Diet Coke: Healthy Alternative or Stealthy Poison?
A Design Ethics Analysis
Diet Coke is the world’s top-selling Diet Cola¹. Artificially sweetened with aspartame, it is marketed as a drink that consumers can enjoy free of sugar, calories, and guilt. The American Beverage Association, a lobbying group of beverage companies, claims that nearly 60% of all soft drinks sold in a $330 billion soda market have zero sugar, with Diet Coke leading these sales.
At the same time, world obesity rates continue to rise, more than tripling since 1980. Sugar-sweetened sodas have come under fire in research as a leading culprit in this epidemic². In this climate, zero-calorie Diet Coke was created in 1982 as a golden solution: a “diet” version of highly-loved Coca-Cola providing “great taste with zero calories” as its founding team claimed. However, its effects on consumers’ health prove to be far from positive.
Diet Coke’s major influence on the world’s public health crisis warrants an evaluation of its ethics and impact on billions of consumers. In this article, I argue that Diet Coke unethically misleads consumers to believe that they are consuming a healthy “diet” drink. Its marketing constructs an untrue picture of the benefits, creating a misguided desire for the product and leading unsuspecting customers into physical, neurobiological, and psychological harm’s way.
Marketing A Chiseled Future
Diet Coke’s biggest selling point since conception is its zero-calorie nature. The Coca-Cola Company uses this to sell a lifestyle of weight, appearance, and health. Their initial user research uncovered weight-conscious consumers who idolized masculine movie stars. Thus, ‘Diet Coke Break’ ads in the 90s featured chiseled men in various states of undress, with women gathering to admire them, selling a dream body. Modern campaigns: ‘Because I Can’ and ‘Regret Nothing’ continue to claim the benefits of allowing consumers to consume as much sweet-tasting, pleasurable soda as they want, guilt-free, in a “diet” form, without any calories.
Masked Health Effects
The scientifically studied effects of Diet Coke raise large cause for concern. A comprehensive review of the most reputed scientific evidence by the World Health Organization concludes that diet drinks have no proven difference in effects on weight compared to regular sugary sodas. Yale researchers have found correlations between increases in drinking aspartame (used to sweeten Diet Coke) and increases in obesity.
Neurobiologists explain that food reward shares brain circuitry with other pleasurable activities. We seek food to satisfy the inherent craving for sweetness. They discovered that sweetness from Diet Coke leads to partial activation of food reward pathways. The post-ingestive component of these pathways fails to activate, because of the lack of actual sugar. This leads to incomplete satisfaction; people crave and eat more high-sugar food after consuming artificially sweetened drinks compared to regular sugar-sweetened sodas. Diet Coke may even have worse impacts on obesity than regular Coke.
A Divergence
Clearly, the stories told by Diet Coke and science have different endings. Science tells the story of this product worsening the obesity epidemic whereas the Coca-Cola company markets it as its golden savior.
This disconnect is prominently seen in this commercial where Coca-Cola addresses obesity directly, reassuring customers:
Coca-Cola emphasizes its focus on cutting calories and prominently displaying information so that consumers can fight obesity.
The ad also appeals to a “common sense fact”:
“All calories count, no matter where they come from… And if you eat and drink more calories than you burn off, you’ll gain weight.”
– Coca-Cola commercial
So with simple, irrefutable statements, where does Diet Coke ethically fall short?
Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing but The Truth
While Diet Coke uses factually correct statements, they tell a small piece of a bigger picture. For example, “all calories” do “count”, but not all calories are the same. Foods that are higher in calories but provide more nutrients, are absorbed slower, satiating for long periods, and actually aid weight loss compared to zero-calorie Diet Coke³. This brings us to the crux of the ethical shortcoming of Diet Coke: creating a misleading picture of its benefits.
Coca-Cola’s ethics are complicated by the fact that all claims made in their marketing are technically truthful. By ethical frameworks, such as deontology, which emphasizes following moral duties, telling the truth is praiseworthy whereas lying is wrong. However, we must consider the completeness and impact of so-told truth.
The design of Diet Coke’s ads distorts ‘zero-calorie’, equating it with ‘healthy’. While ‘no sugar, no calories’ is a true statement, the ‘Regret Nothing’ motto misleads users into believing they can consume large quantities of this drink with no health regrets. Infomercials such as ‘We’re Taking Action on Sugar,’ while true, suggest to consumers that Coca-Cola is working to make their drinks healthier, creating a false sense of security and action against obesity, even though Diet Coke may be more harmful.
The ‘Coming Together’ commercial proclaims “Let’s come together to fight obesity” with “calories in calories out” education and an emphasis on Diet Coke’s zero calories. While it never directly claims that drinking Diet Coke leads to weight loss, the connection is implied.
