Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi. I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, how much sugar do they really put in soft drinks? This question actually came in through email and it goes like this. My friend and I are having a debate about soft drinks. He claims that there are five or six teaspoons of sugar in a soft drink, and I cannot see how that is possible. No one, for example, puts five or six teaspoons of sugar in a glass of iced tea
or a cup of coffee. It wouldn't even dissolve who is right. This is hard to believe, but neither of you is right. There's actually more sugar than your friends suggests. Here are two ways to prove it to yourself. The first way is to buy a packet of unsweetened soft drink mixed like kool aid. They kind of add sugar too. When you're making it, you'll be instructed to add one cup of sugar and enough water to make two quarts or sixty four ounces of kool aid. A cup of
sugar contains forty eight teaspoons of sugar. Therefore, a sixteen ounce serving of one of these beverages contains twelve teaspoons of sugar. For those of you on the metric system, that's about fifty grams of sugar and half a liter. The other way to prove it is to look at the calorie count on any soft drink container. For example, a typical carbonated soft drink will have two calories in a sixteen ounce serving. All those calories come from sugar,
and sugar contains sixteen calories per teaspoon. By this measurement, a sixteen ounce serving contains twelve and a half teaspoons of sugar. So go down to the kitchen and get out a sixteen ounce glass, a tea spoon, and some sugar. Measured twelve teaspoons of sugar into the glass, it's an amazing amount. Then multiply that by however many SODA's you typically drink in a day. That's how much sugar you're consuming through soft drinks. Do you have any ideas or
suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the brain Stuff blog on the how stuff works dot com home page