By Day Greenberg The Daily Northwestern

It’s new. It’s blue. It’s Diet Coke Plus with vitamins and minerals, the latest concoction unveiled by the Coca-Cola Company. But what does it do for you, and what is it doing at Northwestern?

At NU, original Diet Coke is the third top seller among beverages sold on campus, beaten only by two brands of bottled water. SodexhoUSA, the company that stocks the food sold on campus, banks on consistently selling about 1,000 bottles of Diet Coke a week, said Kevin Gilligan, the company’s retail manager.

Gilligan said he was confident the new version already has a fan base.

“We just started carrying it about two weeks ago, and we won’t have any hard sales data until the end of the quarter, but I definitely see students buying it and drinking it,” Gilligan said. “Diet Coke is always one of the top sellers, so any twist on Diet Coke would do well also.”

Weinberg junior Colleen Kron, who said she already drinks two original Diet Cokes a day, tried the new version about a week ago.

“It tastes like Diet Coke mixed with regular Coke,” she said. “It’s like somewhere in the middle. The nutrition information is exactly the same, though – unidentifiable poison.”

Since the creation of the original Diet Coke in 1982, nine different varieties have been released. The latest type implies that with its blue lid and blue swoop comes an added health benefit. An 8-ounce serving contains 15 percent of one’s daily niacin (vitamin B3), 15 percent of vitamin B6, 15 percent of vitamin B12, 10 percent of magnesium and 10 percent of zinc.

The original Diet Coke does not have any vitamins.

But several in the medical community contest the health benefits of Diet Coke Plus.

“In the ’60s and ’70s, they added fiber back to white bread,” said Mark Gold of Concord, N.H., who writes for the Holistic Medicine Resource Center.

“Later it was discovered there was a lot missing in addition to fiber,” Gold said. “Just adding a few supplements to something like a beverage that in general is not healthy does not magically make it healthy.”

Gold also said the new drink’s sweetener, acesulfame potassium or “ace K,” was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration without adequate testing. The new sweetener caused cancer in animals and therefore may increase a drinker’s cancer risk, he said.

Gold said that a six-year-old study in Spain showed that aspartame, a sweetener found in several Diet Coke types, including Diet Coke Plus, caused formaldehyde to collect in drinkers’ brains and kidneys. Such accumulation can also cause cancer.

However, NU Prof. Linda Van Horn at the Center for Preventive Medicine said although long-term effects of consuming artificial sweeteners are not known, “we must assume its use is safe.”

“Most of the sweeteners have already undergone rigorous investigations looking at animal and human studies in order to get approval,” she said. “I don’t think there is much concern.”

But Horn said the sweeteners have not been tested in use together. Many noncaloric drinks, including Diet Coke Plus, contain a combination of artificial sweeteners to get a balance of taste and effectiveness.

Kron said she doesn’t think she’ll switch from the original to Diet Coke Plus anytime soon.

“I’ve heard (carbonated drinks) decalcify your bones,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s true, but maybe they should put calcium in it, instead of B12 or niacin or whatever it says. It has nothing you would buy a vitamin pill for. It’s not like orange juice or milk.”

Reach Day Greenberg at [email protected].