On Diet Cola

I have always loved diet cola. From the tall, cold, thin glass bottles of childhood, it was a special treat at times of leisure. Going to summer camps during the high school years, I noted that college dormitory cafeterias routinely feature a soft drink fountain; it was my first inkling of the incredible license of grown up life in which, to an amazing extent, you can have as much as you want of almost anything.

My relationship with diet cola only reached its full flower, however, when I worked the graveyard shift at a convenience store for two years during college. The only perk of that job was full access to the soda fountain, and you can imagine that the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift involved a lot of caffeine use. Complicating things, the store was across the street from our squalid little apartment, so I was for better or worse able to caffeinate myself through the rest of my waking hours as well. When I finally quit that job, the withdrawal headaches went all the way down to my calves.

Here's how caffeine works: the individual caffeine molecules move easily through the blood-brain barrier, and within the brain they tamper with the system that regulates fatigue. When you burn energy, one of the waste chemicals from the expended ATP (our basic biofuel) stimulates inhibiting chemicals in the brain. This makes sense -- you burn energy, and then you get sleepy. What caffeine does is elbow its way into the neural receptors that detect this chemical. This means that neurons never get the message that fuel is being burned, the inhibiting chemicals never get secreted, and you don't get sleepy. It's a marvelous feeling, as you know.

The problem with this, as with most psychoactive chemicals, is that once the caffeine goes away -- it has a half-life in the body of around four hours -- you miss it. The neural receptors go back to pumping out the inhibiting chemicals, except they pump out more than they did before, and you are more sensitive to them now. And, if you have become a habitual caffeine user, it will take around seven to ten days for your body to return to its natural equilibrium. Seven to ten days in which you will be painfully conscious of the lack of caffeine in your blood.

In 1994, I stopped drinking caffeine in response to a medical crisis, and was fanatically free of the stuff for the next seven years. Returning to office work, however -- and then, having that office move to a new building next door to a convenience store -- has completely undone me. I have long since fully returned to the diet cola fold.

When I talk about this subject with people, they will often want to know whether I am more of a "Diet Coke Man" or a "Diet Pepsi Man." This question represents the triumph of marketing, for there is really no meaningful distinction of taste between the two or any of their smaller competitors. I hold this truth to be self-evident. If you take the proverbial "Pepsi Challenge" and emerge with a decided preference, even a maven like myself can tell you that you are paying far too much attention to your cola beverage.

I never touch the regular, non-diet stuff, by the way. Despite that I have a real sweet tooth in solid foods, the sugar content in a regular soft drink hits me like a bomb, making me lethargic and feeling swollen up tightly within my skin. I figured this out when I was 14 or so, and have avoided the stuff since.

At this point, perhaps we should discuss the question of scale. I drink more cola than the typical person. People often see me with one of my cola cups and ask "do you drink one of those every day?" Well, no. I drink two of those every day. At least. And the cups are 44 ounces in size, meaning that I am drinking the equivalent of a six-pack and a half of those old glass bottles, every day.

Now to a certain extent, this is just no big deal. Cola is mostly water, and the common-knowledge idea that this water somehow "doesn't count" is risible; even the medical establishment has finally been admitting in the last few years that water is pretty much water. Nor is the acid in cola capable of eroding coins (I have experimented extensively with this, thank you); nor would this matter much since it is destined in any event for the acid pit of the stomach. And, although there are some lingering questions about aspartame, I have reviewed the literature on this inert, supersweet protein and come away with no more reservations about putting it in my body than I have about, say, cheese (something else I arguably consume too much of).

On the other hand, drinking this much cola can't help. Can it? And, two bucks a day does become hundreds of bucks over a year, even if I usually buy cola with my pocket change to hide the expense from myself. (I remind myself, too, how much cheaper it is than a coffee habit!) And, there's something uncomfortable about the feeling of need, the feeling that I will be highly aware of it if I choose NOT to have a cola.

Could I make it the seven to ten days required to lick a caffeine habit? Sure I could. It would be uncomfortable, but I could do it. In fact, I have on a few occasions, most recently last year. I went around with my 44 ounce cups full of pure tap water for around a month. And then I backslid. Why I backslid is an interesting question. It might have to do with my constant attempt to squeeze as much time awake as possible out of every day, of course. It might have to do with the pleasant commercial aspect of the habit, the mind-clearing, routine-interrupting, social ritual of walking to the soda fountain where I will, often as not, be greeted cordially by a familiar face behind the cash register. Or, it might have to do with one of those open questions about aspartame: does it have a mild addictive quality of its own, with a longer duration of withdrawal than caffeine?

Addiction is generally thought to be bad, and there is certain obvious logic to having as few strings attached to your person as possible. As addictions go, though, you could make a case that caffeine is a rather innocuous one, easily beating out major competitors such as alcohol, meth, heroin, tobacco, religious hysteria, and sex with strangers. And I often recall the question a buddy asked me a few years ago: "Do you still enjoy drinking it?" My unhesitating answer was clearly not the one he was expecting: "Absolutely. It’s delicious and refreshing, every time."

So, those are the thoughts that knock around in my head about my beloved, but not beloved, diet cola. And they provoke the obvious questions:

1. Should I quit?

2. Why?

3. If so, how should I quit?