"I was talking to my brother, and he and I were joking around about how we saw an actor who drank 10 Cokes a day to gain weight for a role," Prior says. But the joke became real inspiration when he read the USDA's report that the average American eats about 156 pounds of added sugar each year. "I wanted to get people to think about how much sugar they're eating," he says. So he set up a website to track his progress and cracked the first can open on October 24.
One month later, George Prior is still alive—but his body is definitely worse for the wear: In just 30 days, Prior gained 23 pounds and increased his body fat by almost 6%. What's more, his blood pressure climbed from 129/77 to 143/96.
George Prior, before drinking 10 cokes a day for a month (left) and after (right). Photo courtesy of George Prior.
Those jumps aren't very surprising, considering that 10 Cokes pack a whopping 1,400 calories and 390 grams of sugar—a substance that has been associated with a host of health concerns, from causing wrinkles to upping heart attack risk. And 390 grams is a lot of sugar—equivalent to eating 14 and a half Snickers bars. But Prior says the figure is realistic. "If you add everything up, you might see you're eating the same amount of sugar in 10 Cokes every day," he says.
We were skeptical. The Center for Science in the Public Interest reports that the average American consumes between 18 and 23 teaspoons (72 and 92 grams) of added sugars each day, and the USDA's stat of 156 pounds per year averages to about 164 grams per day. Could you really eat your way to 390 without nose-diving into a sheet cake?
As it turns out, you don't have to try very hard to get past the 300-gram mark. Consider this hypothetical day of eating:
Breakfast
2 servings Honey Smacks cereal with 1 cup skim milk: 48 grams
8 ounces of orange juice: 22 grams
1 cup homemade coffee with 2 sugar packets: 6 grams.
Mid-morning snack
Dunkin Donuts coffee cake muffin: 51 grams
Lunch
Subway 12-inch Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich: 50 grams
16-ounce Coca Cola: 51 grams
Afternoon pick-me-up
Starbucks Grande Pumpkin Spice Latte: 49 grams
Dinner
Lean Cuisine Orange Peel Chicken: 15 grams
Dessert
1 cup Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream with 2 tablespoons Hershey's Double Chocolate Sundae Syrup: 73 grams
That's a grand total of 359 grams. It's not 390, but it's uncomfortably close. And it's proof that Prior's experiment, though extreme, might be a dietary reality after all.
