How To Dissolve A Nail
INTRODUCTION
Hello! I hope this electronic transmission finds you neutrally, or perhaps, even goodly. It is I, Geosmin Jones — I cosplay a talking molecule in an utterly ascientific way on Threads. I have no desire to reveal my real identity to you — I’d rather you engaged with my content critically by animatedly harassing me and my arguments in the replies instead. Contrary to my presence on Threads, this will be a primarily scientific stream of content, largely focused on the realm of organic chemistry and the various ways in which it intersects with our lives. The way I see it, one of the most to-the-point ways for me to pursue this goal is by disambiguating the ingredients lists of various household products. In my many misadventures in trying to be a serious science account in an unserious place, one of the most common types of questions I encountered was, “is [compound] in my [food/drink/soap] actually dangerous?” Painfully, the answer was most often no, what the hell, who did this to you, did they have a name? What the hell is going on here. How did this happen, you know? I mean, Jesus. So, that’s really what this blog is going to be about. 99% of the time, these compounds are completely benign, and you are going to be reminded to simply moderate your intake. That’s… kind of boring, so I’ll be taking lots of detours along the lines of relating chemistry to your everyday life that should make the whole endeavour more worthwhile.
As you may be able to ascertain by now, the subject of this particular blogpost is the ingredients of common soda beverages. I began writing this post while sitting in my mother’s kitchen, and we are a big Coca-Cola family. If they created a rewards program, well, we wouldn’t save much — it’s not about frequency or quantity of purchase here, it’s about heart — but our loyalty would be well-represented, I can say that much. To provide fodder for this post, I took the ingredients lists for:
Coca-Cola Classic
Sprite Classic
Fresca (Sugar-Free)
And I then sorted by their parent beverage. The output looked like this:
You should probably not be surprised to find out that all three beverages feature carbonation, but you may be surprised to find out that all three are “naturally” flavored. The next section concerning flavors and textures will explore how this is possible. I will then explore the sweeteners used among the three beverages, with a considerable amount of time dedicated to the process for and history of high-fructose corn syrup and the colonial sweetener that came before it. After that, a detail of the various preservatives found in all of these beverages will offer a less-wordy reprieve from the previous corn-laden rant; and I will conclude with a veritable aggregate of information on the oddballs that are not easily categorized into the above three sections. This will be a fairly lengthy post — despite appearing unusual in language, these ingredients are all some of the most common ingredients in food and beverage products, period, and you’ll come to find that nigh all of them earned their place there fair and square.
Which is pretty haunting, I’m sure. I promise, it haunts me too — but it’ll be interesting, and where it isn’t interesting, I will pull some historical thread to make it interesting again. The goal is to educate you on chemicals, and such a daunting task requires — well, first and foremost, it requires a remarkably dense skull — but it also requires the ability to be a bit of an oddball yourself to give people a reason to actually pay attention. Please bear with me; it’s all on purpose, to an extent.
To conclude our introduction, I’d like to share one parting gift with you:
That’s right, folks. That’s what we’re up against. Coca-Cola is 90% water, and 10% other stuff. As far as solutions go, that’s a lot of other stuff, and I intend to disambiguate as much of it as possible. As I said above, we’ll jump in with flavors and textures.
FLAVORS, TEXTURES, and BUFFERS — OH MY!
Let’s get the boring parts out of the way first. Carbonated water is seltzer water — it’s water with carbon dioxide added, for bubbles. As the linked wikipedia page would inform you, it was historically acquired in its carbonated form from mineral water springs producing — you guessed it — carbonated water. This spring water commonly had other minerals in it — for example, sodium bicarbonate, bicarbonate being the hydrated form of carbon dioxide that it occupies while dissolved in water — and these are commonly added back to artificial seltzer waters to mimic the natural spring flavor profile. At least, that’s how Wikipedia sums it up — in even less words, the addition of the other components creates a buffered solution that resists changes in acidity when acidic (or basic!) components are added. This is a very useful thing — in fact, it is a bicarbonate buffer system that works to maintain the acidity of your own blood within the extremely narrow ranges required for proper biochemical functioning, and it is very good at its job. Harkening back to the original topic of this paragraph, you should now see why “carbonated water” is called that — when you add “carbon dioxide” to water, what you really add is bicarbonate.
