Showing posts with label Soft Drink. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soft Drink. Show all posts

Oct 5, 2012

Soft Drinks and Sugar

A typical carbonated soft drink will have 200 calories in a 16-ounce serving. All of those calories come from sugar, and sugar contains 16 calories per teaspoon. Divide those two and you find a 16-ounce serving contains about 12.5 teaspoons of sugar.

I wanted to compare this to coffee, so I looked at a 12 ounce soda, which has about 140 calories or about 8.75 teaspoons of sugar. Standard coffee cups (not mugs) contain about 6 ounces of fluid. Take half the calories and sugar of a 12 ounce soda and it would take about 4.38 teaspoons of sugar to make coffee as sweet as soda.

Jun 12, 2012

What's in a Name, Moxie

This word takes its name from a soft drink, rather than the other way. The word is not used as much these days. It means 'the ability to face difficulty with spirit and courage'.

The soft drink was invented by Dr. Augustin Thompson, a Maine native and Civil War veteran who worked in Lowell, MA. He patented a nostrum called Moxie Nerve Food in 1876. He eventually reformulated his drink and shortened the name to Moxie, in 1884.

An aggressive marketing campaign helped the brand grow into one of the first mass-produced soft drinks in the United States. One early advertisement for the drink read, “It nourishes the nervous system, cools the blood, tones up the stomach, and causes healthful, restful sleep. The family who orders a case from their grocer feels better and happier; the man who buys it in town at the druggists by the glass can accomplish more work.”

Maine declared Moxie its state soft drink in 2005 and the beverage is celebrated with a festival in Lisbon Falls, ME, every year.