Uncola 100 Percent Un-Artificial? Unlikely!

Here’s an SMNO from November 2006. Hope you like it; it’s a little bit of a change of pace from what I’ve been writing about lately. A needed change of pace, according to some of the email I’ve been getting. (Paul- I would like to call your attention to the facts that the sun is shining, daffodils are blooming, I’ve had a good night’s sleep, a haircut and a day off. You can’t easily depress me today!) I’m taking the rest of the night off.

7UP picked from trees; more cans of 7UP stacked up next to fresh fruit in the supermarket. That’s what you see while someone says, “we’ve stripped out all the artificial stuff. Now it’s just five all-natural ingredients.” There are lots of lemons and limes in these new TV ads for 7UP, rolling all over the place. I haven’t had a 7UP in a while; I had to have one now. The label on the bottle has a couple of slices of the citrus fruit, along with a banner (“Now 100% Natural”) and a stripe on the bottom of the label saying “More Crisp, Refreshing 7UP Taste!” The bottle was tinted green. The “Uncola” inside was clear as ever.

It was also clear that there were no actual lemons or limes in the new formula. At the top of the Nutrition Facts table were the words “CONTAINS NO JUICE.” The label lists the five “natural” ingredients: Filtered carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, natural citric acid, natural flavors, natural potassium citrate. Naturally, I was curious. Natural citric acid and natural flavor… but contains no juice? Maybe all the lemons and limes encourage a placebo effect, because it sure tasted citrusy.

The 7UP website, which features an annoying rabbit and is inundated by lemons and limes (they’ve got to go somewhere, since they’re not in the soda), had a FAQ for people like me. (FAQ is supposed to stand for “Frequently Asked Questions” and, for the last time, is pronounced ‘fack’. That rhymes with ‘rack’. If you are put on a rack, you are frequently asked questions.) Like many FAQs on corporate websites, the questions were probably not asked by real people. They’re part of the advertising campaign, anticipated by the marketing team.

The FAQ explains what the makers of 7UP have done, and why. They’ve removed the flavor preservative Calcium Disodium EDTA, and replaced sodium citrate with “natural” potassium citrate (this regulates acidity “to help provide optimal flavor” and reduces sodium content by about 50%). Why? To sell more soda and/or lower the cost of making it, of course, but the FAQ says they’ve done it because their customers “wanted a carbonated soft drink with no artificial ingredients.” Also, their customers “wanted a carbonated soft drink with natural ingredients.” Is there a difference? Anyone who refers to soda as a “carbonated soft drink” is going to be very specific about what’s “natural” or “artificial.” Or maybe it’s the same people who asked those FAQs. Let’s see if either group is satisfied with the new formula.

We’ll start with “natural citric acid”, which doesn’t come from lemons or limes. Cargill, a major supplier of citric acid, has a product fact sheet that explains: “Cargill Citric Acid Anhydrous is manufactured under ISO 9002 registration by a submerged fermentation process from a glucose carbohydrate substrate.” Wikipedia (not a perfect research tool, but helpful for research of this nature) explained the industrial production process this way: “Cultures of Aspergillus niger are fed on sucrose to produce citric acid. After the mold is filtered out of the resulting solution, citric acid is isolated by precipitating it with lime (not the citrus fruit, but calcium hydroxide) to yield calcium citrate salt, from which citric acid is regenerated by treatment with sulfuric acid.” I’m no chemist, but if citric acid is what comes out of fungus when you feed it, it must be a natural ingredient.

For the source of “natural” potassium citrate, I went to www.ecama.org. ECAMA is the European Citric Acid Manufacturers Association. Potassium citrate “is produced by neutralizing citric acid with potassium hydroxide.” Who better to do that than the guys who make the citric acid?

I am not going to try to explain the high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) manufacturing process. Natural or not, HFCS has been replacing cane or beet sugar in our manufactured food and beverages. That’s because it’s cheaper to produce; it’s a liquid, so it’s easier to mix; and it has a longer shelf-life. Those properties make it very attractive for food manufacturers.

Studies have shown that when your body processes glucose, it releases hormones that make you feel full; that doesn’t happen when your body processes fructose, so you keep eating. That’s also attractive to food manufacturers.

Other studies indicate that when your body processes fructose, it produces more triglycerides (a risk factor for heart disease) and LDL cholesterol (the bad one) while increasing insulin resistance (a factor in developing diabetes). Those things can kill you, but not right away, and in the meantime you’ll be eating more. And that is very attractive to food manufacturers.

HFCS contains a combination of fructose and sucrose, so this becomes the food chemistry equivalent of the global warming debate, and we lose track of the fact that your can of soda has 12 teaspoons of sugar in it.

“Natural flavors” as an ingredient in a product that “CONTAINS NO JUICE” is a concept that is going to take more than Wikipedia for me to understand. And it’s possible that some of the fruit or soda cans growing on trees in the TV ads were computer generated. Ultimately, whether the new 7UP is natural, un-artificial, or artificially natural is only going to be important to people who think of it as a “carbonated soft drink.”

7UP started out as “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda” and they’ve been taking stuff out of it, and advertising it for what it’s not, ever since. In 1950, they took the lithium citrate out of the formula (“You asked for a carbonated soft drink with no mood stabilizers – and we listened!”) This is, after all, the Uncola. There’s far less bad stuff in 7UP than in other sodas, and I feel a little better about enjoying a 7UP than, say, a Mountain Dew. Ideally, with a couple of scoops of vanilla ice cream.