Act Naturally

Sodas, like Coca Cola and Pepsi, are simply bad for you, even if they don't contain pesticides, as a recent news reports from India claim. So what about the so-called antithesis of cola beverages, the Uncola?

7UP began earlier this year an extensive marketing campaign emphasizing that it contains only five "natural" incredients, making it 100% natural.

You may wonder what those five natural incredients are. According to the 7 UP website, they are filtered carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, "natural" citric acid, natural flavors, and "natural" potassium citrate.

You may notice right away two chemical combinations involving citrate. Citric acid does naturally form in citric fruits, such as lemons and limes, which offer the taste inspiration for 7UP. Citrates, like potassium citrate, can be very useful for reducing the risk of painful kidney stones. Potassium is also a natural mineral found in our bodies, but it can be quite a stretch to suggest that the folks in 7UP harvested natural versions of these two formulas, which were most likely produced in a chemical plant somewhere.

Curious indeed that 7UP hides behind the term "natural" flavors, rather than specifically indicate that it uses lemons and limes in its formulation. Hanson's Key Lime soda, a "natural" competitor, claims it uses the flavors of Colima lime and Yucatan lemons in its drink, and even takes the extra step of mentioning that it uses "natural fruit flavors of lemon and lime" among its incredients.

In fact, as NBC Today show Food Editor Phil Lempert points out, natural flavors are created by "flavorists" in a laboratory who must prove that at some point in the process they included a natural ingredient. He adds that there is no evidence to show that natural flavors are better in quality or even safer than artificial flavors. Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article on the taste of ketchup offers some indication how complicated and unnatural this whole business of flavoring really is.

There is nothing natural about high fructose corn syrup (which in fairness to 7UP also exists in Hansen's "natural" soda as well). It simply did not exist until the 1970s, when Japanese chemists invented it. It's so cheap to produce that it almost immediately pushed cane sugar out of cans of soda, as well as made all sugar laden products less expensive (which we might describe as the 'Big Gulp' phenomenon).

As Kim Severson notes in the San Francisco Chronicle, HFCS causes a lot of anxiety among researchers and consumer advocates, partly because this chemical formula, unlike ordinary sugar, seems to wreck havoc with our bodies. Fructose apparently triggers the production of fat cells, and suppresses natural homones that control hunger. Eat too much sugar and your brain will tell you that you are full. Not so with fructose, which might also be linked to colorectal cancer.

7UP's efforts to convince you of its natural state (complete with images of trees that grow cans of soda) has been mimicked in part by the producers of the artificial sweetener, Splenda, which is derived by changing the basic chemical structure of sucrose (and therefore the tagline, Made From Sugar So It Tastes Like Sugar). Ironically, the chemists working on Splenda were actually trying to create a new form of pesticide, when one of the researchers accidently tasted the compound and found it 600 times sweeter than ordinary table sugar.

Considering that Coke and Pepsi use Splenda in some of their diet drink formulas, the suspicions of Indian officials might not be too far off the mark.