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Comment by tsdlts | Hacker News Reader

There's 44g of sugar in a can of coke. The recommended daily amount of sugar is 24g. Although I take issue that there would be any amount of sugar that should be recommended since it's entirely unnecessary to consume.

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I wouldn't say sugar is unnecessary for us: “The brain is dependent on sugar as its main fuel” https://hms.harvard.edu/news-events/publications-archive/bra...

The body needs sugar, but you don't need to consume sugar to get it. You produce your own glucose.

Particularly since in soft drinks it is typically balanced out with salt to intensify craving and the amount you can drink without feeling like you're taking in too much sugar. Soft drinks have quite a bit of salt in there too, even if you're not washing down Doritos.

I'm not aware of any soft drinks that have significant amounts of salt added. Certainly for the most popular drinks (e.g. coke, pepsi), the only sodium in them is from the water source.

It'll end up as much as a twentieth of a teaspoon of salt per bottle, depending on the soft drink. This is not a huge dose all by itself but you don't register it as salt: it sneaks in as part of other ingredients, rather than being added by the spoonful in raw form (that said, 'natural flavorings' can cover a lot, so it CAN be just added as part of the recipe.) Leave it out and your flavor balance will be more along 'New Coke' lines.

It's not just too little to register as salt, it's too little to alter taste at all. It's incidental, not deliberately included as part of the flavor. There's as much sodium in some tap waters, and in fact the sodium content of sodas varies by location because of variations in the source water.

Never mind it being "quite a bit of salt" or enough to "intensify craving."

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