We may earn a commission from links on this page.

Coros, maker of some excellent running watches that rival Garmins in features and accuracy, announced a set of updates that include voice alerts, in-app training plans, and the ability to (finally!) change the number of reps in a strength workout directly from your watch. Here are the highlights: 

Libraries of training plans and workouts in the app

Coros offers pre-built training plans for a variety of goals, like running your first marathon or beating 25 minutes in a 5K race. But until recently, you couldn’t browse and select these from the app. 

Now, you can go into Profile on the Coros app, and select Training Plan Library or Workout Library to see all your options. There are separate tabs for the official offerings from Coros, and for “My Workouts” to show just the ones you’ve created or saved for yourself.

Correcting reps directly from the watch

When you’re doing a strength workout, a Coros watch can attempt to count reps, but it doesn’t always get things right. With the new update, you can now edit the rep count on your watch immediately after the set.

The strength training feature also adds animations for each exercise, but I found that to enable this, I had to go to the Profile tab in the app and tap “Download now” to get the animation files onto my device. The watch helpfully told me how to do this, but it couldn’t download the files during a workout, so I had to end the workout, download the files, and restart.

Voice alerts while you’re running

Previously, a Coros watch could beep to let you know when a turn was coming up on a route you’re following, but unlike a Garmin, it wouldn’t actually speak to you to say “turn left.” Now, voice alerts are available for pace, distance, and upcoming turns, as well as nutrition alerts (reminding you to eat during a run), if you’ve enabled those.

Voice alerts, like exercise animations, also require a file download. Go to Profile, your device, and File Downloads to make sure they’ve been added before your run.

The update also adds more workout modes, including yoga and pilates; an AI chatbot for help; alerts when you’re running a route backwards (and the ability to run it backwards on purpose); and more, including redesigned controls that are intended to be more touchscreen-friendly on touchscreen watches like the Pace Pro. 

If you have been paying attention to your social feeds of late, you may have heard the recent chatter about Tea, an app that functions like Yelp—but instead of rating and reviewing restaurants and stores, women are passing judgment on men they know. The app has been around since 2023, but for reasons I can’t identify, it rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store chart this week. It was the first I’d heard of it, and I thought it sounded like an awful idea. And today, my instincts have already been proven right—though not in the way I expected.

It seems 4chan and Reddit users have successfully engineered a data breach, obtaining and disseminating user verification images—including photos of driver’s licenses—that were submitted when women signed up for the service. A spokesperson for the app confirmed to me that, “Tea identified unauthorized access to one of [its] systems and immediately launched a full investigation to assess the scope and impact.” The initial results of this effort suggest “the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago. Approximately 72,000 images—including approximately 13,000 images of selfies and photo identification submitted during account verification and 59,000 images publicly viewable in the app from posts, comments, and direct messages—were accessed without authorization.”

Basically, things escalated very quickly, going from from viral popularity to a hack within days. Regrettably, I already submitted my own verification image, as I’d intended to write about the suddenly everywhere app. While I am technically still writing about it now, I’m annoyed about my possible inclusion in the breach, though it appears more recently-created accounts may be safe (for now).

If this is all news to you, allow me to, as they say, spill the tea.

What is the Tea app?

Tea is an app that was launched two years ago and which went viral this week, becoming the most-downloaded free app on the Apple App Store. Its tagline is “Dating safely for women” and it advertises that users can “run background checks,” “identify potential catfish,” and “verify he’s not a sex offender,” among other things. A notable feature is the ability to assign a given man a red or green flag, the same way you might append a like or laughing emoji to someone’s Facebook status. Per Tea, you should be able to “find verified green flag men” this way, and avoid a red-flag man.

View this post on Instagram

In practice, it works like this: Women log in with anonymous usernames to rate and review men they have interacted with. You can search for a man to see what other women said about their purported experiences with him. The idea is that women can use the service to vet someone before a first date, dig deeper on a man’s background before getting serious, or find out if a boyfriend is cheating. Men are not allowed to register for accounts on the app at all, so they have no input on what is said about themselves or others.

It functions similarly to “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups and forums that have popped up in major cities in recent years, providing another outlet when women can discuss men they’ve dated with some degree of anonymity. I’ve never liked these groups myself, because while I recognize the value in being able to identify abusers, cheaters, and general fraudsters—and personally know women who have used the groups to do just that, including one who received a tip that helped her uncover legal documentation of prior domestic violence accusations against her now-ex—I worry that the lack of anything resembling due process will leave innocent people open to major reputational damage.

