Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Eradication Without Representation

A friend of mine recently returned from a trip to England. He had a great time, traveled to historical sites, visited multiple breweries, he even went by Buckingham Palace. However, his trip was not complete without (in true American sardonic fashion) standing in front of said palace and loudly chanting, "No taxation without representation!" No wonder Europe hates us.

Which brings me to my stream of consciousness thought for the day. Someone recently brought the point up with me that they drink diet drinks not because of the calories, but because without "diet" drinks, they would not be able to enjoy sweet drinks at ALL... something many of us take for granted. People with diabetes or those who are hyperglycemic have to control how much sugar and carbohydrate they take in... if they take in too much, it causes severe health problems. So without diet products available, these people would most likely not be able to enjoy something as simple as an afternoon sweet treat. There are many people on the Web who are so quick to judge... so quick to say, we don't need low-calorie sweeteners. But it's easy to say that when consuming normal levels of carbohydrates and sugar doesn't affect you. For some, consuming diet products is a choice between taking care of their bodies or allowing themselves to slip into a state of declining health.

So is it fair for people who have no blood sugar issues to cry for diet soda eradication? No eradication without representation! Here's to a new flag - a picture of an insulin bottle and a diet soft drink. Don't tread on me.

4 comments:

Cap'n Ken said...

Great blog, Elaine - but you need an RSS feed!

Elaine said...

Good call... I need to quit being lazy and figure that one out.

Cap'n Ken said...

Looks like you're publishing with Blogger, right? There's a setting in their menus to enable their feed (which is an Atom feed, but workable to turn it into real RSS). If you enable that, it should spit out an atom.xml file in your root directory. I've turned a number of Atom files into RSS using FeedBurner, which you can either do yourself or I can add it to the list of things I'm running through there. Drop me a note at capnken@gmail.com when you get it set up and I'll be happy to help out.

See, I really like your blog (and diet soda, for that matter) - but I rarely hit things that don't come across my RSS reader. Selfish, I know.

Johnny C. said...

Great post!

I was never a big fan of diet drinks until that was all I could drink.

I'm hypoglycemic and it's lame, but atleast I have some choices.

I haven't had a real soft drink in months, but half a can makes me almost pass out.

Let me know when you get some of those flags made up.