🚀 go-pugleaf

> Probably recycling an oldie here, but I understand that the "active
> ingredient" of Coca Cola is NICOTINE, supplied via tobacco juice, and thus
> categorizable as a "natural flavoring."

It would be a lot easier to guess the "11 Herbs and Spices" in Kentucky
Fried Chicken than to guess the ingredients in Coke, since at least you know
how many are in KFC.

In the recent issue of Scientific American that contained an article on
cocaine, it stated that at the time of that article Coca Cola contained an
extract of coca leaves (an extract other than cocaine, of course).  It
surprised me that this was stated as fact, with no doubt implied, but SA is
a very objective publication, in general, and thus I tend to belive it.

So far, all the ingredients that have been discovered to be in Coca Cola
have one thing in common -- which is obvious if you think about it, but
otherwise isn't.  Specifically: if Coke contains a Coca leaf extract, a
Cola nut extract, Vanilla, and lemon ... well, these are all very common,
"down home" ingredients of the late 1800s.  And this leads one to think a
little more...  Coke's original formula (which almost certainly has been
revised since this happened, but probably only to eliminate ingredients
that were discovered to be pharmacologically risky to use) was developed by
an apothecary.  Well, it probably was made from common items in an
apothecary shop of the period, because what's in common with all the above
ingredients is that I can remember seeing them in the museum at the
pharmacy school where my father taught when I was growing up, in which they
indeed had every common item an apothecary of the period had (because it
was used in a course on old-fashioned apothecary methods, which I think is
called "pharmacognocy" (I don't know how to spell it).)

The point of this: a good heuristic for guessing Coca Cola ingredients
would be to (a) identify items of the above types that are now known not to
have harmful side effects, and are appetizing [many of the items were
things like a kind of green winged bug, castor beans, frankincense, myrrh,
beeswax, various types of mustard seeds, gelatin, etc, as well as many
kinds of seeds now known to have bad side effects], or (b) given an
hypothesis obtained by a method other than (a) that some item is in the
product, see if it was common in an apothecary shop of the period.

Tobacco leaves may fit (b) (though they definitely were not in the museum
I knew, in which I spent many hours as a child), but they almost certainly
violate (a), since nicotine is known to have significant side effects.

You could also test the hypothesis on a smoker (one who smoked relatively
few cigarettes per day), by seeing whether or not coke satisfied his or her
craving for nicotine.  (This wouldn't be a good test in itself, since the
caffeine, etc. might also influence it... I am not sure; also, if it didn't
work, your test smoker would be climbing the walls with frustration trying
to get a cigarette... :-))
-- 
Shyy-Anzr:  J. Eric Roskos
UUCP:       ..!{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!vax135!petsd!peora!jer
US Mail:    MS 795; Perkin-Elmer SDC;
	    2486 Sand Lake Road, Orlando, FL 32809-7642