I remember when I was young I heard a friend of mine theorize “It’s annoying that fast food fills your cup up with ice, trying to cheap out and give you less soda. Always ask for no ice.” Later my dad revealed that this theory probably wasn’t true – the whole soda cost just pennies to the fast-food joint, and that ice was actually more expensive than the soda that would take its place.
To me as a kid with no sense of things, this was jarring. The burger, the fries, and the soda were all similar prices so I presumed they all had similar cost and similar value. I remember my parents explaining various attitudes about what “healthy food” was but somehow I think I didn’t “get it.” To be fair there was a lot of “food health” stuff from very official sounding sources, like the food pyramid, or studies on salt, or coffee preventing cancer and causing cancer, a lot of which turned out to be wrong – there was no wikipedia for details.
I don’t think it was until I was an adult that I understood how many things sold as food have no health value and probably should be called desserts. I think there’s an Overton Window of “food” and over the last century we’ve come to accept things that are predominantly just calories under the umbrella of “food.”
Anyways if I could talk to my younger self I’d say it differently. I still don’t know if younger me would have listened, but here’s what I would have said:
So you go to the grocery store and you’ll see all these things on shelves. You’ll see meat, vegetables, chips, water, milk, soda. And they’ll all just be there. And you can read the back of the labels to see what’s in them. And you can eat pretty much any of it, and unless you’re allergic or something, you’ll definitely be safe in the short term.
But what you need to understand is that this food wasn’t put there for you. It’s put there to make money. There are some rules about what stores can sell, like alcohol, but for the most part what’s on the shelf isn’t determined by anything other than what companies can sell for the most. In fact some companies make rules that require the store to present their items on the shelf in a way they like.
So when you go to the store and see 50 types of soda, and maybe three types of juice there’s a reason for that. Everywhere sells soda only because it’s cheap to make, it’s just fizzy water with sugar and flavors added to it – no fiber, no fat, no protein, no vitamins. Because those ingredients is more expensive.
And it’s not just soda, it’s many things. Take gatorade. Read the back and you see it’s water, sugar, and salt, electrolytes is a fancy word for salts. Gatorade is everywhere because it makes a lot of money, it makes a lot of money because it’s very cheap to make, and it’s cheap to make because it’s 99% sugar-water by weight. In fact you can make your own gatorade for pennies. And it’s a lot cheaper to make some commercials that show athletes drinking something than to add healthy ingredients.
And even most things that present themselves as juice aren’t really juice, but that’s a whole extra conversation. They are mostly sugar water too.
So these sugar-water based beverages are cheap – but that alone doesn’t make them bad right? And that’s true, and it’s not the kind of bad that you would notice quickly. And you can drink it, and there are times when I drink it. But it’s important to know that nobody is really looking out for you, and if you drink too much you’ll feel bad in small ways both in the short term and long term.
Consider coca-cola, for a long time it was sold with cocaine in it, you could buy it at the soda fountain at any age. Eventually this changed, but these types of changes are usually slow and companies aren’t doing it to protect you, just their reputation. They only did that because of pressure. But there isn’t enough outcry to remove the caffeine, which is only mildly addictive.
There is no group of people in the government that truly decides what healthy looks like and makes sure that only that shows up on store shelves. There is the FDA, and they say that you shouldn’t have more than 50 grams of sugar a day, though just one bottle of coke is 65 grams. And the American Heart Association says you shouldn’t go over 36 grams.
Of course there are some stores that do sell fresh juice squeezed on site. And those cost about 20 times as much as a soda. But those grocery stores are mainly in rich areas, because they know that only people with extra money will be able to afford it.
But even then, there’s a lot of evidence that drinking juice is a lot worse than eating the whole fruit. The juice is much sweeter than the fruit, and feels so good at that moment. But sugar is one of many things you will find in this world that feels good now and bad later, especially when you drink it.
Most of us have trouble controlling ourselves. We do things we know we shouldn’t. Most adults in this country are overweight, for example, and we mostly wish we weren’t. These corporations do not care, they will happily put ads in front of you and do their best to get you to buy something you’re going to regret. It’s a constant battle. And that’s why at the nicest grocery stores they never put cold sodas near the checkout, because they respect you enough to not tempt you.
Nobody told me this growing up, and I just wish they had. I think everybody should hear this once.