In this scenario, the soda would be so powerful that it would be tricking you into thinking you were burning at least some of its calories, which you weren’t. And this might explain why, as soda drinking started to climb in the 1980s, the rate of obesity followed, in a strikingly parallel curve on the charts. If we got hooked on soda that fooled our metabolism in this way, we would have given up more than our free will; we would have handed the processed food industry a key to overrun our biology.
