Who knew liquid cancer would taste so good?

During my freshman year of college it was a rare exception to get to sleep before 3am. In fact, I remember going to bed early one night– a little after 1am– because I was sick, hehe. I was at BYU, living in the dorms (Deseret Towers, which are pretty
much gone now, aren’t they? Weird.), and caffeine was not to be found
on campus– so I took the opportunities I had to stock up on
contraband– I was addicted to Mountain Dew and I loved bringing a big huge 24 packs of it into
the dorms. 

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…