I hate diet soda but I love Coca-Cola. There I said it. There are few wines that I would take at any given moment over a fountain Coke. I refuse Pepsi. I also love Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb and in a sinful way crave Strawberry Nehi. I guess I'm biased but I'd rather have more calories than mystery-sweetener-substitutes.

I am all in support of legislation that would regulate diets in school. I think it should frankly be a core part of early education. I don't necessarily extend that regulation to our everyday lives. That said, here is a lovely chart that shows the caloric consumption after adding a 'sugar tax' to sugar-sweetened beverages. It seems like a Diet Soda subsidy.

Here's a link to the USDA study and here's the chart from the Business Insider. More after the jump.

The rationale for the tax is that we are a fat country. In the efforts to reduce calories we'll cut out the soda by making it more expensive. It seems simple enough. But can we really point to specific health issues that are tied to soda that wouldn't be also tied to excessive fruit juices? Or Doritos? Or even Snickers? etc.

Cigarettes tax makes sense. There doesn't seem to be any adjacent substances that would be substituted.

What would be the subs for soda? Aside from fruit juice which is just as sugary and can have just as many calories, diet soda springs to mind as the big winner here. Just what we need. Another reason to consume more fake food.

There was just a report about how diet soda triggers your brain. From EARLY 2008 ABC News' medical contributor Dr. Marie Savard says:

Anything you put in your mouth, your body has a strong reaction to it.
It's much more than counting calories. It seems normally with sweet
foods that we rev up our metabolism."

But diet soda does more than potentially fake out your brain, It can deplete your calcium levels. I find it amusing that there are so many calcium supplements shilled to the aging diet-soda-drinking women. (Think unsurpassed-absorbtion). According to the editor of MedPageToday:

Drinking too many diet soft drinks may result in a negative calcium
balance, a marker of low bone mineral density, researchers here
reported.

So are we solving a problem by taxing soda or are we avoiding the issue and remaining the uninformed, spoon-fed consumers that big-business tells us to be.

Seems like a diet-soda-subsidy.