I’m not telling victims to remain silent about abuse they’ve suffered, but it’s not hard to imagine a post about an abusive or narcissistic man might have actually been written by a jealous friend, a competitive co-worker, or a jilted (but otherwise unharmed) ex. A disinterest in inadvertently joining a misinformed mob has generally kept me away from those groups, but when I saw people lodging these same complaints about Tea on social media last night, my interested was piqued, which is when I downloaded it to see what the buzz was about.

The data collected, and what we know about the breach

When I tried to create an account, I was first greeted with a screen that let me know the app was totally anonymous and screenshots were impossible. I screenshotted that message to test it out and it appeared blank in my camera roll. (You know all the old wisdom about how if you have to do something in secret, you maybe shouldn’t be doing it? Yeah.)

Next, Tea asked me to prove I was a woman. Ignoring the rigidity of that framing (and the potential implications for LGBTQ+ people) for the moment, I snapped a selfie with the in-app camera. The picture was hideous—I had just finished my weekly at-home facial peel—but that’s what I get for involving myself in this mess. But I digress. (Actually, I don’t: The fact that I’m upset someone may see something unflattering and private about me without my consent kind of underscores the problem with the app’s basic premise.)

As noted, Tea issued a statement to me and our friends over at CNET saying the hacked photos are from a “legacy data system” containing information that is over two years old, and there is “no evidence” to suggest more recent images or information have been leaked. Honestly, that doesn’t make me feel better. The worst-case scenario for me is that the information is wrong and recent verification photos are out there. The best-case scenario is still one where 13,000 other users have had their data exposed. Still, the Tea rep says the app’s developer has “engaged third-party cybersecurity experts” and is working to secure the system.

“Protecting our users’ privacy and data is our highest priority. Tea is taking every necessary step to ensure the security of our platform and prevent further exposure,” she says. “We are committed to transparency and will provide updates as more information becomes available.”

Eventually, after I took my picture, the app told me I could earn free lifetime access by inviting three other women. I sent one invitation to my own phone number and two to friends, following up with a message that said, “Testing for work, disregard.” One of them was curious and downloaded the app. Now she’s worried about the breach, too, and that’s my fault. When you lie down with dogs…

I still haven’t gotten to try Tea myself

After sending in my selfie, I was put on a waitlist while, supposedly, someone on the Tea staff verified my photo was, I guess, womanly enough. I remained on that waitlist from 7 p.m. last night until this afternoon, but where there once was a message in my app about waiting for verification, I now just see a spinning loading icon. Though the app is still available for download, my own onboarding seems to have stalled, though I can’t say for certain whether that has anything to do with the data breach. (I’ve asked for clarification and will update this story when I hear back.)

For what it’s worth, at no point was I asked to submit a photo of my government ID, though I’m not sure if that would have been the next step after getting off the selfie waitlist or that level of verification has been phased out in favor of the in-app selfie,. From what I’ve seen on social media, though, there are plenty of Tea users’ ID pictures floating around.

At some point, I may still be able to actually access the app, at which point I will provide an update on what it’s like in there.

I saw disaster coming

While I didn’t necessarily expect a vengeance-fueled data breach by internet reactionaries who took issue with Tea’s raison d’etre, I did anticipate things would not turn out well the minute I saw some viral posts about the app. That’s because, at the risk of outing myself as an elder millennial, I’ve seen this all before. In late 2013, I tried an app called Lulu that served almost the same function. It also initially barred men from access, and actually gave women the opportunity to link a man’s personal Facebook details to his Lulu page without his consent. Where Lulu was a bit girlier and took more delight in gossip, Tea claims to be more focused on safety, but they general gist is similar.

Lulu is offline after a 2016 acquisition that saw the removal of the man-rating feature, followed by its quiet exit from the app store, but the app spent some years undergoing massive retooling in response to the initial criticisms leveled against it. It ultimately granted men access and gave them the ability to opt out of being featured. (Other rate-a-man services have also drawn criticisms: At least one man has sued over his inclusion in an “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” group.)

