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Many of the entries in this commonly reproduced list of alternative uses for Coca-Cola are just simple household tips provided by Joey Green in his 1995 book Polish Your Furniture with Panty Hose and on his Wacky Uses for Brand Name Products website. However, the list includes a tacked-on coda positing that Coke is dangerous to drink due to its acidic content: That you can cook and clean with Coke is relatively meaningless from a safety standpoint. You can use a wide array of common household substances (including water) for the same purposes, but that fact alone doesn't necessarily make those substances dangerous to ingest. Nearly all carbonated soft drinks contain carbonic acid, which is moderately useful for tasks such as removing stains and dissolving rust deposits (although plain soda water is much better for some of these purposes than Coca-Cola or other soft drinks, as it doesn't leave a sticky sugar residue behind). Carbonic acid is relatively weak, however, and people have been drinking carbonated water for many years with no detrimental effects. The rest of the claims offered here are specious. Coca-Cola does contain small amounts of citric acid and phosphoric acid; however, all the insinuations about the dangers these acids might pose to people who drink Coca-Cola ignore a simple concept familiar to any first-year chemistry student: concentration. Coca-Cola contains less citric acid than does orange juice, and the concentration of phosphoric acid in Coke is far too small (a mere 11 to 13 grams per gallon of syrup, or about 0.20 to 0.30 per cent of the total formula) to dissolve a steak, a tooth, or a nail overnight. (Much of the item will dissolve eventually, but after a day or two you'll still have most of the tooth, a whole nail, and one very soggy T-bone.) By comparison, the gastric acid in your stomach's digestive fluids is much stronger than any of the acids found in Coca-Cola.
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