Sanka - You deserve better.

Sanka is still is business, it seems. Why? Good question. Apart from trying to sell you a pointless product that wants you to be miserable, does this ad have anything to recommend it? Yup!

You know what happens when you get sleepy? You forget to put the "e" on the end of words, you monster! That's why Sanka misspells caffeine consistently throughout the copy here.

Does coffee mess with your sleep? It may, if you don't understand how it works. After ingesting caffeine, it reaches maximum levels (or "maximum happiness") in your bloodstream within an hour. After that, it'll take between three and six hours for you to come down.

If you want to read more detail than that, go nuts:

http://www.caffeineinformer.com/caffeine-metabolism

http://www.sleepeducation.org/news/2013/08/01/sleep-and-caffeine

So how much caffeine is in stuff? Everyone seems to use one cup of coffee as a benchmark, with about 120 milligrams of caffeine. Now, be careful. That's a cup of coffee, as in, you sitting in a restaurant and the server asks if you want coffee, maybe calls you "honey", and then brings you a thick ceramic cup that holds twelve ounces.

In the last twenty years or so, the actual coffee cup has become a bit of an anachronism, giving way to the "coffee stein" or the "coffee pail" that people carry around with them. If you call the twenty ounce bucket you get from Starbucks "a cup of coffee", go right ahead, but that's like two of the assumed standard servings, there, droopy.

Here's a pretty exhaustive chart of caffeine content:
https://cspinet.org/eating-healthy/ingredients-of-concern/caffeine-chart

But here are the high points that a person might have some hope of memorizing:

-Plain old coffee: about 120mg.
-Black tea: about 70mg.
-Green tea: about 50mg.
-Diet Coke: 40mg.
-Pepsi: 38mg.
-Coke: 35mg.
-Diet Pepsi: 35mg.

A note on tea. "Herbal tea" is always caffeine free. In order to be actual, literal "tea", a drink must have the brewed leaves of camellia sinensis in it. There is only one kind of tea plant in all the wide world: camellia sinensis. The type of tea you wind up with is only determined by when the leaves are picked and how they are dried. To think that any hot drink with planty stuff in it is "tea" is a mistaken assumption. That's not tea. In the case of hot-plant-water, they have to call it "herbal tea" to avoid lying. If you want loads of details, go look on FaceTube for documentaries on tea. Modern Marvels has a complete episode on tea, and it's really interesting (Your mileage may vary.)

This Sanka ad claims that caffeine adds nothing to the flavor of coffee. Incorrect! If you've ever tried that weird caffeinated water brand, "Water Joe", you know that caffeine is bitter. Any sceintific article on caffeine's properties will tell you that. Are you going to accept the opinion of a company that can't even spell right?

Even though Sanka was preaching the gospel of grossness, the ad does offer something worthwhile. Taken out of context, the illustration of the lady pouring a gigantic cup of coffee is pretty neat. Nobody needs to know she's pouring herself a stupid cup of Sanka for jerks, do they? So, let's just take that out of context, shall we?

Click for 1600 px.

Boom. Context completely taken out of. You can keep her in your HDD's folder of clip art for a rainy day... or, this afternoon around three o' clock when you need a little help making it to quitting time. You're welcome!