Coke

I'm failing on the Coke thing, although I did have Pepsi today which is heretic and completely missing the point.

However, I feel slightly better in that I restrict my use of it to drinking it.

From New Scientist:

Coca-Cola douches

Deborah Anderson of Harvard Medical School's birth-control laboratory took her first step towards the Ig Nobel chemistry prize in the 1980s when she asked medical student Sharee Umpierre what type of contraception had been used at the all-girl Catholic boarding school she had attended in Puerto Rico. "Coca-Cola douches," Umpierre replied. Though that was the first Anderson had heard of the idea, her gynaecologist colleague, Joe Hill, remembered a song of the same name by an outrageous 1960s band called The Fugs.

"Coca-Cola douches had become a part of contraceptive folklore during the 1950s and 1960s, when other birth-control methods were hard to come by," Anderson told Feedback. "It was believed that the carbonic acid in Coke killed sperm, and the method came with its own 'shake and shoot applicator'" - the classic Coke bottle.

To see if Coke really worked, Anderson, Umpierre and Hill mixed four different types of Coke with sperm in test tubes. A minute later, all sperm were dead in the Diet Coke, but 41 per cent were still swimming in the just-introduced New Coke (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 313, p 1351). But that's not good enough, Anderson warns. Sperm "can make it into the cervical canal, out of reach of any douching solution, in seconds" - faster than anyone could shake and apply a bottle of Diet Coke.

The three researchers shared the chemistry prize with Chuang-Ye Hong of the Taipei Medical University in Taiwan and his colleagues, whose similar experiment found both Coca-Cola and its arch-rival Pepsi-Cola useless as spermicides (Human Toxicology, vol 6, p 395).