Ball State University has a very heterogeneous community, made up of people with all kinds of backgrounds from all over the country. And when you get this many different people and put them together in a single community, there are bound to be arguments and discrepancies.
There are many points of view and debates that rage all over campus every day, many of them based on differences in backgrounds and cultural heritage. Of those arguments, there is one especially heated argument to which we will probably never see the end: Is it "pop" or is it "soda?" The Ball State community will most likely never be able to see eye-to-eye on this crucial issue.
But whatever you call it, it's about to get a lot healthier. Both Coca-Cola and Pepsi have announced that within the year, they are both releasing "healthy" versions of their products.
What? Do you mean to say that Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi weren't as healthy as originally thought?
The new products being released by Coke and Pepsi, to be called Diet Coke Plus and Tava, respectively, are being promoted as "vitamin and mineral-fortified sparkling beverages."
These companies aren't calling them "pop" or "soda." They're not even calling them soft drinks. In marketing, they're referring to these drinks almost as if they were the antidote for the poison that is Coca-Cola Classic.
The soft drink industry is a multi-billion dollar operation, but they've recently been under heavy scrutiny because people are pointing fingers at them in regards to rising levels of American obesity.
Both Coke and Pepsi released diet versions of their drinks in the early eighties, but according to the American Obesity Association's data, obesity has been steadily on the rise ever since the association started collecting data in 1976.
This means that diet soda has done absolutely nothing to hamper the rising obesity rates in our country. If soda is the reason that people become obese, and diet soda is meant to counteract that notion, we should have seen a massive dip in obesity levels around 1983. But diet soda isn't impacting the health-conscious community; it's not making a difference at all.
So Coke and Pepsi think that by releasing these new brands of soda that are fortified with vitamins and minerals, they'll start gaining some of their customers back who have recently switched to bottled water and tea. But what the soda companies are failing to realize is that it doesn't matter what's in the drink; it's how the drink tastes.
It's like Flintstones vitamins when we were growing up. There could have been iron, calcium, or even arsenic in a purple Barney Rubble for all we knew, but we didn't care - we liked the vitamins because they tasted good. And that's why Americans drink soda: because everyone can enjoy it, because it's acceptable in nearly every social setting and most importantly because it tastes good. Soda isn't supposed to be healthy: that's why it's soda, and that's why we drink it.
And that's why marketing soda as healthy doesn't really make sense. And who knows - maybe Diet Coke Plus and Tava really will be the magic elixir that promotes good health and lowers obesity levels. But it doesn't really matter, because in the end, it isn't the product or the marketing or the corporations that determine good health. The decisions of the consumer do.
Call me crazy, but it seems like marketing vitamin and mineral-enriched sodas is as inane as selling a clear version of Pepsi that looks and tastes like Karo syrup or a blue version of Pepsi that looks and tastes like Windex.
Write to Paul at pjmetz@bsu.edu
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