As for why this is in there? Well, some people like carbonated stuff, I hear. Additionally, it is likely acting as a gentle buffer for some of the more harsh-on-pH ingredients that are included in all three beverages.
I won’t dig into “Grapefruit Juice” because I have even less to add on that subject, but I will mention that the interactions between grapefruit juice and drug metabolism do still apply to Fresca, just in a reduced capacity. Do not use this as a workaround to the effects of bromocoumarins on cytochrome P450 enzymes — this interaction is too serious for me to discuss in this article. Just don’t. As for why it’s in there, well, it tastes good.
Natural Flavors
For some specific information, I’ll be turning to this 2014 paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (cites: 16, JIF = 5.7 in 2023) that was linked in the body of the Wikipedia page on the Coca-Cola Formula. More often than not, chemically-unmodified natural flavors are essential oils, volatile hydrocarbons that constitute the aroma of living organisms like plants and fungi. This paper lists potent aromatics found in the analyzed colas for that reason — it’s trying to get a hint as to what the natural flavors actually are. Based on the abstract of this paper, we can plainly state that eugenol (cloves, most economic from nutmeg) and coumarin (vanilla) are found in Coca-Cola.
The rest of this information on the aroma content of common colas is taken from a… “borrowed” version of the pre-print manuscript of the 2014 paper. Repeat at your own risk, I offer it here only to raise awareness of the health benefits of “borrowing” papers.
As for lighter (by potency) notes, guiacol (smokey aroma) was noted as a substantial component of both Coca-Cola and Pepsi, while linalool was noted as prevalent in both Coca-Cola and RC Cola. 1,8-cineol, implicated in the aroma of cinnamon, was also found to be a highly potent aroma in most colas. The authors note that the most abundant terpenes by concentration — limonene to name one, you may have heard of her — were nowhere near the most potent aromatics due to their degradation by the acid content of the soda.
As you may expect, public fervor surrounding the Secret Formula™ of both Sprite and Fresca occurs at a markedly reduced pitch. This has left very little specific sources on the two sodas, but I trust the previous paragraphs have given you a blueprint as to how that question would look answered — they’re probably using lemon/orange/grapefruit peel extracts. Given the acid-sensitivity of limonene, the most distinct citrus-y aromatic, this probably explains why the gentler citric acid is used in Sprite and Fresca as opposed to the phosphoric acid used in Coca-Cola.
To conclude this section, I wanted to mention some additional useful info on ‘natural flavors’ writ large — according to a Sigma-Aldrich bulleitin on navigating the Natural Flavors label, minor chemical transformations of raw natural flavorings do not render a natural flavoring “artificial,” and would still qualify for labeling as “Natural Flavors.” This is how compounds like ethylvanillin can still end up in a product listed as containing only natural flavors.
SWEETENERS — OR, MOUTHFEEL?
We’ll start with the Big Guns — that’s right, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). I think this is a somewhat-unfairly maligned ingredient, and there’s not much else to say except to begin the really annoying biochemistry breakdown on why this is the case.
At a very high level of abstraction, HFCS is produced from corn starch. A starch is simply a long, linear polymer of monosaccharides (individual carbohydrate units), and it is the preferred carbohydrate storage solution of the plant kingdom of life (us animals prefer glycogen for the same purpose). The main “issue” with starch is that when monosaccharides — which are almost universally sweet-tasting when present in their unpolymerized forms — occupy that polymerized form, they are tasteless. A manufacturing process is required to break the linkages between the monosaccharides and create a sweet-tasting syrup — however, the process used does not resemble one that typically leads to an uninformed fervor aiming to declare the novel product a synthetic horror.
