If you love soda, you've gotta read this

Almost everybody likes soda.  Some more than others.  I know I drink way too much of it, and now I'm trying to cut it back to a treat I give myself a few times a week in moderate doses.

I've always enjoyed a good soda, but recently I discovered a secret.  If you're old enough to remember the late 70's and early 80's, or if you travel overseas, you may have noticed that the soda you get tastes different than you remember.

The truth is, the soda you buy is constantly changing formulas, and beyond that there are slight variations by bottler (e.g. a bottle of Coke you get in New York might not taste the same as one you get in California).  But the major change that happened to us in the late 70s and early 80s was the switch away from actual sugar to High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS).  In fact, if you start reading labels, you'll find HFCS in almost everything you eat.  Despite claims by the corn lobby, HFCS products do not taste the same as their sugar counterparts. There are also controversial claims that HFCS coincides with the increase in obesity and diabetes.  While I won't draw that direct link, I liken it to the butter-versus-margarine debate.  Neither are good for you in large quantities, but perhaps it's wiser to go with the "natural" version instead of the artificially created product.  HFCS does not occur in nature and it's produced by heavily processing corn meal in a centrifuge. 

I'll probably go on a unibomber-style rant about HFCS in a separate post, but the short version is this:  we don't grow a lot of cane sugar in the United States.  I remember seeing a lot of it in Hawaii, but aside from that the US doesn't grow cane sugar.  But we sure do grow lots and lots of corn, subsidized by the American taxpayer.  So much corn, in fact, that there's big money in finding other uses for it such as Ethanol and HFCS.  

Ironically, the United States is known around the world for Coca-Cola, and to a lesser extent Pepsi; yet in the United States, the product we buy is an inferior variation made with HFCS while the rest of the world gets it the way they used to be made, with sugar.

You might not expect the taste to be very different; if you can't tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, you probably won't care about the difference between HFCS and sugar.  But if you savor a good cold soda, you will be interested.

There's a developing market of soda buyers that is looking for soda made the old fashioned way, with actual sugar instead of HFCS.  There are boutique soda makers like Boylan who take pride in making their products the old fashioned way.  (Try their black cherry, it's incredible).  There are ways to get soda made in other countries imported into the US; Mexican-bottled Coke is a very popular score.  There are limited-time sugar versions of normal drinks such as Pepsi Throwback.

My recommendation is, if you love a good soda, give the sugar variations a try, I think you'll enjoy it and you'll have a hard time going back to the HFCS swill the soda companies put on our store shelves.

I will review each of the sodas I've tasted individually in the coming weeks.  This includes:

• Mexican Coke
• American sucrose Coke
• Kosher for Passover Coke
• Mexican Pepsi
• Pepsi Throwback
• Kosher for Passover Pepsi
• Dr. Pepper Heritage
• Dublin Dr. Pepper
• Boylan
• RC Cola, 7-up, et al.