| Today’s letter |
| Two numbers on the back of the can, and what to add instead |
| My friend Deb has been buying the gut health soda since the spring. She keeps four cans in the door of the fridge and drinks one most afternoons at about three o’clock. Deb is fifty-eight, and for most of her adult life somebody has been telling her she does food wrong. A swap she could keep felt like a win, and this was the one that stuck. |
| Then in July a headline went around about what is in those cans, and her daughter sent it to her. Deb put the phone face down on the kitchen table and told me she felt stupid. That was her word. It is the word I hear more than any other, and it has never once been the right one. |
| “How did I fall for that?” |
| Deb is not careless. She ran the front desk at a plumbing supply for twenty two years, and she still checks the date on the milk before it goes in her cart. When her doctor told her to cut down on soda, she cut down on soda… and then she went looking for something to put in its place. The aisle handed her a can with fiber printed on the front. |
| So she bought it, week after week, and she believed she had solved one small thing. Nobody in that aisle mentioned that the fiber came with about as much sugar as fiber. When the headline landed, she did what she has always done and assumed the problem was her own judgment. Deb decided she had been gullible. |
| Here’s what gets me. |
| Deb read that can exactly the way it was built to be read. None of it was her fault. |
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| Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study that went and looked at the cans themselves. |
| In July, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill presented an analysis of 108 prebiotic sodas sold in the United States between 2021 and 2025. Nobody was tested and nobody was put on a diet. They simply read the labels, front and back, on every can. |
| What they were measuring was the distance between the promise on the front of a can and the numbers on the side of it. That distance has a name in nutrition research. It is called the health halo, and it is the reason one word like prebiotic can make everything else in a can look better than it is. |
| What they found |
| NUTRITION 2026, American Society for Nutrition. Soto Díaz and Smith Taillie, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
| The front of the can (gut health) |
| Prebiotic, fiber, gut health, and on some cans the words no added sugar sitting on a product that still carried around 10 grams of total sugars from juice. Nearly two thirds also used non-nutritive sweeteners. |
| The panel on the back (5 and 5) |
| Across the 108 cans, the average 12 ounce serving held about 5 grams of fiber and about 5 grams of sugar, at roughly 35 calories. Fiber ran from 2 grams to 9 grams, depending on the brand. |
| A woman under fifty needs about 25 grams of fiber a day. That is five cans, and 25 grams of sugar riding along with them. |
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| In other words, there is fiber in the can. Not much of it… and it arrives with about as much sugar as fiber. |
| Deb’s judgment was fine, and so is yours. The number that settled the question was printed on the side, where nobody is meant to look. |
| So why does the front of a package work on all of us, even on the careful ones? |
| One claim on the front sets your opinion of everything behind it. Your eye takes the strongest word on the package and scores the rest of the product up to match, before you have read a single number. That word is chosen, and the space it sits in is the most expensive space in the store. The numbers on the back are the part the law makes a company get right. |
| Deb never stood a chance in that aisle. Neither did you, I’d bet. |
| That’s the part no one says out loud… the front of the can is an ad, and she was reading it the way you read a label. |
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| Try this today |
| Pick up whatever you drink for your gut and give it a quarter turn, to the Nutrition Facts panel, then read two numbers: dietary fiber and total sugars. If the sugar number matches the fiber number or beats it, the can is a drink and not a fiber source. Keep drinking it if you like it. Then put the fiber where it costs you nothing, into a meal you are already eating today: a cup of raspberries on your yogurt is 8 grams, half a cup of black beans in tonight’s dinner is about 7, a pear with the skin left on is 5.5. Any one of those beats the average can, and it comes attached to a food instead of a claim. |
| Nothing has to leave your fridge. You just stop asking one can to do a job it was never built for. |
| Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick. |
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| None of this works because raspberries are magic. They are not. Fiber does its job by the gram, and grams are the one thing the front of a package never has to tell you. |
| Deb still buys the soda. She keeps it on the counter and gives it the quarter turn first now, which took four seconds to learn and one headline to feel foolish about. Nobody in that story should have felt foolish, and least of all her. |
| It took Deb a summer and a headline to get here. There’s still time for you. |
| So if you have been feeling stupid about a can in your fridge… |
| It was never your fault. |
| — Cole |
| P.S. How many of those cans do you drink in a week? Hit reply with just the number. I’ll tell you tomorrow how that compares. |
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