The raw corn starch product is first treated with alpha-amylase, which shortens the long chains of carbohydrates in starch, and then with gamma-amylase, which severs the individual bonds between the monosaccharides. The resulting monosaccharides are nearly universally glucose, as that is the preferred monosaccharide for sequestering into big polymers like this. Alpha-amylase is the form of amylase found in your saliva, and gamma-amylase is the form of amylase found on the brush border of your intestinal wall. Over the course of these two steps, all that has happened to our corn starch is exactly what happens to it when you eat it. The next three steps involve a series of filtrations to remove impurities, and then the purified solution is run over solid-state xylose isomerase — yet another enzyme found in your own body, with a bit more of a boring role — which converts glucose in the solution to fructose in a manner that doesn’t require the investment of energy (where my Glycolysisheads at??) in the form of ATP. While this isn’t quite the most recognizable enzyme performing in-whole-or-in-part this role in your body, it’s still, like, one of them — and yes, there are several, because it’s a vitally important thing to be able to do.
I am being obnoxious about this because the harshest “reagent” I’ve seen mentioned as involved in this process so far has been activated charcoal. Is this a synthetic sugar? …Sure. It was made in a vat that was all metal and shiny, and you saw one of those in Breaking Bad once, so we can call this a synthetic sugar. However, this is not a mystery ingredient, this isn’t likely to be a xylitol situation, and your health will suffer from consuming it in the same way it would suffer from consumption of any other “21st-century” processed-but-germane carbohydrate would: dose-dependently.
Everything in moderation, and some things in more moderation than others. As I mentioned above, interconversion between glucose and fructose is necessary all over the body — it’s one of the very first steps in “burning” glucose to energy, and ingestion of fructose directly bypasses this pathway. At least in animal models, this had substantial effects when consuming a high-fat diet:
There were no major health differences when the animals ate a standard, low-fat diet — both groups gained similar amounts of weight and had mild accumulation of fat in their livers compared to control mice drinking only water. However, the story was different in mice eating a high-fat diet. In those mice, fructose consumption caused them to have more obesity and other indicators of metabolic dysfunction (e.g., reduced tolerance to glucose, impaired insulin signaling) compared to mice drinking the same caloric levels of glucose.
The authors go on to implicate ketohexokinase in the differential responses observed. What you should take from this is that you shouldn’t drink exorbitant amounts of HFCS-sweetened sodas while also consuming exorbitant amounts of food high in fat in your diet — if you are just finding this out now, well… I’m glad you are finding out. Essentially, I’ve included all of this to show you exactly how mundane high-fructose corn starch is. Don’t get it twisted — this is a very, very modern product with a completely bonkers manufacturing process only enabled by several Nobel Prizes awarded in the last 50 years (and many more in the previous 50), but realistically speaking, it’s all been done as a way of reinventing the wheel so that the wheel wasn’t subject to domestic production quotas or import tariffs while taking advantage of domestic wheel manufacturing subsidies. For a clearer idea of what the hell that even means, let’s step back into history; just for a tad, only a tad, I promise!
The Big Switch
Sucrose — a disaccharide composed of a beta-D-fructose unit and an alpha-D-glucose unit in an a1-b2 linkage pattern — was the dominant sweetening agent used in, well, essentially anything you needed sweetened, and in certain applications still is. As the Wikipedia article on high-fructose corn syrup details, however, this compound was near-completely thrown out of the soft-beverage market upon the commercialization of HFCS — though it is notably present in Coca-Cola imported from Mexico. Sucrose itself is probably better known as “table sugar,” as evidenced by the fact that a google search for “table sugar” leads you most directly to the Wikipedia page for sucrose. If there’s a big bag of sugar in your kitchen (or your mom’s kitchen), the contents are almost certainly highly pure, crystalline sucrose. Those who have decided against skipping this section of the article will notice that they are the same constituent monosaccharides that are found in high-fructose corn syrup.
If you wanted an easy answer as to why cane sugar lost to high fructose corn syrup, the answer would be money — in the United States, it is cheaper to make HFCS + buy it for beverages than it is to do the same for cane sugar. However, as the (absolutely fantastic article about Old Coke / New Coke / Classic Coke and how the outrage was completely manufactured) linked article entails, things were never this simple. While the Old Coke / New Coke / Classic Coke outrage is often posited as being about the switch from sucrose to high-fructose corn syrup, the switch was actually quietly made a few years before Coca-Cola decided to fix a thing that wasn’t broken. While the outrage over the Old Coke / New Coke flip ended up being largely manufactured by Big Sugar (seriously, you gotta read the article), it appears that the actual Big Switch a few years earlier did upset the stomachs of many sucrose-acquainted consumers. Still, taste tests revealed little apparent sensory difference between the two sweeteners — a sensible finding considering our relatively fuzzy sense of sweetness as humans, and the biologically-familiar nature of the sweetening agents — and so HFCS, cheaper than sucrose and easily substitutable, became the dominant beverage sweetener in the United States.
