I used to work on a large freighter, and one of my jobs was to fight rust. To do this we used phosphoric acid. Take a spray bottle of phosphoric acid and squirt it on the rust and you’d come back in 20 minutes or so to find it had turned the rust into an inert black substance. We also used the acid for cleaning.

One day I got a face-full of it in the wind and realized that phosphoric acid tasted really familiar, it was that tang in the coke. So I followed Rudd Sound Bites 10 reasons not to drink Coke with a couple nods of my own:

10. If you rub a car bumper with a rumpled-up piece of Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil dipped in Coca-Cola, you can remove rust spots.

9. If you need to clean corrosion from car battery terminals, pour a can of Coca-Cola over the terminals.

8. If you empty a can of coke into a load of greasy clothes, add detergent, and run through a regular cycle, the Coca-Cola will help remove grease stains.

7. Coca-Cola will clean road haze from your windshield.

6. The active ingredient in Coke is phosphoric acid. Its pH is 2.8. It will dissolve a nail in about 4 days. Phosphoric acid also leaches calcium from bones and is a major contributor to the rising increase in osteoporosis.