I think I am so put off by Tea because I actually used Lulu when I was in college. It revealed unsavory and disappointing things about some men in my life—but realistically, I wouldn’t have even downloaded the app if I didn’t already harbor suspicions, so what was the point of invading their privacy just to confirm what I already felt, if not knew? Lulu didn’t allow for detailed comment, but it gave users a variety of coy hashtags to apply to a man, ranging from #GlobeTrotter to #TotalF—ingDickhead. It was unnecessarily vindictive, and what’s worse, I didn’t just use it to assess potential romantic partners; out of curiosity and selfishness, I even invaded the privacy of my platonic male friends, who were horrified to learn (from me) that they had nonconsensual profiles on an app they’d never even heard of. After seeing how violated they felt, I deleted it out of guilt.

Don’t rate people

Any “Yelp for People” concept is always going to be a terrible idea, especially when it’s hamfistedly tied to the archaic idea that dating is nothing more than a confrontational battle of the sexes instead of a good-faith effort to get to know potential partners who could enrich your life while delicately sidestepping those who can’t.

But even as I anticipated disaster, I did not anticipate was how fast Tea would crumble, nor how poetically—though certainly I disagree as (or more) vehemently with the release of women’s driver’s license and verification photos as I do with the anonymous rating of men’s personalities. You could say Tea users got a taste of their own medicine, but it’s medicine no one should have been taking in the first place.

Google is back with yet another AI-powered Search feature. But unlike AI Overviews, which attempts to summarize an answer to your search, or AI Mode, which uses generative AI to try to return results that are more detailed and useful, “Web Guide” is much simpler: It aims to make your search results easier to look at and surface links you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Google announced Web Guide in a short blog post on Thursday, and there’s really not much to it. When you enable the feature in Google Labs, you’re able to try it out along any search query you want. Google suggests “open-ended” searches, like “how to solo travel in Japan” or “detailed queries,” like “My family is spread across multiple time zones. What are the best tools for staying connected and maintaining close relationships despite the distance?” But the feature technically works with anything you would normally search Google for.

The core of the feature is this: Instead of showing AI summaries, it simply groups relevant links together into different categories. Since Google isn’t trying to give away the content of each link with AI, you still have to click on any you find relevant, but the fact that they’re grouped in this way might actually make it easier to find what you’re looking for—or to find different types of links in one search.

My experience with Web Guide

After enabling the new feature on my personal account, I tried out a couple queries to get a sense of what Google was going for here.

My first attempt was the search, “news about generative AI.” After hitting the search button, Google instantly loads two links it thinks are relevant at the top of the page. One was from TechCrunch, while the other was from the site AI Business, both of which pointed to the sites’ generative AI news stories.

Beneath this, I could see Google’s AI was busy loading a full page of search results, which took about five seconds to return. Those results begin with a short summary of my query, including that, “the field of generative AI is rapidly evolving” (thank you for that insight), as well as two stories that had been in the news recently: the release of Grok 4, and the introduction of Qwen3-Coder.

Scroll past this, and you finally reach the results groupings. Each has a title (e.g. Aggregated Generative AI News) with a short summary of what you’ll find, and, of course, the links. The first two groupings in my results only had two links each, but subsequent groupings offered a “More” button, which added another two or three links to the mix.

Some of these groupings could be useful: One, AI Communities and Forums, linked me to four different subreddits, three of which dealt with AI discussions in one form or another (r/machinelearningnews, r/generativeai, and r/localllama). The fourth linked simply to an AI story on r/technews—possibly helpful if the Reddit thread has to do with AI, but not necessarily a helpful way to find new AI communities, if that’s what I was looking for.

Others, however, were a bit odd: AI News Aggregators, for example, offered one link to r/machinelearningnews, and three links to articles rounding up different AI news aggregators. Not aggregators of AI news, mind you—AI-powered news aggregators.

My second query was more successful. I searched for “best Mac for college students.” The first grouping attempted to find links for MacBook recommendations for college students: Three of the four did, while one was a CNET article about the best MacBooks they’ve tested in general, not necessarily for college. Still, helpful! The next grouping was also helpful, as Google listed four different Reddit threads about MacBooks for college—three of which were questions about which MacBook was best for college, while one asked if a MacBook was the best choice above other products.

A few groupings down, there was “MacBook Model Comparisons,” which featured two links: one to Apple’s official “Which Mac Is Best for Me?” page, but also one to a site called “Mac Business Solutions,” which is a computer repair store in Maryland. Its Mac comparison guide seems helpful for parents or students looking to buy a Mac for school, and it was the one the AI choose to sit next to Apple’s in this grouping. I tested “best MacBook for college” on a standard Google search, and this particular site didn’t show up until the fourth page of results for me, so it’s pretty cool to see such a niche site pop up in these Web Guide results.

