Coked up again

[pyesetz]

A Certain Bear sent me this link.  Of course, it's mainly aimed at Americans, the only people on this continent who are willing to drink soda pop that contains high-fructose corn syrup.  Still, honour must be defended with a good Fisking!  And making fun of snake-oil salesmen is about as easy as doing it to Creationists.

Consuming soft drinks is bad for so many reasons that science cannot even state all the consequences.
    Really?  This is saying that soda pop is *supernaturally* evil?

sugar. It’s an evil that the processed food industry and sugar growers don’t want people to know about.
    This is actually true, but phrased in dog-whistle religious terms.  Because Coke is "evil", the people selling it are demons working for Satan.
    The phrase "don't want people to know about" is commonly seen in advertisements for snake oil.

When somebody drinks a Coke watch what happens…  In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system.
    This assumes that you down the entire can in an instant.  That is not usually what I see when I watch somebody drink a Coke.

You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor
    There is no medical basis for this statement.  Sugar is antiemetic, something people eat when they're trying to *avoid* vomiting.  Phosphoric acid makes the product bubbly, which cuts the flavour, but drinking flat soda doesn't cause vomiting.

20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst.
    Again assuming that you downed the whole thing in an instant.

Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat.
    He only says this because everyone knows that fat is "evil".  Actually the liver turns sugar into glycogen, which is a starch.  The liver's response to high sugar levels is a measured attempt to restore calm to the blood, not a frenzy of fat-production that will make you gain 10 pounds (5 kilos) in an instant.

40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream
    As if caffeine has no effect during minutes 1-39, then suddenly hits you during minute 40.

The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.
    More black-and-white thinking.  Only *some* of the receptors are blocked, which only *reduces* drowsiness.

Your body ups your dopamine production stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain.  This is physically the same way heroin works, by the way.
    No, it's not.  Heroin works by simulating the effect of endorphin, not dopamine.  But everybody knows that heroin is "evil", so let's slime Coke via random word-association.  The author of this document is obviously a Republican.


* * * * *

Well, let's wash our mouths of that horrid taste.  Here's a Slashvertisement for command-line dating.  And here's CATO's map of botched SWAT raids.  And here's a little paranoia piece about how the Bush presidency is like General Pompey's Rome (which paved the way for the collapse of the Republic into Empire).

Comments

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

:-) And if HFCS soft drinks are this evil, then diet soft drinks must be the foul cursed vomit of the devil himself. Someone once told me that diet soft drinks are worse than regular soft drinks, because they turn your brain into foam. My response (to him):

"Is that what happened to you?"

[just-the-ash.livejournal.com]

OH HELL! IT COULD BE WORSE! RED BULL GIVES ME CAPSLOCK! ;D

[pyesetz]

Red Bull is the "menthol cigarette" of soda pops ;-)

[pyesetz]

"M'pral vomi san ye", saith the lord Lwa Ezili Danto.  (I'd include a link, but the only decent one I have is in Italian and Google-translate doesn't handle it well.)

Do dietetic pops turn your brain into urethane foam or urea-formaldehyde foam?  Or glass aerogel?  (Eww, mad-cow brain)

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I tend to think of the Republic evolving into Empire as a natural adaptation to environmental pressures, rather than as a failure of the Republic. We're headed that way ourselves, because the world we live in is no longer amenable to the sort of place that our Republic has become. When the standard of living rises beyond a certain point, you tend to become a target for the barbarians, just at the time when people are becoming tame and civilized enough to be unsuited to the rigours of freedom. That's where we are now. We can move forward, or we can die, but we can't live in the past.

[warrenwolfy.livejournal.com]

For one of my early English classes I had to do a persuasive essay and presentation. I chose the topic of Diet Soda, because I'd heard all the horror stories about Aspartame and figured it would be interesting to do some serious research and see if the reports were credible.

After a few days research it was pretty clear to me that the "Aspartame = SATAN" arguments weren't credible at all.

However, I decided to give my presentation on why Aspartame is evil anyway. I made sure to pick my words very carefully so that nothing I said was technically a lie, and I skewed the facts as far as I could without actually falsifying them.

At the end of my presentation my classmates looked like they'd been hit by a bomb. They actually looked scared. A few remarked things like, "I never knew," or "Wow, I can't believe it's legal to still sell the stuff," and "I'll NEVER drink Diet Coke again!"

The professor even went and got one of her colleges, who regularly drank huge volumes of Diet Coke, and brought him over, telling him, "You need to hear Warren's presentation."

At that point it was question and answer time and people were sharing their "I knew it was bad, because this one time..." type-stories, and I casually picked up the 6-pack of Diet Coke I had brought as a prop for the presentation. I'd used it to open a can and pour anti-freeze into it to create a frightening visual for the fact that Aspartame (does, technically, in a VERY small amount) break down into methyl-alcohol.

I offered the unopened cans to the class. They laughed uneasily, thinking I was making a joke, and of course refused them.

So I cracked one open and started chugging away. The room went silent.

"How...!? What...!? Why...?!" people stammered.

I shrugged. "Oh, I didn't find a single piece of actual evidence it's harmful. I just chose my words very carefully."

I then went back over my presentation point by point, explaining exactly how I stretched the truth on each point and how I had used emotional appeals and scare tactics to sound persuasive. By the end of the presentation people were then convinced that the Aspartame scare had no actual solid factual foundation after all.

Needless to say, I got an "A" on the presentation.

[pyesetz]

"A Republic, madam, if you can keep it."  Franklin knew all too well the pressures that would force the Republic towards Empire, but he hoped future generations would stay the course.  They haven't.

We don't have to move "forward" toward Empire.  We could instead invent a really groovy new kind of democracy, with web-based direct participation, some tasty flibbertygibbets, a maybe a deus ex machina.

[pyesetz]

I then went back over my presentation point by point, explaining exactly how I stretched the truth on each point and how I had used emotional appeals and scare tactics to sound persuasive.

Fun times!  Reminds me of my final essay for high-school English.  I was supposed to write something that had a trick ending.  So I wrote a short biography of Isaac Asimov.  Then I wrote a postscript which pretended that the preceding biography was written by a defective robot—and then I proceded to criticize my own best-effort writing for being too robotic!  Needless to say, I got an A.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

And in happier times to come, such things may yet be. Right now, we need to concentrate on surviving the external threats.