We were Drinking Calories Before Coke

02 Oct, 2026

I occasionally hear people say that people are more fat now because we drink our calories, while nobody had this luxury in the days of yore.

This seems wrong to me. Soda is a new thing, but highly caloric drinks are not: people have been drinking alcohol for a very long time, and your body is happy to turn ethanol into fat. Wine definitely has more calories in it than coke. According to my personal intern, Opus 5.5, beers are a bit more variable. It claims Guinness and Coors Light are less caloric than coke, but IPAs typically have more calories (and strong barley-wines utterly mog coke in this regard).

Of course, we're not comparing apples to apples here. Your body immediately protests if you drink way too much beer, it is less scrupulous about the dangers of coke. And, aside from we teatotaling Zoomers, everyone began drinking coke in addition to beer, not in place of it.¹ But, the point still stands. We've been drinking calories for a long time, and coke participates in an ancient and venerable tradition.