The rumor: Mountain Dew lowers your sperm count.

The reality: False (although it may make you lose your teeth, which can put a serious damper on finding a mate, anyway).

Normally, debunked rumors vanish quickly from consumers’ radars. But the Mountain Dew myth has proved so resilient that PepsiCo (PEP), the owner of the beverage brand since 1964, addresses it directly on the company’s website.
 

“From time to time these misleading rumors circulate throughout the country and it is difficult to say why or how they began. We would never allow harmful ingredients to be included in our soft drinks. We want you to be able to keep drinking gallons of Dew for all eternity.”

Now before you rejoice by consuming gallons of Dew for all eternity, let’s take a step back and consider the allegations at hand.

Sometime in the mid-90’s, a series of rumors swept the nation about one of Mountain Dew’s key ingredients: Yellow #5. Depending on which playground you were on, or who you were talking to, the neon-yellow dye purportedly killed off sperm, shrank testicles or, worse, shriveled the... cough... manhood.

Yellow #5, known in scientific circles as tartrazine, is one of the most widely used food coloring dyes in the world. It can be found in all sorts of products, including cereals, candies, jam, yogurt, soaps, shampoos and even in prescription medications and pills.

In other words, if Yellow #5 -- which has been around since 1916 -- really did cause impotence, the human race would have been in serious trouble a long time ago. In fact, there's no scientific evidence proving that Yellow #5 is harmful to sperm or anything else in men’s nether regions.

Still, the rumor has serious implications for Pepsi. Who wants to sell a beverage with that kind of baggage?

Perhaps that’s why Pepsi has positioned Mountain Dew as a real man’s man beverage. On commercials and on the web, young, virile men drink the carbonated yellow stuff while skateboarding, playing basketball and snowboarding off intense, icy cliffs. The drink practically screams: “I’ve got balls and I know how to use them!!”

Whatever Pepsi’s strategy is for selling the Dew, it’s working. According to Beverage Digest, in 2008 Mountain Dew was the 4th best selling soft drink in the United States. Moreover, Diet Mountain Dew was the top growing beverage of the year.

Still, Pepsi still has yet to kill the rumor once and for all.

On the relationship advice site DearCupid.com, one concerned gentleman recently wrote:

“I been drinking Moutain [sic] Dew ever since it came out in production. I do want to be a father someday and I want to know if my over obsessive consumption of Mountain Dew will have an effect on that. Sometimes I drink about 4 to 5 cans a week, when I'm in the mood I drink up to 7 cans a day.”

Regardless, anyone who drinks 7 cans of soda a day probably won’t find the time to father anything. But the real scary thing is how some people are taking the rumor to its next logical conclusion... Mountain Dew as a contraceptive!

Joe Conaghan, a director at the Pacific Fertility Center, addressed the veracity of this birth-control method in Syracuse University’s Daily Orange.  "This is simply not true, and is just one of the many stupid ideas that reckless young people perpetuate about sex," he said.

Oh well -- condoms taste better anyway.