Who knew liquid cancer would taste so good?

Oh how I loved that stuff. My family probably can recall how I went nowhere without a few cans of it on hand. Some people keep water bottles by their beds at night for if they wake up thirsty. I would roll over and crack open a can of Dew.

Well, seeing as I wasn't sleeping real well, and not liking straight soda first thing when I woke up (usually in the afternoon), I concocted a mixture I called "wake up juice". I don't know that it really woke me up that much, but it was a fun way of naming my "breakfast" drink that was made from part Mountain Dew and part Sunny Delight, or sometimes real orange juice instead of Sunny D. (I've only used orange juice in recent years). Ah, those were the days.

Well this morning I was washing down a breakfast burrito with a can of Mountain Dew (yeah, I know-- so healthy. I was craving some sugar, ok?), and I was looking at the ingredients for some reason. I noticed that Mountain Dew was made with concentrated orange juice. I thought, hey-- if this is made with orange juice, why doesn't it have any Vitamin C? Is it the goal to make soft drinks as unhealthy as possible by stripping any nutritional value they might otherwise have?

So a quick google search leads me to some page that says Sodium Benzoate and Vitamin C in Soft Drinks Damage Mitochondrial DNA. So I read a bit to see what this has to do with Mountain Dew. Well, Sodium Benzoate is a preservative that you find in soft drinks (including Mountain Dew), and the article says that:

Sodium benzoate aka E211, a preservative used in carbonated drinks, can form carcinogen benzene when mixed with vitamin C (ascorbic acid).

Sweet! Mixing soft drinks with vitamin C CAN form a carcinogen! ("a substance.... that is an agent directly involved in the promotion of cancer or in the facilitation of its propagation.")

Alas, it's probably a good thing that a) I don't drink Mountain Dew like water anymore, and that b) it's even more infrequent that I make "wake up juice". In any case... if they HAVE removed the vitamin C from that orange juice concentrate in Dew, I know why now. It's so I can't sue them for my bone cancer, Mr. Nugent!

On the bright side-- the same google search revealed that Mountain Dew DOESN'T shrink your balls like everyone in middle school said it did! From askmen.com:

Can Mountain Dew make a guy impotent?
This has got to be one of my favorites! The spokesperson for Pepsi, who makes the neon green soda, denies that it "has adverse affects on [the] human reproduction system." It was believed that excessive consumption of the dye in the drink, FD&C yellow number five (tartrazine), could lower a man's sperm count, but the US Food and Drug Administration also says that it's not true.

Whew!

I also searched my blog to see if I had a picture of regular Mtn. Dew to use for this post, and only a couple entries came up with any reference to mountain dew at all. It's only a passing detail in this entry, but it did amuse me to go back and read. Hehe...