[mngdtt]

It's really tough seeing the amount of sugar that this recipe has. Really puts things into perspective, compared to simply drinking the end product from a can.

[Bluecobra]

A can of coke has almost 10 sugar cubes, it's pretty silly. The only winning move is not to play.

https://www.zmescience.com/other/sugar-26072011/

[nataliste]

Acid-sugar taste-hacking is something that has bothered me for quite a while.

We know that sodium consumption can be drastically reduced by adding salt at table rather than adding it directly to food. Why doesn't this happen with sugar? Why not make desserts that take advantage of the fact that surface sugar will make it seem to be sweeter than it actually is and just have table sugar?

[bdcravens]

After drinking Coke for about 32 years, I switched to Coke Zero (I have cystic fibrosis and scarring of the pancreas eventually leads to diabetes). After 14 years, drinking a regular Coke tastes like I'm drinking maple syrup.

I'm aware that aspartame isn't ideal, but I'm not brave enough to give up sweet-tasting beverages yet. :-)

[nickthegreek]

Luckily for me I only drink the small 7.5oz cans... so I only ingest 6 cubes of sugar... oof. Still an improvement over my younger years. I don't have many 'addictions' in my life, but this vice has been with me for a long long time.

[timeon]

I drink it only 1-2 times per year. It is helpful on long distance rides. I like sugar more than I like Cola.

[pdn1]

I'd rather get cancer from diet coke

[mngdtt]

Yes, I agree. I feel sick at the thought of eating 10 sugar cubes but I can happily drink a can. Silly is an appropriate word.

[syntheticnature]

When I was younger and drank more soda, I discovered I could grab a can of coke, pour it into a 24oz cup I had, then fill the can with water and pour that in and it tasted the same to me. If I focused on the flavor it was very subtly different, in a way that felt more refreshing -- but most of the time I was just drinking it without full focus and couldn't tell the difference.

Back then I was also packing lunches for my wife, and she wanted a bottle of commercial fruit juice to have with lunch. We'd buy a large bottle to save money and pour some into a smaller bottle for transport. I mentioned my experiment and she said "I'd like it if you had me try it with the juice" -- so I started doing it. A few days later she brought it up again, "Can we start diluting my juice I'm taking in?" and I told her she'd already been having diluted juice.

These days I fall into "water is the real adult beverage" but I always keep in mind just how sweet things are commonly made.

[bityard]

To my taste buds, North American candy, soda, and other sugary snacks have gotten twice to three times sweeter since I was a kid. To the point that in most cases, all you can actually taste is the sugar and nothing else. It would be interesting if someone were able to dig up a 30-year-old can of Coke or whatever and compare its carbohydrate content to modern Coke. (You can't just use the Nutrition Facts label, because that is not only a recent invention, but also companies free use it to lie about their products.)

We have a 1st-gen Coke freestyle machine in my workplace. On the rare occasion I go for it, I pick a zero-sugar variant, and I dilute it with 50% sparkling water otherwise every single flavor is way, WAY too sweet for me.

[earthling8118]

Interesting experience, but I tend to notice even a small amount of water mixed in. Different senses I guess.

[jihadjihad]

That's the recipe for the syrup [0], not the final beverage. The final beverage would obviously be diluted, to the given ratio of 7:1 in favor of carbonated water.

The water/sugar ratio for the OpenCola syrup is nearly 1:1, which is the same ratio as simple syrup [1].

0: https://github.com/cognitom/OpenCola/blob/master/recipe.mark...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrup#Inverted_sugar_syrup

[Der_Einzige]

Coke is still ~40 grams of sugar per 12oz can. That's insanity and a quick way to give yourself diabeetus.

No matter how bad you think artificial zero calorie sweeteners are, they are nothing compared to the damage that too much sugar does to your body.

[macinjosh]

I had the same reaction. Makes one realize how cooking for yourself can greatly impact calorie intake. If I made my own soda instead of grabbing one from a machine I'd certainly balk at the amount of sugar I see, but the number on the side of the can tells me the same info but with less psychological impact.

[JohnFen]

I stopped drinking soda many years ago because it's all just far, far too sweet for me. But a couple of years back, I started making my own (real) root beer because making my own means that I can control how sweet it is. I prefer mine with about 1/3 the sugar that is in most soda.

[AdmiralAsshat]

This is true, but the thing is, you don't have to follow the recipe. When I made a batch of this, I just bought the 7x concentrate from Cuba-Cola (https://cube-cola.org/index.php?route=product/category&path=...) and then added like half the amount of sugar it called for when making the concentrate, so that it was more like a 1:1 sugar:water ratio ("simple syrup") rather than a 2:1 ("rich syrup"). It didn't taste as sweet as commercial Coke, but it tasted fine.

[andsoitis]

Similar when you bake a cake. Sugar galore. Inflammation galore.