It was only a matter of time before politics came for soda. First it was cereal (Froot Loops), then candy (M&M’s) and now Coca-Cola, another sugary icon of the American pantry. Last month, President Trump announced in a social media post that Coca-Cola would start using cane sugar in the company’s beverages. “You’ll see,” he wrote. “It’s just better!”
Is it?
Yes, according to health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again agenda, which holds that ultraprocessed foods like high-fructose corn syrup are always less healthy than (relatively) unprocessed foods like cane sugar. However, the vast majority of scientific evidence shows that one form of sugar is not “better” for health than another.
Does it taste better?
Many food lovers cling to the idea that high-fructose corn syrup is a sticky-sweet impostor for “real” sugar in soda, and insist that they can taste the difference. These are the people who seek out Coke and Pepsi produced in Mexico, made with cane sugar, and believe it has a “cleaner” or “sharper” taste.
They stockpile plastic Coke bottles topped with yellow caps in the spring, when some bottling plants produce cane-sweetened soda for Jewish consumers who do not eat corn during the Passover holiday. And they post tasting videos on social media that get thousands of comments from people weighing in on the relative merits of cans vs. bottles, plastic vs. glass, Burger King vs. McDonald’s.
Paul Breslin is a professor of nutrition at Rutgers University who specializes in the genetic basis of taste perception. He said that recent research in his laboratory, and others, shows that people tend to choose sugar over high-fructose corn syrup, even when the sweetness level is comparable.
“There’s a clear preference, even in blind tests,” he said
Precisely how we taste the difference is not yet fully known, according to Dr. Breslin, who is also a member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research institute focused on taste and smell.
“It’s not just happening in our mouths,” he said. “There’s a whole sweetness signaling system” running on neural and metabolic pathways throughout the body.
I enlisted The New York Times’s wine critic, Eric Asimov, for a blind tasting, knowing he would bring the same vocabulary and attention he brings to wine, paying attention to things like balance, finish and structure. As in wine, the sweetness in cola should be just one of many flavor notes, balanced by notes like spice, citrus, vanilla and mint.
To nail down the question of whether cane-sweetened cola tastes better, the tasting was limited to four drinks:
1. Coca-Cola Classic, sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup
2. Mexican Coke, imported and sweetened with cane sugar
3. Pepsi, sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup
4. Pepsi-Cola Made With Real Sugar, which contains both beet sugar and cane sugar
He tasted each twice: first, chilled and straight from the can (or bottle, in the case of Mexican Coke); then, poured over pebble ice for a fountain-soda effect. Potato chips were our palate cleanser.
He began with a swift round of sips, tasting all four in quick succession. He was immediately drawn to No. 2, Mexican Coke, which he described as a “laser beam,” with a precise balance that stayed consistent. “In wine terms we would say it has more structure to it.”
They all seemed to have about the same level of sweetness, he said, but some were more “oily,” lingering on the palate. He identified clove and citrus in No. 2, and detected wintergreen in No. 4., Pepsi-Cola with beet and cane sugar.
Next, he paid attention to the “finish,” or the way a drink lingers in your mouth after swallowing. Both of the sugar-sweetened sodas started off strong, but on the finish, “they kind of fall flat in the mouth,” he said. “You want that crispness.”
Crispness or briskness, a kind of rasp on the tongue, has always been part of the flavor profile of soda. To counteract the sweetness of fruit syrups, 19th century soda jerks added hefty shots of phosphoric acid along with fizzy water. But once it was discovered that the acid causes dental erosion, its use in sodas was reduced, with milder citric acid making up the difference.
The feeling of crispness is also produced by carbonation, and cold. We both preferred the soda when it was poured over ice, muting the sweetness a bit.
In the end, the soda that we both picked as the winner was Pepsi, made with high-fructose corn syrup. It wasn’t more “syrupy” than the sugar-sweetened sodas, and seemed to have more — and more balanced — flavors than the others.
Overall, we didn’t find that soda with sugar tastes better than — or even different from — soda sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.
We did, however, manage to illustrate the well-known “Pepsi paradox,” noted since the 1970s, that although Coke is a far more popular drink, Pepsi often wins blind taste tests. First illustrated by the wildly successful “Pepsi Challenge” ad campaign that began in 1975, it nudged the Coca-Cola Company into the fiasco that was “New Coke,” formulated to be milder and sweeter, i.e. more like Pepsi.
But that didn’t explain why consumers continued to buy more Coke while preferring the taste of Pepsi. In 2003, the neuroscientist Read Montague led a study of M.R.I. responses that showed that the two sodas affected the brain differently.
When the participants knew which soda they were drinking, brain scans showed that they liked Coke better. But when they didn’t know, they consistently preferred Pepsi. Dr. Montague’s interpretation, published in the journal Neuron in 2024, posited that the Coke brand is so powerful that its positive associations creep into our unconscious minds, causing us to prefer something even though it does not taste as good. This study is often credited — or blamed — for creating the field of neuromarketing.
Dr. Breslin said that our unconscious preference for one sweetener over another is not unlike our preferences for certain people over others. Our senses of smell and taste can transmit information that is important to us, but that we are unaware of. Attraction, he said, is partly a matter of sniffing out compatibility at a genetic level.
“Chemistry is real,” he said.
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Julia Moskin is a Times reporter who covers everything related to restaurants, chefs, food and cooking.
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