The Coke Myth and the Renegade Who Generated it

Share a Coke With: A Quack

 

It appears that the infographic of ‘what happens 30 minutes after a can of coke is consumed’ appears to be circulating the internet again. However, although I heard a lot about it, I had missed the story the first time round last year and then completely forgotten about it. The graphic itself is produced by The Renegade Pharmacist, and spun into action by the Daily Mail and, of course, Natural News. The Renegade pharmacist, apparently, was a ‘licensed drug dealer’-turned good after witnessing how many drugs were prescribed each month. Isn’t it marvellous that we live in such a world that we can reject and go against conventional medicine based on this notion?

Renegade Pharmacist

Let that name sink in. They are an outlaw for pharmacy. Essentially, the website is against getting better through actual medicine. The about section of the website gives a profile of Niraj Naik, he appears to be semi-famous for the coke-gate (that’s what I am calling this), and that is about it. Before we talk about that, I’m going to point out the fallacies and riddles in his very own biography. First of all, “Certified Legal Drug Dealer” is a term they use for pharmacists, which is, technically correct. Its’ connotation however, that is not correct (using language to denote a deeper, sinister tone). They use the word ‘qualified’ and ‘certified’ about his pharmacy background, amping up the fact he has a pharmacological background, whilst at the same time calling them ‘drug dealers’ and demeaning the profession. Which is it?

 

“He also learnt of the debilitating side effects of the prescription medication which drove many of the patients to have to take more and more drugs to ease the side effects”

Errrrm...you really shouldn’t be giving people drugs for the side effects of drugs, unless they’re illicit drugs. So, lets not do that. As a pharmacist, how does he know the exact pathology as to why the patient requires the drugs? In other words, how on earth does he know that they are consuming more drugs to counteract the side effects of other drugs? So, after learning all this as a fully trained, qualified, certificated pharmacist, he decided (hopefully against his better judgment) to attend seminars on the ‘true origin of disease and prevention’ (I wouldn’t even know where to start in disseminating that title). Following this he swapped pharmacy for food, tools and websites to help people. The best line of all of this bio follows:

"After an arduous battle trying to get his novel approach accepted into the mainstream that resulted in a lot of stress and disillusionment, in 2010 he was diagnosed with a stress related illness, ulcerative colitis, that left him housebound for over 10 months."

This ‘arduous battle’ is no where near as rigorous and as regulated as the actual case of getting medicines from ideas to shelves. No where near. I wasn’t all to shocked to discover there is no evidence to say that ulcerative colitis is caused by stress. It is, however, caused by genetic and environmental factors. However, getting stressed can exacerbate the condition, but it is studied to be down to genetic factors and possibly environmental. Another case of Wikipedia being wrong and a story that ricochets with a little less than the truth from the offset.

Diet Cokegate

Yeah, the crux of this post. This guy is mostly famous for not knowing biology. No, errm... his highly scientific, dammit... his post of what happens when you consume diet coke. Let’s start from the beginning:

 

10 minutes

Aspartame does not trick your body into thinking it has processed sugar. When digested, aspartame breaks down very quickly making phenylalanine and aspartic acid, hardly any enters the bloodstream. Which takes down the next part of the post saying aspartame triggers an insulin response. There is zero evidence of this, despite him saying something about there being studies on such things. I cannot find them, and believe me, I’ve tried. There are myriads of studies out there on sweeteners all with similar conclusions. For example published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition titled: Functional magnetic resonance imaging of human hypothalamic responses to sweet taste and calories 1’2’3:

"Glucose ingestion resulted in a prolonged and significant signal decrease in the upper hypothalamus (P < 0.05). Water, aspartame, and maltodextrin had no such effect."

As it doesn’t really enter the bloodstream, it would be quite impressive to illicit an insulin response.

20 minutes

In the original post by Niak, he cites some scientific studies. In this science game, it’s not just enough to cite them, you should probably read them too. The infograph above states that it is reported that there are higher risks of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. The links he used to ‘back up’ these claims, actually don’t back them up. Each of the studies do not individually, or collectively, prove that the drinks cause any of these problems. At best, they show some association, there is a great difference between an association and a cause (pdf). Remember that whole ‘correlation doesn’t equal causation’? Yeah, apply that here, there and everywhere. There are a hell of a lot of factors involved in disease, singling it down to one cause and saying that there a 67% risk of increased diabetes is quite the stretch (even though only 8.2% of the subjects were identified to have got diabetes out of the 6814 subjects. I mean, that would only be a correlation if they consumed only diet coke and you would require more than two studies to back this up.

40 minutes

Addiction, that’s some powerful drink, eh? Potentially deadly combination of caffeine and aspartame, that’s new. So if I take sweetener in my ultra strong coffee, is that potentially deadly too? Why is only diet coke getting the bad rap here? Let put some scientific terminology in here ‘excitotoxin’ and ‘neuroreceptors’ and it sounds like hes’ done his research, or has he? A systematic review published in Critical Revolutionary Toxicology states:

"The studies provide no evidence to support an association between aspartame and cancer in any tissue. The weight of existing evidence is that aspartame is safe at current levels of consumption as a nonnutritive sweetener."

But his one source says it is deadly? No, it doesn’t even say that. And we are using some powerful and suggestive language here, yet again; cocaine. This guy is seemingly obsessed with drugs, why cocaine? If you drink coke, you may as well do cocaine, no other stimulate in the world could be compared to caffeine. Only cocaine.  

60 minutes

All your minerals are potentially depleted and you are craving more sugar and junk food. I drink diet coke and this never happens to me, maybe I am an anomaly or the science just isn’t there? I’m going to err on the latter, since the last points were highly incorrect. Yeah, there are more nutritious things out there, water for example, but I see no evidence of these causing cravings.

The Blog Post

So, it wasn’t enough for me that the basic fact of the reported biological processes was highly inaccurate. I wanted to know why he thought this acceptable? Well, he states on the post that:

"I found if people drink diet sodas they still get the same problems as people who drink normal soda."

As a pharmacist he is asking patients of the consumption of their drinks? That’s a little odd is it not? And then comes the pin in his ever-present lack of regard for science bubble;

"The research I found from other well respected scientists back up my claims up too and you will discover this in great detail in the new infographic and from this article."

Two words; confirmation bias. Got it, the entire thing is based on a fallacy, like all pseudoscience. "What I feel is shown to be true by these well respected scientists (I have no clue who is is talking about here) so it must be true". So he has gone out of his way to find studies that back up the claims he believes to be true. These studies are either highly preliminary or he has inferred a conclusion from them that just does not exist, in the same way that the media run with stories and in this case, did.

Conclusion 

When you actually type the words ‘the research I found from other scientists back up my claims too’ you have kind of lost any credibility.  The conclusions drawn to make the ‘info’graph are not actually backed up by actual science. The entire renegade pharmacist website reeks of self-entitled, in touch with the earth, holistic anti-science.

I’ll leave you with this:

“He believes that the stress of modern living is the root cause of disease and poor health, and that treatment begins with self belief.”

So my diabetes and magnesium disorder is down to stress and not genetics? You may have become a renegade pharmacist, but you have become a regular quack.