One might argue that consumers have their own responsibility to educate themselves, however, realistically, consumers cannot be expected to conduct in-depth scientific reviews of every product they drink. They reasonably trust that ads honor expected ethical practices in our society and ‘tell the truth’. And there is no doubt of Diet Coke’s marketing effectiveness and public perception as a ‘health food’⁴ when research contrarily shows that it leads to weight gain, sugar dependence, and more. The harm this causes on a public health scale, far outweighs the benefits. Weighing the consequences on consumers, Diet Coke ethically fails the people who trust the brand with the way it designs its ads.
F̶u̶l̶f̶i̶l̶l̶i̶n̶g̶ Creating Desire
The Coca-Cola company’s defense is:
“We’re focused on bringing people the drinks they want — including options with less sugar “ – Coca-Cola Company
This might lead us to ask: how much ethical responsibility is on Coca-Cola who fills a need versus consumers who want the product?
However, Coca-Cola’s marketing influences people to want it by capitalizing on secondary desires. This is perhaps illustrated most compellingly by Sirin, a Guardian writer. She recalls Kate Moss’s quote “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” (who modeled in a recent Diet Coke ad). Girls at her school, aspiring to be as thin as possible, would skip lunch to buy Diet Coke.
She describes its psychological harms: Diet Coke feeds into people’s desires for a certain body by marketing itself as a method to achieve it through its choice of models. And it encourages excessive consumption through calorie-counting ideas projected onto a zero-calorie product. The guilt-free ‘Regret Nothing’ slogans create a desire for overindulgence in a sweet-tasting product. In contrast, data shows that the consumption of sugary sodas is declining due to health consciousness, soda taxes, and anti-soda campaigning such as this ad⁵. Diet Coke incentivizes people, who are being encouraged by public health campaigns to cut sodas, to consume more of a product that is perhaps worse for their health than regular Coke.
“I decide my calorie intake based on gym days and I drink a lot more Diet Coke than I would be able to drink regular Coke, because it’s zero-calories.” — 21-year-old college consumer
We can’t put ethical responsibility on people for desiring Diet Coke, because the want and extent of it is based on Diet Coke’s design. It lures consumers into excessive drinking behaviors of a harmful product, believing that they healthily can. Looking at its consequences, the obesity epidemic may have been better off if it was never created, or marketed as a regular soda as people started to become more health-conscious and drink more zero-calorie water instead.
Moving Forward
From the misleading design of promotional materials to imply scientifically false health benefits to the use of consumers’ secondary dreams to design the product to promote a desire for overindulgence in it, Diet Coke’s strategies successfully attract and sell to millions of consumers every day. However, these design choices harm the population's health, worsen the obesity epidemic, and put unsuspecting people in proven harm’s way, illuminating a clear ethical flaw.
Diet Coke may truly have been created with good intentions: fixing the obesity crisis while providing enjoyable drinks. However, its continuing adverse health consequences can no longer be excused as unintended, when data to show otherwise has existed for years. This ascribes some ethical blame to designers, marketers, and company officials promoting this product.
So what are some future steps the company might take to market Diet Coke more ethically?
- Promote informed consumption of Diet Coke by removing misleading ideas of Diet Coke preventing obesity, but rather present a holistic picture of Diet Coke’s place in a healthy lifestyle.
- Design warnings about how artificial sweetness still builds sugar cravings and should ideally be enjoyed in moderation despite zero calories.
- Yale researchers recommend that the key to fighting the world’s obesity epidemic doesn’t lie in artificially sweetened Diet Coke, but in “unsweetening the world’s diet”: weaning people off cravings and dependence on sweetness. The company might consider moving towards less sweet-tasting drinks to divert profit.
- Market.Us, “Coca-Cola Statistics and Facts”. Mar 7, 2024. https://market.us/statistics/food-and-beverage-companies/coca-cola-company/.
- Temple, Norman J. “The Origins of the Obesity Epidemic in the USA-Lessons for Today.”, Oct 12, 2022. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9611578/
- “Here’s What Sugar and Zero-calorie Sweeteners Do to Your Body — World Food Policy Center.” 2024. World Food Policy Center. January 31, 2024. https://wfpc.sanford.duke.edu/podcasts/what-sugar-and-zero-calorie-sweeteners-do-to-your-body/.
- de la Peña, Carolyn. “Artificial sweetener as a historical window to culturally situated health.” 2010. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20388147/
- Beckett, Emma Liem. “Local Anti-soda Campaigns Hurting Grocery Beverage Sales.” Food Dive, March 13, 2017. https://www.fooddive.com/news/local-anti-soda-campaigns-hurting-grocery-beverage-sales/437964/.
