DYNOMIGHT best Underrated reasons to be thankful Plans you're not supposed to talk about Better air is the easiest way not to die Bourdieu's theory of taste: a grumbling abrégé Grug on diet soda and autism I don't like NumPy topics AI air bourdieu computer conspiracy data discourse economics effort experiment forecasting health history life lists math philosophy policy psychology random science writing follow RSS mastodon bluesky substack go about Two conspiracy theories about cola dynomight · updated Aug 2022 · conspiracy Phosphoric acid Our first conspiracy theory has all the best qualities: It sounds insane. At first, the facts seem to support it. Later, the facts lead to disquieting reevaluations of the medical system. So here’s the conspiracy: “Cola has so much sugar in it that you’d throw up from drinking it, except they add an anti-vomiting drug to stop that from happening.” Fact #1: Phosphoric acid is the active ingredient in some over-the-counter anti-nausea drugs. The common brand name here is Emetrol, but generic equivalents are everywhere too. Fact #2: Cola contains phosphoric acid. Nothing controversial here, it’s right on the label. My first thought when I saw this was that, OK, cola has phosphoric acid. But surely it has much less than the drugs. Well… Fact #3: Cola has just as much phosphoric acid as anti-nausea drugs do. The drugs contain 64.6 mg of phosphoric acid in a small dose and twice that in a large dose. This is easy to calculate given the information on the label above and the fact that the recommended dose is 15-30 mL. Cola probably contains something like 200 mg per can. This isn’t trivial to figure out. I estimated it in two ways, which I trust only because they give similar answers: Random internet people claim that Coke is around 0.055% phosphoric acid. This suggests that a standard 382 g can has 210 mg. This paper says that a single can of Coke contains 58mg of phosphorus, and this leaflet from Coca-Cola Hellenic gives a similar number. Meanwhile, the chemical formula for phosphoric acid is H3PO4. Since the molecular weights for hydrogen (H), phosphorus (P), and oxygen (O), are 1.01, 16.0, and 30.97, each unit of phosphorus should convert to (1.01×3 + 30.97 + 16 × 4)/30.97 = 3.16 units of phosphoric acid. So a can of Coke should have around 58mg × 3.16 = 183 mg of phosphoric acid. Dose Sugar Phosphoric Acid Emetrol (small dose) 11.22 g 64.5 mg Emetrol (large dose) 22.44 g 129 mg Coke (one can) 39 g ~200 mg Interestingly, even the ratio of phosphoric acid to sugar is almost the same (around 5.5 mg phosphoric acid / g sugar). What’s the catch? If Emetrol is just a more expensive and worse-tasting cola, why does every pharmacy everywhere sell it? Well, if you think that’s disturbing, keep reading. Fact #4: You wouldn’t throw up if the phosphoric acid wasn’t there. You can just try it. A can of cola has 39 grams of sugar (10 teaspoons), and around 350 ml of water. I measured these out into two glasses, which looked like this: After mixing these up, the result was very sweet, but all members of House Dynomight—sometimes after a lot of encouragement—drank some without feeling the slightest bit ill. Apple juice has just as much sugar as cola. Non-cola soft drinks have citric acid instead of phosphoric acid. (As do some diet colas.) Obviously, people drink these without vomiting. Root beer, it turns out, has neither phosphoric nor citric acid. For this reason root beer has a higher pH than other soft drinks and probably isn’t as bad for your teeth. Fact #5: There’s no evidence that these anti-nausea drugs actually do anything. The Mayo Clinic simply states that the combination of sugar and phosphoric acid “has not been proven to be effective”. Puzzling. Or, you can go to the NIH’s information page on different versions of the drug: Emetrol Cherry CVS’s version Kroger’s version Walgreen’s version All of these state: Marketing Status: unapproved drug other DISCLAIMER: This drug has not been found by FDA to be safe and effective, and this labeling has not been approved by FDA. For further information about unapproved drugs, click here. Don’t click there, it’s useless. But here’s the history: The FDA was created in 1906, but only gained the authority to approve drugs with the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. However, this only gave authority to approve new drugs, and only said that they needed to be tested for safety. It wasn’t until 1962 that the law was amended to require that new drugs be tested for effectiveness. As far as I can tell, drugs like Emetrol can be sold because (a) they’re grandfathered in because they’ve been around forever, and (b) phosphoric acid is generally recognized as safe meaning the FDA thinks it’s unlikely to be harmful. It’s in all sorts of food like almonds, beer, bread, and jams. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no evidence at all that these drugs have any effect other than placebo. (Though, of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of abse...