Dr Pepper 10

Shortly after high school, I switched to diet soft drinks. Most of the reason for the change was working nights in hot professional kitchens after long days of culinary school’s hot instructional kitchens. I discovered that warm water assimilates fastest to rehydrate the body, but sometimes I still wanted an icy drink with some flavor. Sugary sodas no longer quenched, and after nutrition classes our instructor showing the granulated sugar equivalent to a can of Coke I figured those wasted calories would be better spent on the myriad foods we were learning about. Though I always preferred Coca-Cola to the sweeter Pepsi, that was not the case with their diet counterparts. Diet Pepsi tasted better to me, and soon became the go-to because it was usually the only diet option at my jobs, and when you cook in a kitchen, it’s all you can handle, free of charge.

If I was getting a drink at a gas station or something, I’d go with Diet Dr Pepper. This is one of the more popular diet drinks because your brain associates some of the flavors with sweetness. Vanilla, caramel, cherry, cardamom, nutmeg these being some of the purported “23 flavors” are mostly used in sweets, but are available in extracts, oils, essences and other sugar-free concentrations. Your brain perceives a sweetness that isn’t really there.

Last year, I grabbed several different diet sodas to try. Diet Squirt (grapefruit) was OK; Diet 7up really suffered the transition (and contained a lot of sodium); diet root beer? Never again. But Diet Orange Crush was surprisingly tasty. It was soon after that I noticed why: 40 calories per 20-ounce bottle. But if you compare that to regular Crush, at 320 calories per bottle, it didn’t seem so bad. Quite a fair trade-off really, and still much healthier than those 5-percent juice fruit drinks.

I learned that by starting with some sugar, the sweetening effect of the artificial was greatly compounded. Which brings us to the inspiration for this column: Dr Pepper 10. The first time I saw some of the in-your-face ad campaign for this product last month, I checked to make sure I hadn’t tuned into a Saturday Night Live commercial, or The Onion News Network. Blatantly announcing that their product was “not for women” seemed an unlikely successful marketing technique that’s bound to offend the easily offended. Dr Pepper is standing by the campaign, for now, hoping it will turn more men on than women off.

But that weirdness aside, the drink is a great idea. While the Coke and Pepsi lab jockeys have had years to improve upon the formulas of their calorie-free sodas, giving us Coke Zero and Pepsi Max, they soon discovered that these would never fully replace, or even become as popular as, their respective original diet versions. People have had years to acquire the desire for that “bite,” which is significantly softened with Zero and Max, and restaurants and major fast food places aren’t going to pull one for the other, or add more options any time soon.

So since Diet Dr Pepper achieved years ago (through sweetness brain-fakery) what Zero and Max have recently somehow done, Dr Pepper had to make some kind of move, and “10” is it. The “10” is actually a little misleading. Soda bottles and cans tend to adjust their idea of “servings” to fit the goal. So a 20-ounce bottle of Coke Zero contains one serving, because what do they care? Zero multiplied by anything is still zero. Even after a full gallon, you’ve ingested no calories. Then look at the same 20-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew Voltage (more on the “extreme” flavors and colors of Mountain Dew in the future), and you’ll find there to be 2.5 servings there, and why’s that? Because the Dew contains 290 calories per 20-ounce bottle. I’m not going to get into the physics of carbonation, but most people are going to drink that bottle in one session, not two and a half.

There’s really no lying going on, just denial. This brings me back to the Dr Pepper 10, which is taking a bit of extra liberty with the servings thing. The over-the-top commercial shows a man pouring his can into a glass, proclaiming it “10 manly calories.” So when I found and bought a 20-ounce bottle of it, I was a little surprised to note that this 10 calories is per 8-ounce serving. Who drinks two-thirds of a can? Will they be making cute little cans that contain 8 ounces apiece? Doubtful. I eventually came across a 12-pack (or “twack,” as the kids are saying) of 12-ounce cans, which like all other brands, cites the number of servings per can as one. So this made little sense.

How can an 8-ounce serving and a 12-ounce serving both contain the same 10 calories? I remembered reading years ago how “fat-free” pan lubricants such as Pam could make their claim: the FDA‘s rounding rules. Pam can claim to be fat-free because of its miniscule serving size. If it contains less than half a gram of fat per serving, it contains “no” fat. Can you get by with one serving of Pam (one-third of a second spritz)? Probably not. Similar rules apply to sugar (or in this case, high fructose corn syrup) calories. When a serving is less than 50 calories, you round to the nearest five. So both the 8-ounce and 12-ounce servings would end up being 10. Clever. Did I mention it’s totally delicious? It is.