Shit—do I actually like an AI-powered search feature?

More Web Guide, less AI Mode, please

I don’t want AI to summarize my content for me with varying levels of accuracy. However, I’m not opposed to AI making the information I am looking for more apparent and easy to find.

Web Guide is a brand new experimental feature, and it shows. I’m not sure this is something I’m really going to use in its current state, but I can see the vision. I’d like to see more links that are even more relevant in each grouping, and I’d like to see a wider variety of groupings than I’ve received so far. But I think the idea of grouping relevant links together, and scrolling through those groupings, rather than a sea of individual links, is very compelling. I like that I’m still clicking on each link I want to see, so I’m both engaging with the content myself and supporting that content by visiting its site.

But perhaps what I like most of all is the potential to surface links I wouldn’t have otherwise found. There’s no chance I thumb through four pages of Google for a search like “best MacBook for college,” but with Web Guide, I might actually see a link from a site that typically lives on that fourth page. That’s what excites me about something like Web Guide. Let’s focus on AI tools that still supports sites (especially small ones) while making search better, instead of assuming everyone wants their answers handed to them by a bot that might just be making up those results anyway.

How to try Web Guide

If you’re interested in trying this experience for yourself, head to Web Guide’s official Search Labs page. Click the toggle to enable the feature, then click “Search on Web Guide” to launch a search—or, click the new “Web” tab that appears when you start a new search.

Ironically, it seems to replace the Web filter that removes AI from Search entirely. If you want that back, you’ll have to disable Web Guide.

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

Either Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft isn’t selling well enough, or the competition is selling better, because the company appears to have quietly released a new, cheaper version starting late yesterday. It was all over my Amazon app when I opened it this afternoon, and it’s being promoted to the point where I can’t find the old model outside of bundles and direct links to it. The problem? It comes with a bunch of compromises, and is just $30 less.

It does, however, fill a hole in the Kindle lineup. Previously, the Kindle Colorsoft was only available as a “Signature Edition,” meaning it had bonuses like wireless charging, auto-brightness, and extra storage thrown in. This new model finally gives the Colorsoft a “standard” version, but is that tradeoff worth it?

As a plus, it doesn’t come with ads on the lock screen, something you have to pay for on other non Signature Edition Kindles. But for the low, low discount of $30, you’re also just getting the bare minimum. If you’re like me, you can probably live without wireless charging and auto-brightness, but the new Kindle Colorsoft also has half the storage, at 16GB instead of 32GB.

That’s a lot of space to give up for just a $30 savings. To be fair, you’ll be able to hold tens of thousands of text-based books with that, but throw in audiobooks or the comics that the Kindle Colorsoft practically seems made for, and you might start to brush up against those storage limits more.

With that in mind, I’d probably still go for the signature edition, especially since you can get competing budget color models like the Kobo Clara Colour, and even the more expensive Kobo Libra Colour, for cheaper than you can get this new, budget Colorsoft. You’ll lose out on an inch of screen size with the Clara, but the Libra actually improves on the Colorsoft in a few ways, like page turn buttons and stylus support. It’s also got 32GB of storage, like the Colorsoft Signature Edition.

In my testing, I will admit that Amazon’s approach to color e-ink tends to look more vibrant and have fewer artifacts than the competition, but it’s still a compromised experience compared to more traditional screens. If you’re already willing to make sacrifices, you might be the type of person who’s willing to lose a little fidelity for savings. If money is what matters to you, then even pared down, the new Colorsoft isn’t your best option, especially since it locks you into Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem—and its pricing.

If you are willing to pay a bit more and deal with the Kindle ecosystem, I still have plenty of positive things to say about the Colorsoft Signature Edition. It’s difficult to find right now, as Amazon seems to be leading searches for it to bundles with covers and wireless chargers thrown-in, rather than the device itself. But it’s still available at the direct link here. You can also add a bit more value to the new Kindle Colorsoft by buying the Kids version, which costs $20 more but throws in a year of Amazon Kids+, which normally costs $8 a month.

Scam texts are out of control. Texts from the “DMV” about unpaid traffic violations, your state’s “transportation authority” about unpaid tolls, or from “wrong numbers” are all phony. Their goal is to get you talking or to click links to malicious sites so you share sensitive information about yourself.

