Candy or medicine?: Shoddy Goods 047
Just what are cough drops, anyway?
I'm Jason Toon and one of my favorite parts of writing Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stories behind consumer culture, is digging into conventional wisdom from when I was a kid and getting to the bottom of it. So it was satisfying to settle this one once and for all…
My production of saliva is increasing already
You couldn't win. There they were, in the same rack as the candy, a luscious pair of bright red cherries tempting you from the box. In my neck of the woods, the most common brand was Luden's. In yours, maybe it was Smith Brothers or Pine Brothers. But the craving was the same. You'd ask your mom if you could get some and she'd say:
"That's not candy, it's medicine."
Then one day you have a sore throat, a genuine sore throat, no faking. It really hurts. The pain is worth it. Your chance at cherry bliss has ripened at last! Then your mom kills that dream, too:
"That's not real medicine. It might as well be candy."
And then she makes you take those gross mentholated ones that set your sinuses on fire. Even on the rare occasions when you could get your hands on these cherry "cough drops", you couldn't just pop them down one after the other. Their medical-ish trappings conjured a vague sense that you might OD if you ate too many. But, like, really?
Well, I've decided 51 years is long enough to wonder. I'm getting to the bottom of it. Are these things candy or are they medication? The short answer: both… kind of.
Horehound on my trail
The story starts in 1847 in Poughkeepsie, New York. A vagabond street peddler named Sly Hawkins was hungry and broke. So he made a deal with the owner of a restaurant and candy store, James Smith, a Scottish immigrant: a meal or two in exchange for Sly's personal recipe for "cough candy". Even from the very beginning, nobody could make their mind up what this stuff was.
James Smith & Sons Compound of Wild Cherry Cough Candy was soon being advertised “for the Cure of Coughs, Colds, Hoarseness, Sore Throats, Whooping Cough, Asthma, &C, &C.” You really could just say anything back then. Before long, the renamed cough drops outgrew the restaurant and became the family's main business. When James passed in 1866, his sons William and Andrew took over.
It's their iconic bearded mugs that have graced the boxes for generations. Contrary to the folkloric interpretation of the packaging, their names were not "Trade" and "Mark" - people back then were weird, but not weird enough to name their kids "Trade" and "Mark". Nor, contrary to some accounts, did they invent the term "cough drop", which can be found in newspapers as far back as 1798.
Already old-timey even in olden times
Philadelphia confectioner J. Herman Pine devised his own "softish" cough drops in 1870. The Pine Brothers website doesn't mention a brother; maybe he made that part up to ride those Smith Brothers coattails. In 1881, one William Luden came up with own his hard-candy cough-drop formula but didn't bother to invent an imaginary brother. All of these early cough-drop magnates experimented with a variety of flavors: honey, licorice, menthol, and the evocatively named horehound.
But it wasn't until after World War II that they hit on the flavor that would make them a fixation for generations of kids: cherry. Like Jerry Seinfeld lamented, why did they wait so long? "They know we like the cherry. Start with cherry!"
Demulcent until proven guilty
So what exactly is the case for these cough drops' medical benefits? What are the active ingredients? The Luden's and Smith Brothers labels list only one: pectin.
Yes, that's the same pectin behind the gelatinous texture of jams and jellies. A versatile little heteropolysaccharide, pectin turns out to have a bunch of other oddball uses, too, from repairing broken tobacco leaves in cigars, to stabilizing ink on secret maps in World War II, to, according to one study, enabling victims of the Chernobyl disaster to effectively excrete radioactive isotopes. There are many ways to serve.
But among the various medical applications on pectin's WebMD page, there's nothing about relieving sore throats. The claim rests on the fact that pectin is an "oral demulcent": it coats the mucous membranes and diminishes inflammation. So yes, it can offer relief. But then presumably so can the thousands of other food products that contain pectin.
Similar deal with Pine Brothers, which uses glycerin as a demulcent, and the honey-flavored Honees, which uses (no points for guessing) honey. Yes, they'll demulce the bejesus out of your poor battered mucous membranes. Are they any more effective than, say, a cup of tea with honey in it, which nobody would think of marketing as a medication? Not necessarily.
We are shocked, shocked that anyone would ever mistake this medicine for candy
A dropful of sugar
You might think registering as a medication is more complex than as a food product, and that's probably true, except for one thing: medications don't have to disclose their nutrition facts on the label. So it's not always easy to peer behind that healthful veneer and pin down how these cough drops compare nutritionally to the candy they're often sold right alongside of. Let's figure out what we can.
Luden's and Pine Brothers volunteer some nutritional info on their cherry candies. Smith Brothers declare that their mentholated Honey Lemon drops have 15 calories per drop; they don't say for the flagship cherry flavor, so let's assume it's probably more than that, or they'd be bragging about it.
Here's how all three brands compare to hard candy that's proud to be candy, dammit:
Luden's: weight unknown, 2g sugar, 10 calories
Pine Brothers: 2.15g weight, 1g sugar, 5 calories
Smith Brothers: unknown but probably more than 15 calories
Jolly Rancher: 6g weight, 3.7g sugar, 23 calories
Life Saver: 3.75g weight, 3g sugar, 10 calories
Yankee Traders: 5g weight, 4.3 g sugar, 20 calories
That's a lot of numbers, but basically: gram for gram, self-proclaimed candy is indeed more sugary than these cough drops, but not by much. The typical Luden's, Smith Brothers, or Pine Brothers cherry cough drop might be about half sugar by weight, while a Jolly Rancher or Life Saver is 60-80% sugar.
In other words, they are as sweet as candy, kind of. And they do medicate your throat, kind of. Which means that even when contradicting herself, Mom was right both ways. How does she do that?
Specifically medicated, but not too specifically
There’s plenty of medicine that tastes just terrible. And, I know, I know, you’re not supposed to take medicine just because it tastes good. But…was there medicine that you took as a kid that did taste good? Something you kind of looked forward to, even if you only had it when you otherwise felt bad? Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
Put a drop of these stories in your head at bedtime to loosen the phlegm:
I grew up near Poughkeepsie, NY, home of the Smith Bros. It’s small wonder that the old Smith Bros. factory became the Candy Lane factory which was, at one time, the largest manufacture of candy canes in the U.S.