A Bone to Pick With Coca Cola

So it’s a hundred degrees today and after my noon bus broke down on the way to Villarrica and I had to walk the rest of the way there (in the sweltering sun), I was lucky enough to get a ride back to my site in time for our fogon commission meeting at 4:30pm. My chofer was none other than the ingeniera Delia, a middle-aged, university-educated agricultural engineer who was coming to our meeting to do a capacitation seminar for the group.

Ña Delia (Ms. Delia) had come the previous week to work with the group and was helping them put together a potential project to plant quality fruit trees in the community in an effort to improve family nutrition and increase the potential for income-generating activity (i.e. selling the extra fruit). Wonderful. Fabulous. This is why I love my community. They came up with this project all on their own and named the project Fruta nos da vida saludable (“Fruit gives us a healthy life.”) Americans would never come up with a name that beautiful. We would’ve called it the “family nutrition project” or “community income-generation strategy” or something like that.

Anyways. Delia is a well-educated and respected Paraguayan woman. However, in this seminar she began to repeat a justification for the fruit trees that she had mentioned several times in the last session with our group:

                “It’s important to have the fruit trees for our nutrition, because not only will we eat the fruit but everybody will use the fruit to make juice for their families and even to sell on the streets or at the schools so that people will buy juice instead of soda. And natural fruit juice is so much healthier than soda. Did you know that when people drink soda, especially coca cola, it eats away at your bones? If you let your kids drink soda, it will go straight to their bones and start eating away at them. You know when we drink something with natural coloring, like beets, the coloring of the beet comes out in your pee. Well when you drink coca cola, you don’t see the coloring come out in your pee, because that coca cola doesn’t come out, it stays there in your bones and eats them away.”

UM. EXCUSE ME? Now, as far as I know, there is no compound in soda that has been shown to have a direct effect on bones. As a health volunteer, you would think of this as a great opportunity to correct Delia, either in private or in the meeting, to make sure that people understand the true and scientific risks of coca cola vs. fruit juice. You might think it would be the perfect time to explain that the true risk of drinking soda is the fact that it is loaded with SUGAR whose high consumption is associated with weight gain, diabetes, hypertension, and high triglycerides (all too common health problems in our community). You might not want to lose the opportunity to explain that fruit juice can be considered almost as unhealthy as soda if you add too much SUGAR to it. You may think it is the ideal moment to describe the crucial difference between drinking REGULAR soda and DIET soda. Or, you may think it’s important to point out that while the coca cola doesn’t eat away at your bones, if your kids drink soda instead of MILK, they will be missing out on all the important bone-building calcium and phosphorus that they (as well as the adults in their family) must consume in order to have ideal bone density.  

But you would be wrong. I didn’t know WHY at the time, but my instincts told me to just shut my trap and let the show go on. Analyzing the situation later, I realized that my instinct was right. You have to pick your battles here. Why this was the wrong battle to pick:

1.       In the grand scheme of things, this was a question of nitpicking. Moving people from soda to fruit juices should be a net gain in terms of health. More vitamins, more fiber, and about the same amount of sugar. Why confuse everybody with details? Keep the message simple: SODA BAD. FRUIT GOOD. In this sense, Delia and I share the same message/goal. ¿Por qué fastidiarla?

2.       They might not have believed me anyways. The people in our community have no basis for judging or verifying who is correct in an intellectual argument between me and Ña Delia. (It’s not like they’re gonna check to see if our sources are peer-reviewed or go home and “google” it.) To them, we are both highly educated professional women, only she is older- which commands more authority. When it comes down to it, they are probably more likely to believe one of their own who appears to have more experience over that interesting but strange blonde girl who for some reason ran away from home for 2 years.

3.       It would have put an important professional relationship at risk. Paraguayans hate confrontation and avoid it at all costs. Confronting Ña Delia, in private or particularly in public, would have risked offending her, and could have put at risk an important relationship that is helping our commission design projects and obtain funding for them. It could have even put at risk the completion of our fogon project which I hope to see come to fruition before I leave.

So, although I initially felt a guilty lack-of-integrity for not having spoken up, a later thoughtful reflection led me to realize that I had probably made the best choice. I decided that if I still feel bad about it after all of our work with Delia is complete, then I can always prepare some sources and bring it up with her afterwards in the most friendly and diplomatic way possible.