Presented by Jayde Lovell, shot and produced by Bec Susan Gill, edited by Yohana Yoshe.

This week, the newest beverage in the Coca Cola line – Coca Cola Life – was finally released in New York.

But don’t let that green label fool you – hiding behind the ‘healthy green’-colored label lurks a world of sugar, calories, and additives.

You can almost see Coke’s marketing machine in action. They know people are increasingly concerned about our move towards processed foods, and fear artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, so they chose to flavor the beverage with ‘natural’ sweeteners such as ‘cane sugar’ (sounds so much better than just ‘sugar’ don’t you think?).

They knew people were also concerned about their carb intake. ‘How to drop the carbs without using artificial sweeteners?’ wondered the Coke marketing team. Enter steviol glycoside, a product which is around 200 times sweeter than sugar and is derived from the stevia plant.

Whilst Stevia is officially ‘natural’ it’s extraction process is anything but. To get the sweet sweet steviol glycoside out of the plant, the manufacturers use an extraction process involving all sorts of nasty chemicals, including methanol (or wood alcohol) an additive deplored by the natural food advocates for it’s toxicity to humans.

Stevia also doesn’t taste anything close to real sugar, so coke were forced to leave in around two-thirds of the sugar from regular coke.

The result? A beverage that still has 24 grams of sugar per can, and a bunch of additives that are natural in name only.

Truly, a drink for the gullible amongst us.

You can find out more on Coke Life in this post I wrote for LinkedIn.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140925134949-25420249-why-the-new-coca-cola-life-is-bad-news

It has over 30,000 views and counting – clearly a lot of people want to know more about this beverage, at least more than what Coke’s marketing team are telling them.

MUSIC
“Jingle Bells” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/