Coca-Cola to Launch New Version of Its Drink in U.S. After Trump’s Input Over Ingredients

TIME

Coca-Cola has announced that it will be introducing a cane sugar version of its leading soda product to the U.S. market this fall, confirming President Donald Trump's pre-emptive announcement made days earlier.  The new offering of Coca-Cola will be available in the U.S. alongside the iconic version, which uses high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener and will remain unchanged. (Diet and Coke Zero products use aspartame and other artificial sweeteners.)

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00:00For all practical purposes, they're the same. So I find the switch to be nutritionally hilarious.

00:11So cane sugar is sugar that is extracted from sugar cane. So sugar cane is processed to extract

00:16the sugar. The sugar is then used in lots of different ways. And corn syrup is made from maize

00:23so that the maize is processed to extract carbohydrates and from that is made corn syrup,

00:28which is used as a sweetener as well. Essentially, they're both sugar and from a nutritional

00:34perspective, very similar. So they both would contain four calories a gram. They both increase

00:39your risk of dental caries and they will both contribute potentially to excessive calorie

00:44intake if you're having too much of them. You know, if you sat in front of a 12 ounce

00:48glass of water and put 10 teaspoons of sugar in it, you probably wouldn't like it very much.

00:54But because of the flavor balance that Coca-Cola has achieved, you don't notice how sweet it is.

01:01But it's very sweet. And drinking that many calories from sugar is not a good idea. That's not going to

01:08change if it's cane or beet sugar. High fructose corn syrup, because it was so much cheaper, was put into

01:16everything. And we're Americans. We like sweet foods. We like sweet foods a lot. So the more high fructose

01:24corn syrup that got dumped into foods, the more people liked them and bought them. And so they

01:30became associated with junk foods and they're a marker of ultra processed foods. They taste the same,

01:38they have the same number of calories. They do exactly the same things in the body.

01:44So everybody, everybody would be healthier eating less of both of them.

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