City Lights:

My dad used to keep a poster in his office with the words “Murphy’s Law” written at the top and two columns of pessimistic (but hilarious) sayings beneath them. Among my favorites was “Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral or fattening.” Considering that jazz was once called the devil’s music and that Clark Gable shocked the nation by saying “damn” in “Gone With the Wind,” there’s at least some historical reason to agree.

Nowadays, fewer things are considered illegal or immoral, but fattening . . . well, we’ve gotten more astute in that category. Take the recent study by UCLA and the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, which labeled soda consumption as one of the major factors in expanding California’s waistlines. The study reported that in Huntington Beach, 21% of adults and 41% of children and adolescents drink more than one soda a day, and that adults who drink one or more sodas per day are 27% more likely to be overweight or obese.

Of course, drinking soda isn’t illegal, and since they don’t grind up newborn kittens to make it, I suppose it isn’t immoral, either. But if soda truly is fattening, how much are people willing to abstain from it?

The answer, it appears, is quite a bit. Tuesday morning, I headed to downtown Huntington Beach with my pad and pen, trying to determine just how much of a grip bubbly drinks had on the population. This is, after all, Surf City, a town that revels in having fun in the sunshine. And with BJ’s, Killarney, Sharkeez and other restaurants lining Main Street, surely a good chunk of that 21/41% must congregate here.

Not Tuesday, apparently. The first person I spoke to was an admirably slender woman sitting outside Jan’s Health Bar, reading a newspaper while she waited for fresh-squeezed orange juice and a soy turkey sandwich. She told me she rarely drank soda at all growing up and had completely purged it from her diet two months ago.

Jan’s is a health store, of course, so I decided to mill around some of the more traditional restaurants. But the soda addicts still eluded me. A pair of sisters at Killarney, who were there to celebrate one of their birthdays, had just ordered a pair of vodka tonics. When it came to soda, though, they were downright puritans.

“To be honest with you, it’s a little bit too sweet,” one of them said.

“When we come downtown, it’s either alcohol or water,” her sister replied, adding that she only tried soft drinks occasionally when she was hungover.

Over by BJ’s, a pair of muscular guys in black shirts and sunglasses told me they laid off soda almost completely. It had too many empty calories, they said, and they preferred simple water or juice. A woman on the pier told me she had started a detox a few months ago, eliminated soft drinks from her diet and quickly lost 30 pounds.

This didn’t seem like a town ruled by Coke or Sprite. But finally, on the pier, I came across my first two soda lovers of the day — a young couple with a baby in a stroller. The woman sheepishly admitted that she guzzled sodas “all day long,” while the man said he had at least one Dr. Pepper a day.

“I know it’s unhealthy, but I still drink them,” he said, noting that he occasionally forced himself to go a day without.

So maybe, despite soda’s influence on the waistlines of Huntington Beach, it’s a curable addiction after all. And if you’d like to discuss that notion further, I’d be happy to meet you over a tall cup of coffee.

City Editor MICHAEL MILLER can be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected] .