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Comment by OkayPhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Sugar in the amount put in soda absolutely is terrible for you. The problem definitely is with people drinking too much soda, period, but replacing your average Americans's diet soda consumption with sugar soda consumption works out to an average increase of ~73 calories/person/day. Of course, most of that consumption is being done by the subset of the population currently primarily drinking diet soda, which multiples that number by 2-5 depending on what study you refer to. Which would definitely be an alarming increase in caloric consumption in a significant block of the population.

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It's really weird that we've normalized consuming huge amounts of what's effectively an exceptionally-sweet dessert drink with most non-fancy restaurant or fast-food meals. Shit made a lot more sense when standard serving size was like 7oz and free soda refills weren't a common thing (so: the 1950s or whenever, for the former, and before some time in the '90s, for the latter). 20+oz glasses (and 32oz "medium-size" to-go cups—JFC) and free refills pushed by servers are just nuts. That's so very much sugar.

Imagine consuming a pile of 37 Pixy Stix (sugar equivalent of 24oz of Coca Cola) to accompany a hamburger. WTF. That's plainly nasty as hell, and anyone doing that in public would rightly feel ashamed. And that's not even a large serving of soda, by modern standards.

The cups are usually 3/4 full of ice to start with, heh

Gotta do something with all that corn.

73 calories actually sounds misleadingly low? How is that calculated?

I think this is what you are correcting in the rest of the post? In that a single soda is typically double that. And many folks drink more than a single soda. Considerably more.

The average American consumes 38.87 gallons of soda year. 43% of Coke sales are Diet, I extrapolated that across the market, since Coke has a pretty dominant market share anyway. That's 16.7 gallons of diet soda per American, or 178 cans of soda. Multiply that by 150 calories/can, divide by 365, you get the 73 calories.

As I mentioned before, that's a side effect of averaging across all Americans, a fraction of who don't drink soda, and a (much larger, in both senses of the word) who drink sugared soda. The population that those calories would realistically be distributed over, the diet soda drinkers, is somewhere between 20% and 40% of the population, hence the "multiply by 2-5".

Makes sense; but I think it is odd to include folks that aren't relevant in the increase, though. Really, it is just weird to see a number that the only way to see an increase of 78 calories is to swap over into a half of a drink.

Granted, you work with what you have. :D

Yeah, I suspect it works out closer to the "350 more calories per day in 20% of the population" number, but again, sources were rough.

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