As for why it is cheaper in the first place, that explanation lies with domestic corn subsidies. Agricultural subsidies for corn — essentially, non-loan funding assistance available to farmers growing a given crop — granted since 1995 were worth more than double the value of any other crop (116bil vs. 48.5bil for wheat, next-nearest). The extent to which this is unearned favoritism is unclear — the United States is the largest corn producer in the world. Not only do we have a lot of corn in need of monetary support, a lot of that corn goes to fuel ethanol (27%, though this is down from recent years), distilling operations (11%) and of course, high-fructose corn syrup (about 4%). Around a third of this corn is fed to animals. So, it stands to reason that the United States federal government can use the corn industry as a bit of an impromptu vehicle for delivering welfare, if you think like an irritating capitalist about it — by increasing subsidies for corn, you make every product produced from it cheaper, and that includes dark liquor (!! love this country), high-fat greasy meats (again, great country!! happy fourth everyone!!), and gasoline; and as much as I hate this country for making me say this, lowering the price of gas does lower the price of food across the board via savings on transporation.
Again, this is not a pro-driving blog, but this is a pro-explaining the weird, obfuscated levers of governance built into our particular government blog. Continuous insistence on the use of corn subsidies as a vehicle for economic burden relief has produced an economic situation in which producing high-fructose corn syrup from corn starch is far more economical than processing cane sugar or sugar beet, and that’s why all our soda tastes weird now.
Artificial Sweeteners
These are the two artificial sweeteners that appeared in the can of Fresca I took a picture of while still holding it in the fridge because I didn’t want anyone to see me taking a picture of the back of a can of Fresca — aspartame and acesulfame. I have omitted the “potassium” from the full name of acesulfame as that is the counterion for acesulfame and thus completely dissociated from it in liquid solution. Typically, when you see one organic compound so intricately linked to one specific counterion as you do acesulfame with potassium, there’s a reason for that, but that is outside of the bounds of this couse. Please register for SOD 653 next semester for a discussion of this as it pertains to our beloved sodie’d pops.
Aspartame is essentially a dipeptide — a linkage of two of the 24 fundamental biosynthetic amino acids — between phenylalanine and aspartate, capped by a methyl ester on the C-terminus, which is held by the phenylalanine residue. Given that I’m already roughly retracing Wikipedia’s steps here, and they say the next part the best (and funniest), I’ll give them the stage:
Aspartame is one of the most studied food additives in the human food supply.[7][8] Reviews by over 100 governmental regulatory bodies found the ingredient safe for consumption at the normal acceptable daily intake limit.[6][7][9][10][11][12][13]
When you see that many footnotes, you know the talk page went crazy. Interestingly, the balance between acidity and basicity rears its equilibrious head here once more, as aspartame is quite vulnerable to base-catalyzed hydrolysis and thus degrades rapidly at high pH — soft drinks containing it are buffered with this in mind.
The stability when dissolved in water depends markedly on pH. At room temperature, it is most stable at pH 4.3, where its half-life is nearly 300 days. At pH 7, however, its half-life is only a few days. Most soft-drinks have a pH between 3 and 5, where aspartame is reasonably stable.
Sorry for wheeling in the TV there, but it’s a pretty boring compound and I once again do not understand for the life of me what the big deal ever was. I mean, I do a little bit here — the aspartame scare was before wider public awareness of why 800x concentration petri dish studies were dogwater, and kinda contributed to it — but, still. It’s a dipeptide with a methyl ester. Do you know how much methylation occurs inside your body? We’ll be fine. It’s still, like, a drug though. Like, it’s a chemical we made up on paper to fulfill a specific biological role with no side effects when consumed at the prescribed (daily intake limited) dose. This is a synthetic substance, no matter how badly my colored-circles-analysis has misled you otherwise, and you should definitely care more about the daily intake limit of this than you would for HFCS — however, in line with what we’d expect from it being a synthetic still-stupidly-natural substance, the daily intake limit is approximately 75 packets (FDA source) of most commercially available aspartame sweeteners.
