I was challenged to get off soft drinks this year, and to get me going I received an email on the evils of soft drinks and what it can and will do to my innards if I don’t stop. First off, the email says, if I would bother reading the fine print listing the ingredients I would find phosphoric acid and ethylene glycol, the latter also known as anti-freeze, a chemical which is "a known slow poison in the caliber of arsenic". The warning: "If you manage to drink about 4 liters of Coke or Pepsi within an hour or so, you can die." Hey, if anyone manages to drink that much soft drinks in an hour you can bet they’ll keel over–and anti-freeze poisoning will have nothing to do with it.
There’s more. The pH or acidity indicator for soft drinks is 3.4–"strong enough to dissolve teeth and bones". Some guy with nothing better to do put a broken tooth in a bottle of cola and "in ten days it dissolved... Imagine what the drink must be doing to your soft intestines and stomach lining!" I was once told to take a piece of meat, "marinate" it in cola overnight and see what the cola can do to my stomach. Needless to say I never tried that experiment; I really don’t want to know. I’ve quit diet colas though, since my officemate convinced me that aspartame used in diet drinks has been shown to cause a whole range of negative symptoms–including depression and suicidal tendencies.
I can blame the nature of my work for bad eating habits–odd hours, stress, a prevailing in-office tendency towards gluttony–but I guess I have to admit that it may be equal parts laziness, lack of discipline and pure rationalization. How can you say no to "Madre Cookies" made by nuns, a rich dark chocolatey brown with a catch phrase on the label that says, "Ay mapapamura ka sa sarap"? Or "hand popped" (I’m not sure exactly how you pop corn by hand) Holy Kettle Corn that proclaims it has none of the bad things like artificial flavors and MSG but is "high in fiber"? And besides, it’s just really so much easier to edit an article or write this column with a box of cookies or a bag of freshly popped corn and a nice, cold, glass of freshly uncapped...okay, water...