{"id":4288,"date":"2010-01-26T10:56:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T15:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=4288"},"modified":"2016-01-09T05:46:23","modified_gmt":"2016-01-09T10:46:23","slug":"soda-wars-regular-vs-diet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=4288","title":{"rendered":"Soda Wars: Regular vs. Diet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Coca-Cola: <\/strong>I love the fact that Coke-Cola has managed to tie itself into the concept of \u201cAmerica,\u201d and waving flags, and the 4th of July, and\u2026\u00a0 polar bears.\u00a0 And such.\u00a0 And hey!\u00a0 Do you remember their old ad campaign?\u00a0 \u201cCoke Is It<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 That slogan always cracked me up.\u00a0 It\u2019s vague, and yet ridiculously imposing at the same time.\u00a0 Coke\u2026\u00a0 is IT<\/em>.\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 The slogan may as well be, \u201cSUBMIT TO COKE, NOW,\u201d or, \u201cDID YOU THINK THERE WAS ANOTHER OPTION BESIDES COKE?\u00a0 BAW HA HA HA HA HA!\u00a0 PATHETIC FOOLISH SLAVES!\u201d<\/p>\n

Any<\/em>way\u2026\u00a0 Regular Coke is tasty, yet weird.\u00a0 Because when you think about\u00a0it, Coke is\u2026\u00a0 odd.\u00a0 It tastes like nothing else besides\u2026\u00a0 Coke.\u00a0 But as for Diet Coke<\/em>, I realized upon writing this column that I drink diet sodas all the time.\u00a0 But even though I drink them, I do so unthinkingly.\u00a0 I just drink them because I no longer want to drink regular sodas, because that inevitably leads to fatness and overweight-ness.\u00a0 And so what I learned here is that you don\u2019t want to pay too much attention to the whole diet soda taste experience.\u00a0 Because when I actually paid attention <\/em>to drinking Diet Coke, I was like, \u201cWow, this does indeed taste like sugar-water mixed with crushed up aspirin.\u201d\u00a0 And that ain\u2019t good.\u00a0 Regular grade:\u00a0 A-minus\u00a0 Diet grade:<\/strong> F.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Tab: <\/strong>\u2026Tab is really only available in diet form.\u00a0 Also, it\u2019s pretty hard to find these days.\u00a0 There\u2019s a reason for that.\u00a0 The reason is that Tab tastes like alkaline battery fluid mixed with chewing gum.\u00a0 That\u2019s not really what I look for in a soda, but whatever.<\/p>\n

But back in the day (i.e., the 1980s), Tab was the only soda around that had no sugar and no caffeine whatsoever.\u00a0 And though I personally am not diabetic, my sister actually is.\u00a0 We weren\u2019t allowed to have soda in my parents\u2019 house, but there was a special exception made in the case of my sister, and so there was traditionally a six-pack of Tab lying around in our kitchen.<\/p>\n

\u2026.And so, when I was in the midst of my fourteen year-old torpor phase, and unable or unwilling to walk the half block to the store to buy a real soda, I would often come home from school, drink an entire six-pack of Tab \u2014 which was pointless, since it had no sugar and no caffeine \u2014 eat a bag of Doritos and collapse on the couch and watch episodes of \u201cSaved by the Bell\u201d back to back to back. \u00a0And then my parents would come home, see this, and yell, \u201cWhy\u2019d you drink all the Tab?! \u00a0Do you want your sister to die<\/em>? \u00a0Go to the store and get more Tab\u2026\u00a0 now!!\u201d \u00a0To make up for this, I would occasionally get out of work or school by pretending that my sister was in the hospital for a diabetic attack \u2014 which I am probably, and rightfully, going to hell for. \u00a0Grade: \u00a0D-minus.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Mountain Dew:<\/strong> Wow.\u00a0 Mountain Dew is really sweet.\u00a0 Geez.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever actually had a can of it in my real life outside of reviewing it for this website.\u00a0 Sugar-y!\u00a0 Caffeine!\u00a0 I only drank part of the can, but still, I was running around my apartment for a half-hour, saying things like, \u201cI feel crazy!\u00a0 Yet great!\u00a0 Yet also still crazy again!\u201d<\/p>\n

I mean, thank God real Mountain Dew isn\u2019t like this stuff.\u00a0 If it was, we\u2019d have a lot more mountain goats careening wildly off of cliffs while on sugar highs, and more bald eagles finishing twenty page term-papers in 5 minutes at four o\u2019clock in the morning, and a lot more bears saying stuff like, \u201cDid you ever really look at your hands?! \u00a0\u2026I mean, just look<\/em> at them,\u201d and anyway okay I\u2019m done with this joke now.<\/p>\n

Diet Mountain Dew <\/em>is less horribly sugary, but still tastes not very good.\u00a0 It has that whole aspirin-problem (viz, <\/em>Diet Coke above).\u00a0 So it\u2019s less sweet than the real stuff (good), but also worse-tasting (bad).\u00a0 This is a sort of pick-your-poison type of situation, and I don\u2019t really know who to declare the winner here.\u00a0 Regular grade:\u00a0 C-plus.\u00a0 Diet grade:\u00a0 C-plus.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Dr. Pepper: <\/strong>\u2026This used to be my favorite soda.\u00a0 I think I drank approximately 12,134 cans of it during college.\u00a0 And then, one day, some random friend of mine told me the following:\u00a0 \u201cHey.\u00a0 You know what the main ingredient in Dr. Pepper is?\u00a0 \u2026Prune juice.\u201d\u00a0 Thanks, random friend!\u00a0 So now, when I drink Dr. Pepper, it tastes like prunes to me, which must have been what it always tasted like, but I never would have realized that on my own.\u00a0 Super.\u00a0 Anyway, as for Diet Dr. Pepper<\/em>, it actually tastes surprisingly un-gross.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t taste like regular soda, but it also doesn\u2019t taste bad, which is impressive.\u00a0 Maybe prunes are just so powerful that they can mask even the bizarre flavor of artificial sweeteners.\u00a0 All hail prunes!\u00a0 Regular grade:\u00a0 A-minus.\u00a0 Diet grade:\u00a0 B-plus.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oliver Miller<\/strong> has an M.F.A. in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and has been published in numerous magazines, including Nerve and McSweeney\u2019s.\u00a0 Currently, he writes for The Faster Times<\/a>, and is also working on a book of reviews<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love the fact that Coke-Cola has managed to tie itself into the concept of \u201cAmerica,\u201d and waving flags, and the 4th of July, and\u2026 polar bears. And such…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":4296,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1449],"tags":[600],"yoast_head":"\nDiet Soda vs. Regular Soda<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=4288\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Oliver Miller\" \/>\n\t<meta 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