Old acesulfame — and I do mean old, discovered in 1967, it is only 1 year younger than clonidine — has roughly the same potency as aspartame with a slightly higher toxicity. However, while aspartame is still worth some calories through amino acid catabolism, acesulfame is invulnerable to metabolism in that manner, and thus confers no calories to beverages containing it. Also, by virtue of it not containing phenylalanine, individuals with phenylketonuria can consume acesulfame-sweetened beverages — and baked goods, because it is substantially more heat-resistant than aspartame. Additionally, the two are reportedly used together in many beverages (as they were in the Fresca) because of a synergistic interaction in the imparted sweetness when present together — this helps the beverage maker save significantly on purchased quantities of sweetener, as well as to bring doses down even further away from the daily intake level.
Why is any of this present in the beverage? Well, it tastes good, essentially.
PRESERVATIVES: ALTERNATIVE CANNING
It is with a heavy heart I inform you that we are reaching the end of the wordiest portion of this blog post. Phew. But first, I wanted to include a bit of an overhead note about what a conjugate base is — you’ll understand why in a minute. A conjugate base is the chemical form of an acid that has lost (“given up”) its proton, a characteristic that defines acidity itself. Similarly, the acidity of a compound in a given solution is evaluated by the proportions of its conjugate base and its acid — more conjugate base relative to the protonated acid is indicative of increased acidity, as more protons are being “given up.” In the context of these ingredients lists, the difference between a conjugate base and its related acid is miniscule — as discussed above, sodas are usually semi-complicated buffer systems, and adding conjugate base as opposed to the related acid helps fine tune the buffering activity of the solution. What that means in plain speak is that the difference between a conjugate base and the acid on the ingredients list only serves to fine tune the acidity of the solution — the effect on your health from consuming either is the exact same.
Phosphoric Acid (Coca-Cola)
Phosphoric acid, better known for the purposes of my coming paragraph as orthophosphoric acid, is a phosphorous-containing molecule where all bonds to phosphorous are also to an oxygen. It is the conjugate acid of orthophosphate, meaning that when phosphoric acid loses a proton — a chemical behavior that defines acidity, and also constitutes one of the four fundamental reaction mechanism steps — it becomes orthophosphate. In a roundabout way, the utter normality of orthophosphate’s presence in biological systems is responsible for our susceptibility to arsenic poisoning — when arsenic is in water, it is hydrated to arsenate in much the same way as carbon dioxide is hydrated to bicarbonate. The arsenate ion binds to the orthophosphate site in GAP dehydrogenase, an enzyme crucial to the metabolism of glucose in every cell in your body (and thus crucial to your ongoing living), leading to your prompt death. All this to say, orthophosphate is a very biologically familiar material! In fact, it is the hydrolysis of the bond between the second and third orthophosphate groups of ATP that generates the energy for which ATP is so widely-remembered from K-12 biology courses. To pull things full circle, know that that hydrolysis produces “ADP+ Pi” — an ATP molecule with one less phosphate, and “Pi”, which in biochemistry is shorthand for orthophosphate. GAP dehydrogenase is an efficient component of glycolysis because it uses excess orthophosphate for the phosphorylation of glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate to 1,3-BPG — any other lazy ole enzyme would be burning ATP for this purpose.
Now, as the next three members of this group are precious organic darlings, I figured I’d include yet another graphic! Woohoo! Sorry for the biochem. Please accept this as compensation, I guess.
Sodium [Na+] / Potassium [K+] Benzoate (All)
Benzoate, the conjugate base of benzoic acid, is a naturally-occurring substance that makes both an effective preservative and an effective pickling agent, likely due to the carboxylic acid functional group it shares with acetic acid — the “active ingredient” in white vinegar. It is produced by basic neutralization of benzoic acid, which is produced in the largest scales from a byproduct of refining crude oil. Do not be scared off by this statement — my serious assurance to you is that all of modern science is based upon our ability to refine things to 99.99% purity, and my unserious assurance is that this applies to half the chemical precursors of all your prescription medications as well.
