There was a story a while back about Coca-Cola being a factor in a woman’s death at the age of 30 in New Zealand. She drank up to 10 litres (!) of it a day.
If she had swapped out the regular variety of Coca-Cola for another variety the beverage maker puts out, like Diet Coke, Diet Coke Caffeine-Free or Coke Zero and chugged 10 litres of that a day would her health have fared much better? What would be the expected results of such consumption - would she have eventually succumbed to water intoxication?
It seems that the sugar was the most problematic, but that the caffeine intake was also above a safe dosage. So, in theory, diet coke would have been better but still very bad, while diet caffeine-free coke wouldn not have caused the issues discussed in the article.
I get that the coroner is concerned about this case and the health of the general population, but
seriously? I’m pretty sure the vast majority of us are not as foolish and careless as this woman was (I hope), so as to not require a label on our soft drinks warning us not to consume two and a half gallons of soda a day.
It looks like the caffeine was probably the largest contributing factor in her death, so it would have made little difference if it was Diet Coke. I’m kind of surprised that 10 litres of Coke only contains twice the recommended maximum daily intake of caffeine.
I have a 1st cousin that drank 8 16oz bottles of coke every day for weeks. He eventually went to the hospital because his kidneys shut down. Had he waited a couple of more days it would have killed him. He can’t explain why he was drinking so much, just said he couldn’t get enough. His brillant deduction was to now drink sprite. Also a lot less of it.
Just might. There’s water intoxication, also known as water poisoning or dilutional hyponatremia. I’ve seen people get sick when sweating a lot and just drinking plain water plus avoiding salt. You can see it in people running in a marathon or riding a bicycle 100 miles on a hot day.
However regular Diet Coke has pretty much sodium/salt in it.
The only explanation I can think of for why children might not develop correctly would be some sort of strange mineral deficiency caused by the mother having to process all the phosphoric acid in soft drinks.
Based on the cause of death, cardiac arrest, it seems that either electrolyte imbalance or caffeine toxicity (does caffeine accumulate in the body if you consume large amounts over time?) were the main factors. The sugar itself probably not, unless she was enormously obese (10 liters of Coke has 4,000 calories, twice the recommended daily intake). I doubt that artificial sweeteners would be toxic at such dosages as well; they are tested at levels far higher than anybody could reasonably consume them in (unless you ate it in concentrated form); I know that aspartame would only be toxic if you had a genetic defect (and then pretty much all protein-containing foods, many with much higher levels of phenylalanine, would be off-limits).