Did you reduce consumption of soft drinks? Post your views.
@sindhupradeep (369)
India
December 4, 2006 12:36pm CST
After CSE first came out with its findings of pesticides in colas almost an year ago, did you reduce consumption of soft drinks? Was it just a temporary phase – or have you seriously tried to give up soft drinks and especially colas? Will the latest findings of caffeine in Mountain Dew affect your consumption of the particular drink or drinks in general?
Do you think its time the government took a strong stand on the issue and banned colas/soft drinks in India? Or perhaps laid down strict norms and kept regular checks on these? What is your take on the cola controversy?
3 responses
@aprilsue00 (1991)
• United States
4 Dec 06
No I have never reduced my consumption of soft drinks. I need to though because I know how bad pop is for you. oh well. Maybe in the future.
@brettbum (304)
• United States
4 Dec 06
I have followed the battle in India over soft drinks. From a distance it seems to be a very muddled fight between a number of special interests groups from all sides of the argument.
A hodge podge of environmentalists, foreign soft drink bottlers, local soft drink bottlers, government, lobbyists, distributors, consumers all fighting over this large industry.
Truthfully, it seems to me that every group involved in the argument is a bit corrupt at this point. It seems that the foreign bottlers are guilty of some contamination but the contamination levels do not seem any worse than what the local bottlers have and it would not surprise me a bit if some of the pesticides were planted by any of the interests groups mentioned above.
I live in the US and we have similar issues here. I have not decreased my own consumption of soft drinks, but would definitely like to, not because of this controversy or any other, just to check the consumption into moderation.
At the end of the day, its sometimes safer to drink bottled fluids like this than it is to drink water out of a tap, or from a restaraunt or many other sources. It may not be the purest, but often times at least someone has taken some trouble to clean things up.
Plus, I'd hazard to guess that the foreign bottlers at this point probably have the cleanest drinks around just because they have had to work so hard to prove there are not any pesticides now!
