We don’t drink many sodas in this house. But I’ve always kept some Diet Coke on hand for necessaries like popcorn, pizza.

 

Recently the wife decided that we should be drinking the regular Coke (with all the sugar!) because of the aspartame in Diet Coke apparently causes dementia and memory loss.
Now I keep the ‘mini’ Cokes, 8 oz cans like the bottles we used to drink, in my Starbucks fridge in the garage.
So, having only drank the regular Cokes for awhile now, I decided to drink a Diet Coke from the Coke machine in the garage to make myself feel better for having not drank all that sugar.
My taste buds IMMEDIATELY went back to the horrible revolt that they all had back in 1982 when they were first splattered with their inaugural taste of this new ‘Diet’ Coke.
‘WHY’? they all moaned together in chorus. My sweetly sugar covered taste buds cried like the day I found out they were closing the Waterhole.
They had the same exact ‘OMG, what is this really? This Diet Coke tastes horrible, it’ll never go over. Ever. It’s just flavored fizz. Yuck. Gimme a regular Coke back.’
Therefore today, the 8oz regular Coke, with it’s 24 grams of sugar and 90 calories, has stormed the soda wall in this house and declared it’s rightful ownership of Cokedom.
Note I said the 8oz, because really that’s a serving.
And a serving is all that we need. It’ll get you through a bag of popcorn.
This tastebud evolution came in the 80’s when everything went big; hair, houses, vehicles, blood pressures, blood sugars. Those all soon gave way to bigger wheelchairs, pants, dresses and doctor bills.
This new Big 80’s America could now belly up to the buffet and we could ‘get our money’s worth’ and eat till we couldn’t breath and then wash it all down with an enormous ‘Diet Coke’ because it had no calories!
This new aspartame would release us from being responsible eaters and drinkers.
But, today, my tastebuds have successfully presented their case and have ruled that drinking one 8 oz can of regular Coke every now and then is acceptable. One key argument in their case was their witness to my frequent gym trips.
They’ve successfully argued that the enjoyment from drinking a smaller amount of regular Coke is much more enjoyable to them than suffering through a larger amount of Diet Coke.
Therefore, while I will keep them around, my newly incarcerated and chilled 12 oz Diet Cokes, with their sexy 1 grams of sugar and 10 calories, need to be very very scared around these parts now.
This impromptu blog today was actually supposed to be about aspartame’s effects on our bodies and memory loss.
But I forgot that point as I was writing this, so apparently there is something to this notion that Diet Coke causes forgetfulness.

That’s the best I can tell about it,

~Mark