I live & work in an urban area with young people. Hardly any of us drink soft drinks. When I return home to visit my family (small midwestern town) everybody drinks soda all the time. Most shoppers have a couple of cases of soda in their shopping cart at the grocery. My parents and siblings have 2nd refrigerators loaded with soft drinks. Every meal out includes them.

I think it would be easy to think that soft drinks are going out of style if you're living in a tech bubble (like I probably am), but when you get outside of this circle you can see the massive amount of soft drinks that are still being consumed.

Coke's and Pepsi's marketing has actually responded to that trend - rather than try to win non-drinkers, they try to get current drinkers to buy more.

Obviously, the second part of that strategy is to create a range of products to cater to the kids like us not drinking their syrup.

The largest quantity of beverage stocked at my company's developer office is standard Coca Cola. It's the younger people whom I see grabbing those rather than the diet sodas.

My experience with soda is the same. Once my friends and I stopped drinking it, it actually becomes pretty disgusting to have something with that much sugar in it.

Among college educated folks, you'll probably not see so many sugar soft drink drinkers, but among the poor they still consume them.

>a can of coke has more than 40gs of sugar.

A can of Coke has 33g of sugar.

And here we learn that:

(1) a can of coke varies in volume based on different places in the world. 330 ml in europe, 355 ml in north america.

(2) Sweetness of a can of coke varies by country. 10.6g sugar per 100ml in France, 11g sugar per 100ml in USA, 12g sugar per 100ml in Canada.

A canadian can of coke is 355ml and 42g of sugar, per the label printed on it.

A uk can of coke is 330ml and 35g of sugar.

It depends on the amount of CocaCola in the can, and the formula for that particular distribution.

Eg. USA has a 12oz can with 39 grams of sugar. UK has a 330ml can with 35 grams of sugar. (They aren't required to provide more precise accounting and so that 35 or 39 are rounded figures). These are close to the same.

Of course, if one is using 'coke' generically, there are many that have more than 40 grams. A 12oz can of A&W root beer is at 46 grams, as is a 12oz Mountain Dew.

Why not then just standardize, or at least attempt to, the method by which we compare sugar-content in these discussions.

I.e. "4 grams of sugar per 100ml of coke"

From a health standpoint its like arguing the relative merits of 3 packs a day of smoking vs 3.1415 packs a day, "eh".

Also unit dosage for virtually all consumers is the unfortunately somewhat variable can.

Yeah... back in the day, us kids would try to find the soda with the highest cane sugar content. Now, I try to find the lowest net carbs in everything I eat or drink. Arguing about 33g vs 40g in a soda does seem non-productive.

Europeans buying a coke can in the US will not stop at the 330ml point. They are gonna continue drinking until the can is finished.

39 g is far more representative of the overwhelmingly likely sugar consumption in the US than any per ml measure, and far more useful when discussing diets.

No, in the US it's ~40g. It might be different in other countries or with cane sugar instead of HFCS.