Hang on... What's that in my Coca-Cola?
I drank a coke today, which is not that rare an occurrence. What was rare however was the less sickly feel to this sugary, caffeinated beverage. I was most surprised when I glanced at the ingredients list. This is what I saw:
Cane sugar? I thought they had done away with that in the 80’s?
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Just a ploy to make their ingredients sound more wholesome, I’d say. (After all, nearly all sugar used in the food industry is cane sugar). Would like to see them try and come up with a way to make the aspartame used in their diet drinks sound healthy – according to Wikipedia, 75% of all complaints to the FDA over a 14 year period were aspartame-related!
I'm pretty sure we have previously been getting Coke with corn syrup like they get in the US?
From what I can tell after a bit of Googling, while Coke in the US has been using corn syrup, Australia has been using the more expensive and healthier cane sugar for some time (since at least 1999, going by this speech). Some Coke is probably imported though.
The FAQ comparing the two is quite interesting, but the FAQ page doesn’t use section anchors so I’ve added it below:
Q. I’ve read about high fructose corn syrup. Are there foods in Australia using it and is it worse than sugar?
A. High fructose corn syrup or HFCS is a sweetener made from maize or corn. The starch is extracted from the maize and converted into a mix of fructose and glucose. While fructose is a natural sugar found in fruit, there's nothing natural about this syrup. It's just as refined and calorific as ordinary cane sugar.
In the US, HFCS is popular and is commonly used in soft drinks because it’s less expensive than cane sugar, which is what we use in Australia. However nutritionists have some concerns that HFCS may not be good for us. Emerging evidence suggests that it may increase the risk of the metabolic syndrome - a cluster of health problems including insulin resistance, high blood pressure, obesity and high blood triglycerides.
It’s thought that when the body turns HFCS into energy, it creates too-high levels of the unhealthy triglyceride fats in the process. So even though too much sugar is not good for us, the body seems to handle it better than HFCS. Fortunately for our health, this sweetener is not used widely in Australia but be careful and read the labels on imported foods.
Always been cane sugar in Australia? That means the difference in taste was due to another factor, probably something I was eating at the same time. The other interesting thing about the new can is that it doesn't say "Coke" anywhere (Only "Coca-Cola") and there's a note next to the ingredients saying it was "lovingly crafted." Perhaps they fooled me there?
As for aspartame... that stuff always gives me a stomach ache.