Essay 2 Plan of Action

1. The purpose for writing Essay 2 is to show how we, as a society, may be fooling ourselves with diet coke consumption, mainly by thinking of diet soft drinks as diet food as well as whether or not the artificial sweeteners are even a safe choice.

Soft drinks are notoriously loaded with sugar and no one denies, debates or questions that fact. They just are. That's what makes them such a treat. That's what makes them coke!

However, at some point in the coke evolution, consumers caught on to just how much sugar they were consuming, and how drinking cokes probably wasn’t the best thing for their waist line. That opened up an entire market of people who weren’t consuming soft drinks because of the sugar content. Some coke research and development genius did a little work and came up with the concept of adding artificial sweetener to soft drinks in lieu of sugar and lo and behold, we have diet coke. Diet coke without the sugar! Diet coke without the weight gain! But what do we really know about artificial sweeteners? The word artificial implies they are chemically engineered substances. Have diet cokes evolved from a treat to something far unhealthier? How misleading is the word diet in the branding?

2. The specific topic that I am researching is diet cokes - how safe are they because of the artificial sweeteners, and can they really be considered diet?

3. The audience who would find this appealing is pretty much anyone who drinks soft drinks, whether they are regular or diet. I hope to be able to find in my research statistics of how many soft drink drinkers there are versus how many diet soft drink drinkers there are. Between the two, I would be willing to guess it is an absolutely huge segment of society. Those who would take notice would be the diet coke drinkers, who could ask themselves if they are making the right choice by drinking diet and question if they are any better off diet-wise or health-wise.

4. The mode of writing will be a combination of definition, compare and contrast, cause and effect, and illustration.

5. Summary of research completed – from Friday’s research of USI’s online databases, there appears to be information available on artificial sweeteners like Equal, Nutrasweet and, the one we’re currently most familiar with, Splenda, and how these artificial sweeteners are generally manufactured, how they are being marketed in the products they are added to, and how their marketing slogans have been said to be misleading the public.

I would like to do more research to find out how consumers view their drinking of diet cokes – do they do it for weight control or simply because they want a coke and justify or rationalize it is an ok decision when they choose diet and cut the calories?