As a child, I drank a lot of Mountain Dew soda. In fact i loved it so much that I would plead with my mum to always keep one for me so after school, when I got home, there was always one in the fridge. While I enjoyed Coca-cola and its other brand drinks, Mountain Dew was the only Pepsi Co drink I loved and I took a lot of it.
At some point in time in Nigeria, it really went out of market but then in recent times, I started seeing it in shelves recently but this time around in PET and Cans. I wanted to check about it and why it disappeared for a while in my country, but then I came across post associating the drink to infertility and it caught my attention, so I decided to take climb the mountain to get answers about Mountain Dew.
First, the answer is complicated. Mountain dew doesn't cause infertility as a result of why the myth was popular so how did we get here? The myth started with Tartrazine (Yellow Number 5) which is a common food diet and people raised stories that this chemical when ingested orally can act as a spermicide leading to fertility issues in men. If you go to Appalachia, mountain is the lifeblood of the region but while there is no definitive study on mountain dew and infertility, there is certainly prove that drinking too much soda can lead to tooth decay.
I dropped a link to an NPR article by Eliza Barclay where it was noted that that about 26% of pre school children in Appalachia have tooth decay, and about 15% of 18 to 24 year-old adults have had a tooth extraction because of tooth erosion and decay. The drink is so prolific in Appalachia that people hold a bottle everywhere including health conferences and people now refer to the tooth decay as Mountain dew mouth.
The myth is surrounded by three things, Caffeine, Sugar, and Tartrazine. Researcher have carried out a study on the relationship between Tartrazine and infertility and when I read through, I saw different results and conclusions in studies like the article titled "Synthetic Food dyes cause testicular damage via up-regulation of pro-inflammatory cytokines and down-regulation of FSH-R and TESK-1 gene expression" where 25 male Wistar rats were divided into 5 groups and fed with Tartrazine and Erythrosine. At the end of the study, the researcher came to a conclusion that Tartrazine and Erythrosine could impair testicular function.
Another study on Tartrazine on rats that were fed 2 to 3 grams to make and female rat daily for 2 and a half year and found no connection between the dye and infertility. Although the dye as been seen to exacerbate asthma, eczema, and hyperactivity in certain member of the population.
Looking at sugar, I read a study titled "Sugar-sweetened beverage intake in relation to semen quality and reproductive hormone levels in young men' by Chiu, Afeiche, et al. where sugar was associated with poor semen quality in cross sectional studies. So, if we were to blame Mountain dew just like other Sugar beverages for poor quality of semen in men, it is as a result of Sugar and not Tartrazine as it was being portrayed.
Post Reference
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/09/12/221845853/mountain-dew-mouth-is-destroying-appalachias-teeth
https://www.delkovacevicdmd.com/dental-health/truth-mountain-dew-mouth/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/opinion/appalachias-sacrifice.html?_r=0
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34585250/
https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/does-mountain-dew-kill-sperm#causes-of-low-sperm-count
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8312291/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9408620/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4168308/
Image Reference
Image 1 || Flickr || Mountain Dew in Grass
Image 2 || wikimedia Commons || Museo di Chimica Unige
Image 3 || Wikimedia Commons || Raw cane sugar light