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Under Size Me
Those new
8-ounce pop cans
by Hal Higdon
Does it say something about fitness in America that the greatest nutritional gimmick is the addition by Pepsi Cola to its product line of 8-ounce cans?
How long has this been going on? I just spotted these miniature cans in the grocery store last week. They were so small and cute, perched on a low shelf in the soft drink aisle, I almost rolled past them with my cart chuck full of chips and dips. I thought the trend in America, as documented in Morgan Spurlock's Oscar-nominated documentary film, Super Size Me, was for everything to get bigger and bigger and bigger--including our waistlines.
Small, as a size, hardly exists any more. Visit some coffee shops these days and the smallest cup of coffee you can order is Large. Or in the trendier shops, Grande´ with an accent.
Maybe the super sizing trend finally has reversed itself. If Spurlock is looking for a theme for his next film, it could be Under Size Me. Eight ounces is a third smaller than Pepsi's traditional 12-ounce size and way under the 20-ounce cans, which are about all you can find these days in convenience stores.
Antique pop bottles
But I come from an era when Coca-Cola came
in 6-ounce bottles: green, ribbed, classically shaped, the kind you see now
only on Antique Road Show. Seven-Up originally got its name, because
it defiantly went one ounce up from Coke; Pepsi attacked its Atlanta-based rival
by advertising "Bigger Drink. Better Taste." I still remember the lyrics from
the advertising jingle, first broadcast in 1940:
Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,
Twelve full ounces, that's a lot,
Twice as much for a nickel too.
Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.
And we bought the jingle's message. The more ravenous among us chose Pepsi over Coke, because, mea culpa, it did offer twice as much for our not-yet-inflated five cents. A discriminating few selected Hires Root Beer, which, if my memory serves correctly, utilized 10-ounce bottles. Vegetarians mostly. Some people just hate to swim in the main stream. Twenty-ounce bottles? Nobody could drink that much sweetened water.
But in today's fragmented soft drink market, there may be no main stream, particularly with the popularity of Gatorade and other so-called replacement drinks, the health faddist's equivalent of Pinot Noir. Super sizing, thus, may be less a marketing advantage if you want to attract to your product us health hip consumers with our delightful demographics for whom diet drinks will never do it.
Left in the fridge
Athletes all, we want our carbohydrates, simple or complex. Pepsi One? Does it really have only 1 calorie, or is that marketing hype? If you read the label, a 20-ounce bottle of Pepsi One actually must contain 2.5 calories. How about calling it Pepsi Two-Point-Five? Unless I've just come in from a 20-mile run, I can never finish those 20-ounce bottles. I encounter them in the refrigerator days after they have been opened: dark, flat, tasteless, as appetizing as cough syrup. Eccchhh! I remember a variation of that jingle we used to sing:
Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,
Makes you vomit in the pot,
Twice as much for a nickel too.
Libelous lyrics aside, I finally have a drink I can finish, a portion that, in fact, leaves me a little thirsty. Only a hundred calories too. A mile's worth of running. You have to run more than two miles to undo the nutritional damage done by a 250-calorie 20-ounce bottle.
As long as I'm on a calorie-cutting roll, I probably should push my cart over to the candy bar aisle and buy a box of miniature Snickers bars, the kind you offer kids on Halloween. I need to undersize everything about my eating habits if I want to maintain good health.
Hal Higdon, a Contributing Editor for Runner's World, eats junk food so he can run junk miles.
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