If you know anything about me, you’ll probably know that I’m wayyy out of it when it comes to pop culture because I haven’t watched TV in several years. No one need praise me for self-control or anything like that – TV gives me migraines. If I could watch TV, I would probably be glued to it right now. No one would know who OrangeClouds was because I would never log on. I’d be too busy watching re-runs of What Not to Wear.
Anyway, it may not be news to you, but it was news to me since I live on my own little TV-less planet... they now sell Coke with vitamins! As if that makes it a health food and now pediatricians will recommend "Coke Plus" instead of milk. </sarcasm>
Before I get any further, I want to make something clear: If you want to eat junk, I think you should be able to eat junk. If you want to drink Coke, I think you should be able to drink Coke. BUT... if you want to eat healthy foods, I think you should be able to do so – without receiving zillions of misleading messages blurring which foods are healthy AND if you want your child to eat healthy foods, I don’t think predatory junk food advertisers should be able to undermine your parenting ESPECIALLY before your child is old enough to make informed decisions.
So, why Coke Plus, and why a diary on it? To start with, two things:
- One of nutrition experts’ biggest gripes about so-called junk food is that it squeezes the healthy stuff out of your diet. It may not be that a Coke or two is SOOO bad for you, but if you are downing 200 calories of pure sugar, you are using it to replace other foods that augment sugar with vitamins, minerals, fiber, and other goodies.
- As Michele Simon points out in her book Appetite for Profit, "Big Food" loves to show the world how it is "part of the solution." For example – remember the "voluntary" agreement by soft drink companies to keep pop out of schools? If you read the fine print, you’ll find out that they only agreed to keep some products out of some schools (mainly elementary schools, many of which don’t currently offer soda in vending machines anyway), they were at risk of getting slapped with a mandatory soda in schools ban, and the voluntary agreement lacks any mechanism for enforcement. It was a PR stunt y nada mas. Believing that these companies are "part of the solution" is as misguided as believing that the Republicans are committed to ending the occupation of Iraq.
Apparently, Coke execs went back to the drawing board after hearing complaints that their delicious all-American artificial flavoring and coloring plus high fructose corn syrup and water was squeezing vitamin-rich foods out of our diets. What could they do about that? BINGO! Add vitamins and minerals to Coke! Problem solved! Now, obviously, they are part of the solution.
Here’s a few questions though: if someone wants Coke + vitamins, can’t he or she just drink a Coke and take a multivitamin? And, if Coke is so excited to nourish Americans with vitamins and minerals, why didn’t they fortify ALL of their products? For that matter, if they want to be part of the solution, why do they even sell Coke at all?
I don’t personally believe that adding vitamins to Coke is enough to make it healthy (even if you get Mexican Coke or Kosher for Passover Coke with real sugar instead of HFCS). As I said before, if you want to drink a Coke, drink a Coke. It’s a free country. But if you want to eat or drink a health food, Coke ain’t it.
I believe what I read in the book SuperfoodsRx, that whole foods are more than just vitamin delivery devices (and they are therefore superior to processed foods fortified with 100% of every vitamin). Whole foods like fruits, veggies, nuts, whole grains, and beans give you complex carbs, protein, healthy fats, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients we haven’t even discovered yet. AND they provide them in the right proportions for your body to use them. As Michael Pollan once said (I'm paraphrasing): We don't need to understand the complex nutritional value of a carrot to benefit from everything in it. You might want to take a multivitamin in addition to diet of whole foods, but it’s best not to take it instead of eating whole foods.
How does Coke Plus fare as a health food? Well... to start, it’s a beverage, and people do not account for calories they drink very well. In other words, if you ate 200 calories of cheesecake, chances are you’d cut back your calories elsewhere for the day, but if you drank 200 calories of Coke, you probably wouldn’t. (I’m using 200 calories as a round figure here... I can’t remember how many calories a can of Coke has, but I know 200 isn’t too far off.)
Also, 200 calories is 10% of a 2000-calorie per day diet. What would you eat that is 200 calories? A restaurant I just visited serves a grilled veggie sandwich on homemade whole grain flatbread that contains only 186 calories, plus plenty of fiber, protein, vitamins, and more. Hell, you could even eat 200 calories of gelato (about 3 oz) and even though you’d be eating a ton of sugar and fat, you’d probably also get at least some protein and calcium from the dairy and perhaps some antioxidants from fruit or chocolate mixed in. Most foods you would eat to comprise one tenth of your food for the day would at least contain more fiber and/or protein than ZERO.
Of course, now Coke can counter the argument that its product contains no redeeming nutrients whatsoever because it comes fortified with vitamins and minerals. But, again, that’s no different from popping a multivitamin and washing it down with a Coke. And even if you went the gelato route, getting 200 calories of sinful, creamy goodness in place of a Coke, you’d be far more satiated because your tummy would account for the gelato as food.
So is Coke Plus part of the solution? No more than going to war in Iraq was a way to preserve peace. Coke Plus is a PR stunt and a marketing maneuver. Coke gets to look good for promoting a nutritionally-redeeming product (sort of), while also implementing a major ad campaign that will get some attention since it’s new and fresh. Perhaps it gets a few new customers who want to try the new product, and maybe that will marginally improve Coke’s already enormous market share.