Somewhere in Orange County, inside a 7-Eleven store in the spring of 1976, the Big Gulp was unleashed.

Thus began the era of the giant soda, and some critics say it’s no coincidence that soon after – late ’70s, early ’80s – America started getting seriously fat.

Efforts to stem the ceaseless flow of sugary soft drinks have popped up here and there in the decades since, but one after the other they’ve fizzled out, usually under the weight of heavy lobbying and spending by the soda industry, sometimes aided by a backlash from the public, as happend with New York’s ban that went flat.

The latest proposed restriction is a bill in the California Legislature that would require labels on all sugar-sweetened beverages that contain “added caloric sweeteners” with at least 75 calories per 12 ounces. The labels, which also would go on fountain dispensers and vending machines, would warn consumers that drinking the beverages “contributes to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay.”

Considering that voters in two California cities resoundingly rejected soda-tax measures in 2012, and similar bills in the heavily Democratic Legislature have gone nowhere, SB 1000 faces an uncertain fate. It was passed by the Senate Health Committee by a 5-2 vote, but the Appropriations Committee stashed it in its “suspense file” reserved for bills that would require taxpayer expenditures (this one in the form of stepped-up enforcement). The committee must decide by May 23 whether to send SB 1000 and other bills in the suspense file to the full Senate, says Ryan Guillen, an aide to Sen. Bill Monning, the Carmel Democrat who sponsored the bill.

The soda industry is taking it seriously.

“I don’t think it’s doomed,” said Karen Hanretty, a spokeswoman for CalBev, the trade association that represents California’s non-alcoholic beverage industry. She said that if Monning retools the bill to remove state inspection costs entirely (which have been penciled in at about $400,000 annually), the bill could “very well” advance to the Senate floor.

“We take all these efforts to single out beverages, and claims that they are unique contributors to obesity, very seriously,” she said.

WHY, IN MY DAY, WE DRANK LITTLE SODAS

Coca-Cola was invented in 1886 by an Atlanta pharmacist named John Pemberton, who mixed up the original formula in a kettle in his backyard. Yes, it was made with cocaine extract, at first, as well as the caffeinated kola nut. He sold about nine drinks a day and made about $50 in sales that first year. He sold the business in 1887, for $2,300.

By the turn of the century, Coke was available across the country, but only in containers of premixed syrup. Soda jerks would combine the syrup with carbonated water and ice at the local soda fountain, and that’s how you got your Coke.

That all changed around 1910, when Coke began partnerships with independent bottling companies. There were thousands of bottlers all over the United States.

The original bottle was 6.5 ounces, and it was clear, until the famous contoured green bottle, made by the Root Glass Co. of Terre Haute, Ind., came into use in 1915. The bottle stayed tiny for a couple of decades. Then, in 1934, a struggling upstart, Pepsi-Cola, which had tried unsuccessfully to sell itself to Coca-Cola (the last time for $50,000), came up with an ingenious plan: Put Pepsi product in a 12-ounce recycled beer bottle, while charging the same 5-cent price as Coke did for its 6.5-ounce drink.

The bigger Pepsi was tested in Baltimore. “It immediately scored in blue-collar neighborhoods where a Depression-era nickel buying twice the drink made Pepsi the obvious choice, regardless of Coca-Cola’s ubiquitous advertising,” author Mark Pendergrast wrote in his 1993 history of Coke, “For God, Country and Coca-Cola.” Soon, “Pepsi was selling nationwide in a motley assortment of recycled beer bottles,” and Pepsi survived.

Coke stubbornly stayed with its tiny bottle until 1955, when, faced with the possibility of losing its status as the global leader, introduced “king-sized” bottles of 10 and 12 ounces.

AT LAST, FREEDOM OF CHOICE

In May of 1976, the hottest-selling drink at the 300 or so 7-Eleven stores in Southern California was Coke’s 16-ounce glass bottle, which cost 70 cents, including 10 cents deposit. Dennis Potts was merchandising manager for the Southern California stores, working out of his office in Irvine, when Coca-Cola approached him with an idea: How about selling Coke in a 32-ounce cup from 7-Eleven’s fountain dispensers? At the time, that size for a fountain drink was unheard of, not even at fast-food restaurants and ballparks, where most fountain drinks were sold.

Potts sent a couple of cases of the giant cups – a total of 600 or 1,000, he can’t remember – to a 7-Eleven franchise in Orange County. Which one, he can’t recall.

“In less than a week, she called back and said, ‘I need more of these cups. I’ve sold them all out,’” Potts said. Within months, the cups were in stores all over the Southwest, Northwest and South.

The original big cup had a Coke logo, and it was made of thick paper. The bottom was round, but the top folded over and was held together by a clip. The company that made the cups, out of Colorado, moved its operation to Canada, interrupting supply for a period. That gave 7-Eleven time to commission a new cup, with a regular round top. 7-Eleven Inc., of Dallas, put its own red color scheme on it, and the company’s in-house ad agency came up with a simple name: the Big Gulp. The price was 39 cents.

“They just sold like hotcakes, and our fountain business absolutely doubled,” Potts said.

7-Eleven also pioneered, if you will, the self-serve soda, out of necessity. At the time, the dispensers could only slosh in about an ounce of soda per second, so it took the clerk behind the counter 30 seconds to fill up the 32-ounce cup (it didn’t really hold that much; they had to leave room for ice, and some space at the top so it wouldn’t spill). Clerks were spending much of their time serving sodas instead of other tasks.

