Nondiscriminatory Cola Drinking or It Depends on How You Look at Things
There are so many examples in life where we need to have a broader perspective to see the good in difficult situations just like how people’s preferences for cola brands depends on how much volume of the colas they’re drinking. So let’s not swear off certain possibilities because maybe we just haven’t been looking at our current situation in a creative enough view.
You might consider me disloyal for saying it, but I’m pretty much a nondiscriminatory diet cola drinker. I mean, I certainly prefer the branded version like Coke, Pepsi, Rite, etc to the generic grocery store brands, but when it comes to the Coke or Pepsi feuds, I draw my allegiance pretty squarely down the middle.
Growing up, my family certainly preferred Diet Coke. And I enjoy that well enough. But now that I’m solidly in the adult camp and can choose for myself, I like both for different reasons. And I’m so happy to say that science actually agrees with me on that approach with cola drinking.
Starting in the 1980’s Pepsi challenged Coke to taste testing contests. You know the drill: experimenters have various identical cups that they ask testers to sip on with a blindfold on and then rate which they prefer. And guess what happened? It turned out that people preferred Pepsi over Coke.
We can imagine the dilemma that Coke must have been in with this revelation. Here is scientific proof that people prefer Pepsi to Coke. Some researchers believed that it might have been because Pepsi has about 5% more sugar than Coke. That’s when Coke started testing with the “New Coke” which was a total flop.
What some clever researchers did next though, was to look into the experimental design. And what they discovered was that people only preferred Pepsi in small doses like when sip out of small cups for testing purposes. So, the debate could resume without a whole lot of definitive proof for any overall preferences between the two battling colas.
But there’s a broader allegory we can draw from this story. Sometimes things we label as bad or undesirable can be exactly what we need in certain circumstances. The prospect of having our chests cut open, our hearts being put on a bypass system, and adjusting major blood vessels would make absolutely no sense unless we knew we needed heart surgery. The thought of running 30-40 miles per week, taking ice baths to sooth aching muscles and joints, wearing out expensive shoes, and taking hundreds of hours of our precious time, might seem ridiculously inappropriate unless we are training for a marathon.
There are so many examples in life where we need to have a broader perspective to see the good in difficult situations just like how people’s preferences for cola brands depends on how much volume of the colas they’re drinking. So let’s not swear off certain possibilities because maybe we just haven’t been looking at our current situation in a creative enough view.