New Grads, Perk Up Your ears

????????????????A month after earning a bachelor’s degree in English, I launched my career at the Indiana Chamber. It seems like yesterday. But … it wasn’t. I celebrated my 15-year anniversary last week.

An interesting article on CNN.com reveals the top employers for new graduates based on a survey of business students at colleges around the world.

Among the coveted employers:

The Coca-Cola Company
Is there a more recognizable, more iconic American brand than Coca-Cola? That’s what draws young people to work for the company – the chance to work on products that they’ve been around, enjoyed and seen millions of advertisements for their whole lives.

L’Oreal
It’s no wonder that working for one of the world’s biggest beauty brands is attractive to young workers. With Kiehls, Maybelline, Urban Decay and Clarisonic under its umbrella, employees can have many different jobs with various brands while still staying within the company.

Plus, there are some great benefits, like flexible work options, paternity leave, adoption assistance and 13 weeks of paid maternity leave, among others. And yes, employees receive discounts on products.

Nestle
Sure, getting to work for a company responsible for some of the most famous chocolate brands sounds delicious. Even more appealing for young workers is the company’s policy of promoting people from within. In fact, 80% of positions within Nestle are filled by current employees, according to the company.

Keep Your Hands Off My Coca-Cola!

Let’s pull a Marty McFly and go back 30 years … this time, to 1985.

That was the year Back to the Future became a cultural phenomenon (hence my McFly reference). Another staple of the times was Miami Vice, which won over a generation with its flashy music and fashion. But do you remember Coca-Cola’s disastrous rebranding campaign, which introduced “New Coke?”

You could say it fizzled.

As rival Pepsi ate up the success of its “Pepsi Challenge” (consumers participated in blind taste tastes and found they preferred Pepsi), Coca-Cola did the unthinkable: replace its classic version with something new.

People weren’t happy. In fact, they were outraged. So outraged, in fact, that Coca-Cola pulled the plug on the campaign after just 79 days.

Gulp.

Relive the drama with this History.com story. Here’s an except:

On April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola Company chairman and CEO Roberto Goizueta stepped before the press gathered at New York City’s Lincoln Center to introduce the new formula, which he declared to be “smoother, rounder, yet bolder – a more harmonious flavor.” The press, however, said what Goizueta couldn’t admit: New Coke tasted sweeter and more like Pepsi.

Had it been an opera, the Lincoln Center performance would have been a tragedy to devoted fans of Coke’s original formula. Rather than divide its market share between two sugar sodas, Coca-Cola discontinued its 99-year classic recipe and locked Formula 7x away in an Atlanta bank vault with the intention that it never again see the light of day.

“Some may choose to call this the boldest single marketing move in the history of the packaged goods business,” Goizueta said. “We simply call it the surest move ever made.” Coca-Cola president Donald Keough echoed the certainty: “I’ve never been as confident about a decision as I am about the one we’re announcing today.”

New Coke left a bitter taste in the mouths of the company’s loyal customers. Within weeks of the announcement, the company was fielding 5,000 angry phone calls a day. By June, that number grew to 8,000 calls a day, a volume that forced the company to hire extra operators. “I don’t think I’d be more upset if you were to burn the flag in our front yard,” one disgruntled drinker wrote to company headquarters. At protests staged by grassroots groups such as “Old Cola Drinkers of America,” consumers poured the contents of New Coke bottles into sewer drains. One Seattle consumer even filed suit against the company to force it to provide the old drink.

Time to Come Down from America’s Sugar High

I hate going to the dentist.

And despite my dentist and her staff being pleasant people who are incredibly understanding of my bizarre anxiety about getting my teeth cleaned – it’s not a place I’ll ever feel excited to go.

On a trip there in May, the hygienist informed me that diet soda has more acidic properties than Mountain Dew. And, if you drink a sugary drink you should drink it as quickly as possible and then swish your mouth out with water or milk, because letting it sit on your teeth causes cavities (you might say, “duh,” but I thought my twice-a-day brushing was doing enough to prevent that – and I just had my first ever cavities filled, so apparently it’s news to me).

At that, I stopped drinking soda. All of it: diet, regular, lemon-lime. Done.

Just a few weeks later during a trip to the doctor, I discovered I had lost 12 pounds without changing my diet or exercise routine, aside from cutting out the soda. Woah!

In late July, the Associated Press ran a story about Coca-Cola Co., PepsiCo Inc. and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Inc. experiencing a decline in soda sales for the second quarter in North America. The story notes that according to Beverage Digest, “per capita soda consumption in the U.S. has been slipping steadily since 1998 amid concerns that sugary drinks fuel weight gain.”

But, it’s not just about weight gain. And, it’s not just about soda – though that’s certainly where a number of Americans are getting their increased sugar.

Researchers out of the University of Utah recently completed a study on the sugar levels in mice and gave the mice a diet which had 25% of calories coming from sugar (incidentally, that’s a “safe” recommendation by federal government standards – about the same amount of sugar you’d get from three cans of soda per day) and published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

The researchers found that increase in sugar in mice led to male mice producing less offspring and defending fewer territories than their counterparts. Worse yet, female mice died at almost twice the rate of their counterparts that were fed a different diet.  

So, it’s not just about weight gain, decreased fertility and lethargy. It’s about death.

And whether your sugar is coming from soda or eating cookie dough (which you really shouldn’t do anyway: salmonella!), it’s time to cut back. My personal motivation to cut down on sugar is a combination of weight loss, good health and avoiding that darn dental chair – what’s yours?