“You can definitely tell the difference between real sugar and substitutes in soft drinks.”

If you were a real dork, you’d distinguish between beet and cane sugar, too.

Bottom line, the two (sugar and HFCS) are essentially equivalent in nutrition/health, but for numerous reasons (and I’m on the engineering/production side, NOT sales ), corn syrup is cheaper than sugar.

Alex Jones on HFCS towards the end.

This is politics. Anytime you see a DVD, documentary, read an article that is terribly damning of anything – you can almost be sure that (1) certain facts have been omitted (2) the competitor of the industry being thrown under the bus stands to gain and is behind it all.

So what if Pepsi Throwback is made with natural sugar?!?! It’s still not good for you. It’s not suddenly a health food.

So what

You are about to be crushed by a giant ADM corn…”

Wasn’t Chuck upgraded this year… What was wrong with old Chuck?

Pepsi Throwback has been out for a while. It used to come in dark blue packaging instead of the new “old” design.

It’s one thing to say “Our old way was crap, we’ve changed” another to say “Our new, temporary way is great! But our old, not as great way, will be back soon!”

Remember that the whole New Coke – bring back old Coke was nothing more than a way for the bottler to get rid of sugar and give us corn syrup back in 1985 without people protesting about the formula being changed. You’ve had 25 years of corn syrup in your drinks versus that sugar stuff.

Now, Pepsi, it can be very different depending on where you go. In some countries it’s sweeter, in others a bit more tart. I’ve been to some places where it’s just a bit different tasting than the US, others where I would have guessed it was generic cola or an old Tab or something.

In the US, I generally only drink Pepsi if it’s cans and bottles but tend to prefer fountain Coke in restaurants. Outside the US, I tend to stick with Coke since I know what it will taste like, even though in US the only time I’ll drink a can or bottle of Coke is if Pepsi or good old RC Cola isn’t available.

So there’s my .02 on sodas, written on a site talking about TV. I feel ashamed for having nothing better to do this afternoon than actually writing this up.

I’d pay a premium price for it. Wish they’d leave it on the shelves permanently.

But you have a point about the marketing – it would be like NBC’s new fall campaign being “Now with compelling characters and well-written scripts!”

“Picking up where Super Size Me left off, King Corn examines America’s health woes through the multifaceted lens of one humble grain. Director Aaron Woolf and co-writers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis offer irrefutable proof that the US is virtually drowning in the stuff. Corn meal, corn starch, hydrologized corn protein, and high fructose corn syrup fuel a multitude of products, from soft drinks to hamburgers. The starchy vegetable grows with ease and government subsidies insure over-abundant production. Woolf documents the 11-month effort of college friends Cheney and Ellis, who trace their ancestry to the same small Iowa town, to raise their own crop. After finding a farmer willing to lend them an acre, they meet with agronomists, historians, and other experts before plowing, seeding, and spraying. Prior to harvesting, the easygoing Yale grads travel to Colorado to compare the grass-fed cattle of yore with today’s corn-fed counterparts; then to New York to explore the links between corn syrup, obesity, and diabetes. With assistance from author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), a whimsical score, and stop-motion animation–farm toys and corn kernels–Woolf and associates bring biochemistry to vivid life. On a micro level, this genial eye-opener celebrates friends and farmers; on a macro level, King Corn bemoans the subsidies and genetic modifications that have turned a formerly protein-filled product into the fatty “yellow dent no. 2.” Bonus features include a music video, photo gallery, and “The Lost Basement Lectures,” an amusingly fake instructional movie about the aims of agriculture. –Kathleen C. Fennessy”

some dork, my understanding is that it is not the “corn lobby” but the “sugar lobby” that limits sugar imports, and keeps sugar prices high and prices it out of the soft drink use.

I studied abroad in an East Asian country a couple of years ago, where they lack FDA-style regulations and the corn lobby. You can definitely tell the difference between real sugar and substitutes in soft drinks. When I returned to the states, all U.S. soft drinks tasted rather bland.