Julie Serpico, 26, considers herself a food and wine aficionado. She works in the industry and frequents critically lauded restaurants such as Le Bernardin and Wildair. She’s also into health and fitness, running 5 miles every other day, avoiding snacks between meals and cooking bowls of kale and brown rice for herself. But, she has one habit that surprises her friends and co-workers: Every day she downs a bottle or two of Diet Sunkist soda.
“[It’s] a refreshing beverage to wash down food,” she says.
Her friends and colleagues don’t agree.
“How could someone with such a palate consume something that’s so chemically infused and a really weird color?” asks a former co-worker who wishes to remain anonymous. “We were, like, ‘Seriously? … your teeth are going to turn orange.’ Also, I was, like, ‘Does this mess up your palate for tasting wine?’”
In certain millennial circles, soda is the new cigarette. Just as many smokers felt pressure to quit after legislation relegated puffing to outdoor zones, cola-chuggers are feeling judged in the wake of various public-health attempts to curtail soda consumption. Business is down — according to a report in the Atlantic, with research provided by IBISWorld, soft-drink sales have dipped every year this decade — while alternatives are on the rise. National Beverage Corp., which makes the popular LaCroix flavored sparkling water, saw sales soar nearly 44 percent in the last quarter alone. Those who are still drinking old-fashioned soda say they’re being shamed for it.
“My friends will roll their eyes at me,” says 30-year-old Lauren Renee Bennett, a Corcoran Group real estate broker who drinks Diet Coke at least once daily. Her peers even send her articles on the supposed dangers — from digestive issues to cancer — of aspartame, the sugar substitute found in many diet soft drinks, including Diet Coke. “People are surprised because it doesn’t fit in with everything else [I do].”
One of those friends is Jonathan-Joseph Ganjian, a 31-year-old artist and consultant, who admits to judging her every time they go out for the occasional meal.
“She’ll usually give me the cat-that-ate-the-canary face, or she’ll avoid eye contact until after her first sip,” he says. “I usually say very little. I rely on my raging inner Jewish mother to come out [in] my eyes.”
For some, soda-drinking is a sticking point in romantic relationships.
“My ex-boyfriend would complain and say one thing he didn’t like about me was that I didn’t have a healthy lifestyle,” says Brittany Hite, a 33-year-old news editor who, in the last three years, has run three marathons, one 31-mile ultra-marathon and hits the gym four or five times a week. Most people would consider her quite healthy, except for one fact: She drinks two Diet Cokes every day. “I was livid and shocked,” she says of her ex’s comments about her beverage consumption.
Soda brands are desperately trying to change their uncool reputation. Diet Coke recently released thin 12-ounce cans with colorful Instagrammable labels and flavors such as “zesty blood orange.” On Sunday, it aired a 30-second Super Bowl commercial — Diet Coke’s first spot during the sporting event in 21 years — featuring 29-year-old actress Hayley Magnus quirkily dancing as she sips “twisted mango.”
But Magnus has got a lot of convincing to do.
“I see in my practice and among my peers that millennials are drinking much less soda … as a generation that is very in tune to themselves and wellness,” says Amy Shapiro, a dietitian and nutritionist based in Nomad.
At a former job, Emily Cegielski, 27, a news editor, even received flak from her boss for drinking Diet Coke.
“Her favorite thing was to tell me I was killing myself with all the aspartame,” says Cegielski, who drinks between four and six 20-ounce bottles of the zero-calorie cola during the workday for the caffeine.
While aspartame has long been rumored to cause cancer, the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the use of it, says it is “safe as a general purpose sweetener in food.” The American Cancer Society says, “Most studies in people have not found that aspartame use is linked to an increased risk of cancer” and that research in lab animals has “not found any health problems that are consistently linked” with the sweetener.
Cegielski says she picked up soda, in part, from her mother, who would drink it instead of coffee. But her mom has kicked the habit and is trying to convince her to do the same, though Cegielski has no plans to quit.
She says: “My biggest vice is Diet Coke — oh, the horror!”