As scammers and phishers find new ways to plague our smartphones with these texts, companies are starting to fight back. Take Apple, for instance: With iOS 26, your iPhone’s Messages app is getting two key tools to help keep you from falling for scams—even if they can’t block these texts completely.

iOS 26’s spam prevention features

The new update, which is currently in public beta testing, lets you sort your messages into a number of categories, including “Unknown Sender” and “Spam.” When these toggles are enabled in Messages’ settings, messages sorted into these categories will not trigger notifications, so you won’t be pinged about a message that is clearly a scam.

But it goes beyond the lack of a notification. Any message that lands in the Spam folder is placed under restrictions that don’t normally apply to texts in Messages. First, all links within spam messages are disabled. That goes for both URLs as well as phone numbers. This ensures that you can’t accidentally open a malicious link or start a call to a scammer’s number. You’d have to copy and paste the link or number to use it, which I believe a majority of people likely won’t do.

In addition, Messages will prevent you from replying to any texts that are sorted in Spam. Often, scammers are looking for a back and forth to establish a rapport, and convince you to reveal important information. By removing the option to do so, the scammer won’t even be able to confirm your number is active—one particularly good reason not to text scammers back.

These are simple changes, but powerful ones. They take the wind out of scammers’ sails, by removing the interactivity from their phishing texts. Whether someone would have willfully or accidentally clicked a malicious link in a spam text, the risk plummets with this simple change in iOS 26.

What if a spam message really isn’t spam?

If you’ve ever spent time in your email’s spam folder, you’ve probably noticed a legitimate messages are occasionally flagged among the sea of junk. That’s entirely possible with this new spam filter, too. Apple’s tech might get it wrong sometimes, and a text from a new friend or a company that you don’t have saved in your contacts could get incorrectly placed in this folder.

Any messages in this folder, of course, cannot be replied to, which you would think would spell the end of communications between you and this person. (Sorry boss, I’d love to text you back, but my iPhone thinks you’re spam, and iOS 26 doesn’t let me reply to spam. See you on Monday.)

Luckily for your boss, there’s an easy solution: iOS 26 lets you move messages back from spam to the main Messages folder. You can also report that the message is not spam to Apple, which should theoretically help the company’s sorting abilities going forward.

Just be careful when using this feature: You don’t want to accidentally move spam messages back to your main inbox, and you definitely don’t want to give scammers the advantage by marking actual spam as not spam.

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

I make time to work out every day, typically using my Peloton Bike and Peloton app, but I don’t know that I would consider myself, like, an elite athlete. For as hard as I’ve tried to get into, say, running, there are certain things that just aren’t for me. I don’t ever want to run a marathon or, God forbid, even look up what goes into an Iron Man competition, so I am generally unaware of what the broader “fitness community” is into at any given time while I mind my own business on an indoor cycle.

That’s not true about Hyrox. Even I have heard about Hyrox, an indoor fitness competition that combines eight runs alternating with eight functional fitness stations. Do I see myself ever doing that? Not really, no, but I respect the hell out of anyone who wants to—and if you are among them, I have good news: Peloton and Hyrox have teamed up so you can train for your Hyrox race using the offerings of the at-home fitness giant.

You don’t even have to actually be preparing for a real Hyrox race to get some use out of this. You can tap into Peloton’s Hyrox content just to spice up your existing workouts. You never know—it could make you want to compete in the race.

Peloton’s Hyrox offerings

Per Peloton, the joint pairing provides “a curated group of classes that will help you crush your next (or first!) Hyrox race.” Right now, all this means is that Peloton has taken the time to group together pre-existing, on-demand classes that match up with certain elements of training for a race.

A traditional Hyrox race involves those eight functional stations I mentioned:

• a 1000-meter SkiErg

• a 50-meter sled push

• a 50-meter sled pull

• a set of 80-meter burpee broad jumps

• a 1000-meter row

• a 200-meter farmer’s carry

• a set of 100-meter sandbag lunges

• 100 wall balls

Thus, Peloton’s curation is designed to prepare you for all of those. Classes are divided into categories designed to do the following:

• Build stamina: This section include interval runs and endurance runs and rides with longer efforts to build your stamina over time. The classes work best on a Peloton Tread or Bike, but you can complete them without either.

• Power training: This section has interval and HIIT row classes, ideally to be completed on the Peloton Row.

• Self-powered push: This section calls on you to move your treadmill belt manually, without using the motor, and is designed to prepare you for the sled push and sled pull.

