make).
While we might laugh at Big Soda’s blatant attempts to dupe consumers, fact is, Australia remains in the top 10 for per capita consumption of soft drink.
The situation is even worse in the UK and the U.S., with our American friends down about 165 litres per person in 2014!
This is just one of the reasons we’ve been championing a sugar tax here in Australia, to help tackle soft drink consumption and its related health issues. Is it time you joined the shake up?
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