Happy 30th Birthday, Diet Coke!

No Comments | Written on August 10, 2012 at 1:00 pm, by Lesley Kennedy

Coca-Cola Co.

There are just some things that just make life worth living: Kisses from your baby. A perfect sunset after a bad day. Diet Coke.

And whether you sip the soda “just for the taste of it,” slurp it down a few times a week or — like us — chug it all day long, you may want to pause and sing a little “Happy Birthday” chorus to the drink that turns 30 this year.

And what a way to enter adulthood (yep, adulthood, right?): Diet Coke reigns as the most popular diet soft drink in the world, reports The Guardian in the U.K. It may have spawned all sorts of imitations, but it has continued to hold its crown since 1982.

Celeb Diet Coke heads include Bill Clinton, Warren Beatty, Barack Obama, Ellen Barkin, Julianne Moore and Katie Holmes, according to the Tumblr blog “Celebrities Drinking Diet Coke.”(Yes, that’s a real thing.)

And commercials for the soda over the years have starred the likes of George Michael, Paula Abdul, Elton John, Batman, the cast of Friends, Adrien Brody and Heidi Klum. (Although we prefer the “Diet Coke Break” ad from 1994, where the ladies in the office pause to ogle the construction worker.)

DietCoke.com shows there are currently six varieties of the soda, including the original, Caffeine Free, Diet Coke Plus (“refreshing taste and several essential nutrients”), Diet Coke Lime, Diet Coke Cherry and Diet Coke sweetened with Splenda.

Boy, does that make us thirsty. As The Princess Diaries author Meg Cabot writes in her book Queen of Babble: “Diet Coke does not contain nasty chemicals. It contains lovely and delicious carbonation, caffeine and aspartame. What’s unnatural about that?”