• Foundational strength: This section includes full- and lower-body strength classes, as well as Bike, Tread, and Row bootcamps to build your strength.

• Recovery and mental stamina: This section incorporates meditation and yoga classes to build your mental stamina and focus, which are pretty necessary for a race of Hyrox’s size and demands.

• Adaptive athletes: This section includes adaptive training classes in seated and standing formats to meet the needs of a variety of athlete types.

Finding Peloton’s Hyrox training

To find the Hyrox training collections from Peloton, the easiest thing to do is just search “Hyrox” on the Peloton app. Along the top of the screen, you’ll see Classes, Collections, Programs, and Music artists. Tap Collections and you’ll get a banner for the Peloton X Hyrox collab. Press that and you’ll get a landing page full of the classes in the sections outlined above.

Credit: Lindsey Ellefson

You can also select specific instructors if you have a favorite whose classes are in the collection.

Each section briefly explains what the classes contained in it should be used for in preparation for a Hyrox race. for instance, under Build stamina, it says, “Prep for 8km Run & Overall Hyrox Endurance.”

You can, of course, add these classes to your Stack (Peloton’s version of a playlist you create for when you want to do multiple workouts back-to-back without taking a break). That’s what I would recommend: Identify the classes you want to take using the mobile app, then add them to your Stack so you can access them easily from the Bike, Tread, Row, or app.

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

Coca-Cola will add a sugar-sweetened Coke to its product lineup, but it’s not going to be nutritionally different from regular Coke—at least not in any way that matters. The difference between sugar and corn syrup has been a hyperfixation of wellness influencers for decades, but the Secretary of Health and Human Services is now posting about how a burger joint offering sugar-laden Coke is part of the plan to make America “healthy” again.

The regular version of Coca-Cola is made with high-fructose corn syrup, which has gotten a (mostly undeserved) bad rap. Orthorexia is now basically a right-wing political position, to the point where there is a whole conservative market sector that wants to drink “correct” soda alongside their “correct” fries. (Those would be fried in beef tallow, which is a whole ‘nother story. If you want the flavor of beef tallow fries without sitting next to a bunch of MAGA guys at a Steak n Shake, try Claire Lower’s recipe to make them at home.)

The difference between sugar and high-fructose corn syrup

If sugar is going back into Coke, what was in it before? High-fructose corn syrup, which is nearly identical to sugar (I’ll get into the differences in one sec, I promise) and which has become a sort of boogeyman of people who like to talk about healthy and unhealthy food. 

Look, it’s true that we shouldn’t eat too much high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and that foods that have it tend to be ultra-processed. You can easily draw a correlation between consuming a lot of HFCS and being at higher risk for health outcomes. But you can also draw that same correlation with regular plain old table sugar. Some sodas use sugar as their sweetener, while others use HFCS. The main difference is that HFCS is cheaper, so if you’re a corporate giant like Coke or Pepsi, you’re going to default to the cheaper thing unless you have a specific reason not to. 

So, here’s the difference. Table sugar is chemically known as sucrose. Each molecule of sucrose has two halves: glucose and fructose, chemically bound to one another. These are all naturally occurring sugars that we find across the living world, and in our diet they mostly come from plants. (The word fructose literally means “fruit sugar.”)

Corn syrup is made from breaking down the starch in corn, which produces glucose. So a regular (non-high-fructose) corn syrup has 100% of its sugar in the form of glucose. Glucose doesn’t taste as sweet as fructose, so it’s not going to work as a soda sweetener on its own. But you can add an enzyme that converts some of the glucose to fructose. If you do your numbers right, you can get the result to be roughly half glucose and half fructose, which means it will taste like sugar. 

The version of HFCS used in soft drinks is 55% fructose, compared to table sugar which is 50% fructose. So while it’s “high-fructose” compared to regular corn syrup, which has no fructose, it’s not actually that high in fructose compared to sugar.

Why the health difference between HFCS and sugar is either tiny or nonexistent

So, sugar isn’t great for you. I think we can all agree on that. I have a breakdown of the science here—basically, sugar is not poison, but it is empty calories and eating too much of it crowds out the foods that provide protein, fiber, vitamins, and other nutrients that a healthy diet needs.

There’s plenty of research on the health effects of what are often abbreviated as “SSBs”—sugar-sweetened beverages. Ironically for this discussion, most of those are sweetened with HFCS. They’re grouped together in the research because they’re basically the same damn thing. 