This compound, when consumed, has the ability to bind free amino acids in your blood, which has led to it having some legitimate medical use in the treatment of urea cycle disorders. It was also shown to have statistically-significant benefits in the treatment of schizophrenia, likely due to inhibition of D-amino acid oxidase — ultimately, enhancing activity of the neurotransmitter NMDA.
Na+ / K+ Citrate (Sprite, Fresca)
Citrate, as you’ve probably figured out by now, is the conjugate base of citric acid. This is an extremely familiar compound to your body — in biochemical contexts, it is best known for the cycle named after it that is key to generating biological energy via oxygen — and one that has been in use as a preservative for much longer than you, I, or our grandparents have been alive.
A little interesting fact about citrate (as I have nothing to add here that isn’t dense biochemistry) is that most species of E. coli — a unicellular bacteria — cannot aerobically (with oxygen) metabolize citrate into biological energy. E. coli, as one of the premier biological models for processes common to all life on Earth, have been in their fair share of experiments. One of the most famous experiments involving E. coli is the ongoing long-term evolution experiment, currently housed at UT-Austin and overseen by Dr. Jeffrey E. Barrick. The goal, as you’ve probably surmised, was to observe evolution happen in real time over the course of thousands of generations of bacteria. I’ll save you a hefty read and say they succeeded handily, but the most stunning observation to occur in the experiment to date was when one of the populations began to aerobically metabolize citrate around the 31,500th generation, likely enabled by a potentiating mutation occurring around the 20,000th generation. This result was published on June 4th, 2008 — the experiment, which was started in 1988 by Dr. Richard Lenski at the University of California-Irvine, reached it’s 73,000th generation shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Na+ / K+ Sorbate (Fresca)
Sorbate — the conjugate base of sorbic acid — is a naturally occurring compound (first isolated from the rowan tree) that is produced in industrial manners for this use.
While the compound was first isolated in 1859, its antimicrobial properties would lie latent for about another 60 years, becoming commercially available at the end of that window. It found widespread use in the 1980s, being added primarily to meat products to replace nitrite preservatives. The antimicrobial activities of sorbate and sorbic acid are the same, and in fact, optimal operating acidities lie below 6.5, in favor of leaving some of this compound protonated in the final mixture. However, when it comes to animals writ large, the compound has proven extremely safe — the median lethal dose lies between 7.4 and 10 grams per kilogram of your body. For comparison, the same metric for alcohol lies around 2 grams per kilogram.
Calcium Disodium EDTA (Fresca)
This compound, better-stated as sodium calcium edetate, is a chelating agent. That means it is often used in hospitals for the purpose of capturing heavy metal ions — particularly lead— to alleviate the symptoms of acute metal poisoning. Their mechanism of action is brutally simple; chelating agents are made to bind nothing better than metal ions, and the resultant metal ion-chelating agent complex is far easier to excrete than the metal ion alone. The complex, if you’re curious, looks a little something like this:
Source: Wikipedia (users Smokefoot, Chamberlain2007), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylenediaminetetraacetic_acid
In many organometallic complexes between carboxylic acid-containing compounds and metal ions, both oxygens form coordinate bonds with the central metal ion. In this complex, only one oxygen atom per acid contacts the metal ion; this is largely due to steric hindrance. Another frustratingly physical fact of organic chemistry is that things can only bend so far, and they don’t actually phase through each other in statistically meaningful quantities. In the edetate-ion complex, because each carboxylic acid is only one carbon away from one of the bridging amines, none of them can be rotated in such a manner that both oxygen atoms have access to the metal ion (all single bonds with no double-bond character may freely rotate except where steric effects prevail — insert Titanic comment here). You may also note that the bridging amines are acting as electron donors to the metal ion here, instead of to an unlucky labile proton as they usually do — the more energetically favorable individual coordinate bonds a chelate can form to a metal ion, the better, as observed in the chelate effect (discussed in the linked page on chelation therapy, before the most recent image).
