I can remember hearing about this angle on fizzy drink sweeteners years ago. Then not at all any-more, after the health concerns about Cane Sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup arose. Now, US President Donald Trump is an expert, the issue…
US President Donald Trump has avoided war with Cocoa Cola over
the use of ‘Real Cane Sugar’ in a new line of its classic Brands.
Long ago and far away, in a land called America, where fizzy recreational drinks first emerged and flourished, there was leading brand called Coca Cola. Among other ingredients it contained – but no longer does, for plenty of good reasons – was real ‘live’ cocaine. Another thought to be harmless at the outset of the band’s odyssey, ‘was real cane sugar’.
It was called that because it was a 100 percent natural sweetener, grown in fields full of neat rows of tropical grass called sugar cane. Sugar cane was a close look-alike to bamboo and a distant cousin. But bamboo was never so sweet!
Big business
When it was discovered, Sugar Cane was cut down as it turned brown in the fall or winter, crushed, and run through powerful presses which separated the rich, sticky-sweet cane juice, which was col-lected to be used for many purposes. All of which depended on its sweetness. It became a really big -global – business very quickly. Like cotton before it, sugar came to represent the very the roots of New-World slavery.
But by then, crafty humans who wanted the sweetness nor the Calories or the obesity it engendered, had come up substitutes, Some of those were plant-based. Others were entirely artificial.
Sugar Wars begin
Sometime in the middle 20th Century, someone else discovered that there was another substance, this one a by-product of processing corn into its many spin-offs, that it was very cheap and easy to use in it’s natural, liquid form.
So off went Cocoa Cola and its mounting army of competitors, and switched to Corn Syrup to improve profit margins and profits. “What a sweet deal!” many folks in the business said. And, lo! – Many mainstream generations of fizzy drink lovers grew up believing Corn Syrup-sweetened beverages tasted better than Cane Sugar ones.
Even better…
One principle difference between the two was, fructose was almost pure glucose, and didn’t have to be converted to that very basic sugar before being used in sweets or processed by the human body.
Ultimately Corn Syrup – particularly a variant called High-Fructose Corn Syrup – was found to be the ultimate sweetener for applications such as commercial beverages, baking, and other applications such as confectioneering.
Enter, Donald Trump…
By the 2020s, US President Donald Trump emerged as perhaps the most disruptive American leader ever. And fizzy drink makers had been convinced, or pressured, to remove actual natural sugars from their former mainstream lines. Making no-cal or non- and low-sugar(s) their new mainstream pro-ducts. And had turned to artificial or highly-processed natural-source sweeteners almost altogether.
“It’s just better!”
Thus did it come to pass that Trump – who claimed to know best about everything – landed on the notion of Making Coke Great Again… The plan was to return to cane sugar for it’s ‘Original’ products. Because he had been petitioned by Coke fans claiming that the cane version tasted better.
“You should try it!” Trump told a shareholders’ conference call before getting into the Q2 2025 num-bers. “it’s just better! You’ll see!”
The President had called on Coke to bring back Cane Sugar last week. Possibly because the fizzy drink maker didn’t want to get into a feud with Trump, it acquiesced, ‘agreeing’ to introduce a new line of cane-based products.
My take
Nevertheless, I have to agree with Eva Greenthal, senior policy scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, previously told CNN.
“Excess consumption of sugar from any source harms health,” she emphasized. “To make the US food supply healthier, the Trump administration should focus on less sugar, not different sugar.”
Meanwhile, it has become known that Trump’s own Health and Human Services Czar, RFK Jr., actually agrees with Greenthal. Making excess sugar the single known topic on which he disagrees with his boss…
… Which was a very odd thing. Although nobody thought much about that, considering where the whole notion was coming from…
~ Maggie J.