There are people who will try to tell you that fructose is terrible for us, or that fructose is the reason sugar is bad, but see above about sugar not actually being poison. If you’re afraid of fructose, “high-fructose corn syrup” sounds scary. But, as we previously established, it’s not actually much higher in fructose than regular sugar. 

(By the way, agave nectar? It’s about 80% fructose. It’s gotten a health halo for having a low glycemic index, but that’s just because it’s low in glucose. And it’s low in glucose because it’s high in fructose. So if you’re avoiding HFCS because of the fructose, you really shouldn’t be subbing in agave nectar if you want to stay ideologically consistent.)

Anyway, when pressed, people who say sugar is better for you than HFCS will point out that it is higher in fructose. OK, that’s true—the sugars are 55% fructose in HFCS-55, roughly 50% in sucrose. But even if fructose is slightly worse for your health than glucose, how much sugar are you eating that the 5% difference between the two sweeteners is making or breaking health outcomes? 

The World Health Organization recommends people eat 5% or fewer of their calories in the form of “free” sugars (similar to added sugars). That’s 100 calories, if you’re a person who eats 2,000 a day. The U.S. guidelines are a little less ambitious, suggesting we stay under 5% to 10%, or about 100 to 200 calories/day. That’s 25 to 50 grams of added sugar per day. A single 16.9-ounce bottle of Coke breaks that limit, but just barely (55 grams of sugar), whether it’s made with sugar or HFCS. 

So let’s say you stay under that limit. If you’re drinking Coke with HFCS, 30.25 grams of those sugars are from fructose. If you’re drinking Coke made with cane sugar, you’re getting 27.5 grams of fructose. That’s a difference of less than three grams. You think some kind of health outcome hinges on whether those three grams of sugar are one type of sugar versus another?

What if you routinely have more than one Coke a day? Let’s say you have 10. Then you’re getting 27.5 extra grams of fructose (and 27.5 fewer of glucose) compared to drinking sugar-sweetened Cokes. In this case, you do have a problem, and the problem is that you are drinking ten Cokes a day. That’s 550 grams of sugar per day, or 2,200 calories worth, which is basically an entire day’s calories for a small-to-average sized person. 

The real reason why Coke is doing this

Nobody cares about those 3 (or 30) grams of sugar. When Coca-Cola announced its plans to add a sugar-sweetened Coke to the lineup, it didn’t say that its executives were worried about customers’ health, or anything like that. Rather, Coca-Cola heard that people would pay money for a version of Coke that loudly announced it was sugar-sweetened, and it wants that money! 

Specifically, the company said: “As part of its ongoing innovation agenda, this fall in the United States, the company plans to launch an offering made with U.S. cane sugar to expand its Trademark Coca-Cola product range. This addition is designed to complement the company’s strong core portfolio and offer more choices across occasions and preferences.”

Coca-Cola’s CEO put it even more plainly in an earnings call, according to reporting from the Washington Post: “We are definitely looking to use the whole toolbox, the whole toolkit of available sweetening options to some extent where there are consumer preferences.”

So Coke is not changing its regular formula; it’s just introducing a new variation. You already have Diet Coke (sweetened with aspartame), Coke Zero (sweetened with aspartame plus acesulfame potassium), Coca-Cola Classic (the HFCS one), and a new offering, yet unnamed, that will be sweetened with cane sugar. 

This fits right in with Coke’s interest in providing whatever it thinks people will buy. There is no earthly reason to offer Diet Coke and Coke Zero, but the two drinks have slightly different branding and people say they taste slightly different, so by golly Coke will sell them both for as long as it seems like a good business decision. Just like it sold Tab (the original diet cola made by Coke) alongside Diet Coke all the way up to 2020. 

The punchline to all this is that Coke has already been selling a sugar-sweetened version of Coke all along. In some markets, you’ll see yellow bottlecaps on Coca-Cola bottles in the spring. That’s kosher-for-Passover Coke, made with sugar instead of corn syrup since corn is a grain. Year-round, you can also find Mexican Coke, imported in glass bottles, which is also made with sugar rather than corn syrup. People say the sugar Cokes taste different from standard. I’ve tasted both and cannot detect a difference. 

Which brings us back to RFK, Jr’s proud announcement that Steak ‘n Shake (a health food establishment, right?) will be serving sugar-sweetened Coke in glass bottles just over a week from now. I’d bet money it’s not waiting for Coca-Cola to introduce its new product, and are just planning to serve Mexican Coke.