As for… wait, yeah, why is this lead poisoning treatment agent present in my Coca-Cola Corporation-branded beverage product!? Well, uh…
According to a clearly biased source, the beverage industry “certainly cannot do without EDTA,” as it serves to protect both flavor and color of the containing beverage. As a less biased source confirms, the compound is included for this purpose and quite effective for it. Additionally, it has very little identified risk of cancer, but may be linked to intestinal inflammation via manipulating intestinal permeability — a good sign that people with IBS should avoid beverages containing this compound.
As for the big picture of why all of these compounds are present in your beverage, just know they ensure the beverage tastes the same many, many months — even years — after it was produced.
THE OTHERS; or, THE FRESCA SECTION
That’s not an exaggeration, either — literally every single ingredient in this section was found exclusively in the can of Fresca. Should be fun!
Acacia Gum
Originally, this ingredient— also known as gum arabic — was harvested from two specific species of acacia tree. I’ll leave it to Wikipedia to define what a natural gum even is, as it’ll be important in this blog:
Natural gums are polysaccharides of natural origin, capable of causing a large increase in a solution’s viscosity, even at small concentrations. They are mostly botanical gums, found in the woody elements of plants or in seed coatings. — — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gum
Acacia gum, at an overhead non-chemical level, consists of the dried, hardened sap collected from the acacia trees mentioned above. In this form, the natural product has existed since at least the 9th century. Chemically, acacia gum is largely polymeric arabinose — named after the gum — and galactose, a six-membered-when-cyclic monosaccharide mentioned in a graphic above. Lactose, the compound present in milk causing incredibly-hydrated excrement in the lactose intolerant, is composed of one molecule of galactose covalently bound to a glucose molecule. Essentially, the major components of acacia gum are long polysaccharides, rendering it quite similar to regular ‘ole starch at a high level. As for why this is present in your beverage, the answer is most likely to be, as a thickening agent — natural gums in general are most often used to tastelessly modify the consistency of a food or beverage.
Carob Bean Gum
Overall, a similar story here. Also known as locust bean gum, this ingredient is a “galactomannan vegetable gum” extracted from seeds of the carob tree. Interestingly, as Wikipedia has informed me in the manner it could be informing all of you; the pods of the carob tree may be ground into carob power, which serves as a substitute for cocoa powder.
Glycerol Ester of Rosin
This ingredient is produced by reacting glycerol with wood rosin, itself produced via the distillation of oleoresin from pine trees. The process produces turpentine and wood rosin. This is unpleasant to think about, but is certainly more pleasant to think about than the industrial processes used to produce sorbic acid (which are regulated to safety quite effectively by the FDA, I might add). It is used as an emulsifier, to keep oily compounds — largely chemically incompatible with water — dissolved in a watery solution. In food and beverage products, it has risen in usage due to the phase out of brominated vegetable oil — both are used to keep beverages flavored with essential oils homogenous, but BVO is decidedly toxic while no such concerns exist with glycerated rosin.
CONCLUSION
I do hope you’ve enjoyed this read, and have learned something from it. I’m sure I’ve gotten a few things wrong, and I’d appreciate (genuinely!) you pointing them out to me, so I can refine my process for producing these. I look forward to producing more regardless, as the information currently available for these types of questions is utterly abysmal. Before I cut this short for good, I’d like to tell you one last thing:
The key to dissolving a nail with soda products is boiling. Concentration of the reactant; in this case, one of the many acids present in the soda, is key to the time it takes for a chemical reaction to finish. And, of course, the dissolution of a nail in highly acidic cola distillate is a chemical reaction; it merely involves the dissociation of a metal ion from the rest of its metal ion pals, and instead associating with the water in which it is dissolved with the help of the acid. So, no, you cannot dissolve a nail with Coca-Cola, at least not in the time it takes you to die; you can dissolve a nail in Coca-Cola distillate though. You could probably dissolve a nail in the distillate of your athlete’s foot cream, though, so I’m not sure that’s much of an accomplishment to write home (or a billion news articles) about.
Whelp, that’s about all I’ve got. Thanks for reading, and let me know what you thought via the means you see best — please address all written concerns to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington D.C.; someone there will take care of it, I’m sure.
— @geosminjones (Threads)
