This month, the New York Times reported that US President Donald Trump consumes a "dozen Diet Cokes" daily - often delivered by "household staff he summons via a button."
Who knows? Maybe overdosing on all-powerful US corporate brands will help the president "Make America Great Again".
In the meantime, a Washington Post article has taken Trump's Diet Coke habit and run with it, citing a recent study according to which "people who drank diet soda daily were three times more likely to develop stroke and dementia than those who consumed it weekly or less."
Also mentioned in the article is the possibility of weight gain owing to "artificial sweeteners [that] can confuse the brain and the body".
Suggestions of a correlation between soda consumption and deleterious health effects, including diabetes and heart disease, are, of course, nothing new - although Coca-Cola has in the past sought to distract public attention from the bad news by funding more industry-favourable narratives.
To be sure, Coca-Cola is hardly the only culprit in a world so saturated with soft drinks, fast food and other counter-nutritional items that one often wonders how humans are even still alive.
But as the Coca-Cola Company website boasts, Coke is the "most popular and biggest-selling soft drink in history", with an estimated 1.9 billion beverages served globally every day.
In other words, it's a gigantic part of the problem. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.