Science | Science Experiment of the Week 5 | 257 - Light Soda

Sugar, Artificial Sweetener, Aspartame, Weight, Cola - Comparing the weight of sugar and artificial sweetener in colas.

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This Week's Experiment - #257 Light Soda

These experiments are from Robert Krampf - The Happy Scientist

This week's experiment is one that has been in my file for quite some time. I dug it out in response to a question sent to me by Jaclyn in Pittsburgh. She is a math teacher and had heard about the experiment a while back and was trying to remember the details. To see why she found this interesting, you will need:

a large bowl or other container for water
water
a can of regular soda
a can of diet soda

Be sure that both of the cans of soda are the same brand. Since this is a scientific investigation, we want to control the variables. What is a variable? It is something that changes. For example, if you were comparing a can of regular Coke with a can of diet lemonade, you would have several variables. Besides the fact that one has sugar and the other has artificial sweeteners, one is carbonated, while the other is not. Also, there is a big difference between the recipe for Coke and the recipe for lemonade. If you found a difference in the properties of the two drinks, you might not know whether the difference was due to the sweetener, the carbonation, or the recipe. Controlling the variables is very important in science.

Fill the bowl about 3/4 full of water. DON'T OPEN THE CANS. Place the can of regular soda into the water and watch what happens. Then put the can of diet soda into the water. Do you notice a difference?

The regular soda sinks, while the diet soda floats. What is the difference? Both cans are the same size, but one floats and one sinks. The contents of the regular soda must be heavier than the contents off the diet soda.

The variable that we are looking at is the sugar and artificial sweetener. Is sugar that much heavier than aspartame, which is the most commonly used diet sweetener? No, there is not enough difference between the two to cause one can to sink and the other to float. The clue to the difference can be found by looking at the sweetness of the two chemicals. Aspartame is more than one hundred times sweeter than sugar. That means that if you want the two cans of soda to have the same sweetness, you must put one hundred times as much sugar in the regular soda. Adding that much more sweetener makes the difference between floating and sinking.

To get an idea of how more sugar is used, look at the ingredient list on each can. The ingredients are listed in order by amount, with the most abundant ingredient first. Sucrose and high fructose corn syrup are both sugars. Even dividing the sugar into these two groups, you will still see both near the top of the list for any regular soda. Compare that with where aspartame is listed on the diet drink. If you are using a cola, you will notice that the sugar comes before the caramel coloring and that the aspartame comes after it. It varies from brand to brand, but some use more than 400 times as much sugar.

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