Going into this Coca Cola challenge of giving away free pop I thought was going to be a piece of cake, boy was I wrong! I asked guys, I asked girls, teachers, everyone, I got nothing but “no thanks, I’m good” or “I don’t drink pop” or a picky “I don’t like Coca Cola, maybe if it was Diet…” I couldn’t believe it, I was handing out free, cold pop and no one wanted it! I walked around for 45 minutes. The one I did give away was to a teacher I don’t even know, and she was ecstatic that the pop was cold too. She thought since I was walking around with the box in my hand it was going be room temperature or even warm.  I ended up taking the eleven pops back for my four rooms, three of which are guys. Thinking I’d come back from golf and it would all be gone, nope wrong again. All eleven were still there! Does this society not drink as much pop as I thought? Was I just talking to the wrong people?! I’m still left confused as to how I couldn’t give away as simple as twelve pops for FREE!

Now, I am going to put a spin on this assignment; this spin made me understand and realize maybe this is why people are rejecting free pop. Coca-Cola is used as a cleaning agent. Coca-Cola can clean car batteries, clean rust, make chrome shinny again, clean car engines, and remove oil stains on garage floors among other things.  Another crazy fact about Coca-Cola, is that in 2003, the CSE (Centre for Science and Environment of New Delhi came out saying that Coca-Cola contained toxic pesticides that could cause cancer and breakdown the immune system. Better yet, Coca-Cola was found containing 30x the amount of pesticide permitted under the EU regulations.

Have you ever stopped and actually thought about what is going inside your body when consuming something? I think of myself as a healthy eater, I watch what I eat and how much I eat. Well I did some research on what goes on inside your body when drinking a Coke. After only ten minutes of a glass of Coca-Cola, you have just ingested ten teaspoons of sugar, which causes a major “strike” on your organism. Ten minutes later, high levels of insulin goes into your bloodstream, which makes the liver convert all he sugar into fat. Add another thirty minutes onto that, the digesting of the caffeine is done. Your eye pupils are getting bigger; blood pressure goes up, because the liver is just throwing more sugar into the bloodstream. Drowsiness kicks in due to adenosine receptors getting blocked. Only 45 minutes after drinking that glass of Coca-Cola, your body goes through the same effect as if it was heroine in your system. Your body raises production of dopamine hormones, which starts up the brains pleasure center. The list goes on and just goes even more downhill from there!

Now after those ten minutes of simple research, I now have a good idea as to why people rejected my free pop. Morningside College to me is a very athletic/active school, The HPER building is always busy, most of the students are athletes, so why would someone active or a college athlete want to put that kind of  “poison” in their system? It all makes sense to me, maybe if I was handing out Gatorade, or even a diet pop this whole experiment might be completely different.