“We said, ‘Let’s try an experiment: Let’s turn it (the fountain) around and let the customers fill it up themselves,’” Potts said. 7-Eleven had been selling coffee in to-go cups since 1964, and customers liked making it their way.

But there were a lot of risks with the self-serve soda gambit. “Will it be sanitary? Will the customer know how to do it? Will the customer cheat – drink half of it and come back and refill it? Let’s try it,” Potts said. “Well, our sales doubled again.”

New, faster fountains were put in at all 7-Eleven stores, and by 1980, Big Gulps were in all of its 2,000-some stores. A TV commercial slogan said: “7-Eleven’s Big Gulp gives you another kind of freedom: freedom of choice.” The customers didn’t cheat enough to put the stores out of business, and the idea of life without a self-serve soda fountain now seems almost undemocratic.

THE SODA ARMS RACE

The Big Gulps tapped into a yearning for larger soda portions that businesses clearly hadn’t seen coming. Soda vessels ballooned accordingly: In 1984, 7-Eleven introduced the Super Big Gulp (44 ounces); in 1989, the Double Gulp followed at 64 ounces, which for Coca-Cola Classic equals about 740 calories. But that size proved too big to tote around or drive with, so the size was reduced to the current 50 ounces. The human adult stomach generally has the capacity to hold about 30 ounces at a time.

Meanwhile, a McDonald’s large drink went from 7 ounces in 1955 to 21 ounces in 1974; 32 ounces in 1988; 42 ounces in 1999, when the large was upgraded to Supersize; back to 32 ounces when the Supersize menu was phased out, in 2004.

Some of the shrinkage in recent years could be attributed to manufacturers responding to consumers’ desires for “healthier” products. In 2009, Coke rolled out smaller cans of 7.5 ounces and 90 calories, compared with the 12-ounce can’s 140 calories. Mini-cans are becoming popular at children’s birthday parties, and among adults who don’t want a full 12 ounces but feel obligated to drink the rest of a can instead of throwing it away.

But a mini still has about 6 teaspoons of sugar in it.

That’s too much sugar for kids, says Dr. Patricia Riba, who helps families with weight-loss and food issues at Dr. Riba’s Health Club. She says children’s options should be limited to water and white milk – and sodas, with their empty calories, shouldn’t even be around the house or at parties.

“I do think that soda and sugary drinks are a huge culprit in the obesity epidemic,” she said.

In 1980, the adult obesity rate was about 15 percent; today it’s about 30 percent. Among children age 6-11, it went from 7 percent in 1980 to about 18 percent today. Among those 12-19, the rate went from 5 percent to 21 percent. Nearly 40 percent of California children are overweight or obese.

Decades ago, Riba said, a soda – in that glass bottle – was not a “to go” product. “It was a special thing, it wasn’t something you walked around with outside.”

Kids who experienced the explosion in soda availability now have children and can pass along habits – bad and good. “I’m noticing more and more adults drinking these green drinks, like kale, and teens doing that, as well,” she said. “As adults, we can be doing more healthy things and the kids will pick it up. They have to see it.”

The architects of the soda surge don’t feel any particular responsibility for the rise in obesity. Potts, who is 75 and retired, living in Lexington, Ky., said the fact that the Big Gulp was an overnight success shows that the demand among consumers was there all along.

“We didn’t do anything the customer didn’t want,” he said. “Maybe we should feel ashamed, but if you’re meeting customer needs and wants and desires, maybe that’s not so bad.”

Danny Ginsburg, aka the “Soda Sommelier,” runs a bottling plant in Gardena called Real Soda in Real Bottles. He produces a range of specialty soft drinks – some of them hard to find, like Bubble Up – and prefers ones with real cane sugar, not the high-fructose corn syrup that became the industry standard in the 1980s. He says soda is just one component of obesity.

“Yes, there’s a problem with obesity. However, the problem has to do with teaching people to be healthier and more active, generally, and soda is not, in my opinion, a staple item. It’s a treat.”

THE FIGHT AGAINST REGULATION

Did the soda “bubble” directly cause the nationwide expansion of our waistlines? There are too many other factors to say definitively, only associations.

The California Center for Public Health Advocacy, based at UC Davis, says the connection is clear. The group is backing Sen. Monning’s bill to put warning labels on sodas, pointing to research that shows consumption of soda raises the risk of disease to the liver because it has to process so much of the liquid, converting the sugar to fat that is stored in the organ.

“We weren’t really designed to consume concentrated liquid sugar like that,” said the group’s founder, Harold Goldstein, “so the premise of SB 1000 is, we think consumers have the right to know this information. We’re not telling anybody what to drink, but at least give them the information. Isn’t that what America is all about, the free enterprise system?”

A 2013 study co-authored by Goldstein and published by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research showed that consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (soda, energy drinks and sports drinks) by California children under 12 fell between 2005 and 2012. Among the 2-5 group, 19 percent drank at least one “SSB” a day, down from 27 percent; in the 6-11 group, the rate declined from 43 percent to 32 percent. But among adolescents, age 12 to 17, consumption rose from 60 percent to 65 percent.

Hanretty, from the California soda trade group, supports the industry’s position by noting a 2013 CDC report that shows a consistent trend of declining soda consumption, beginning in 1999. And yet diabetes rates continue to climb: Between 1999 and 2008, the rate of diabetes and pre-diabetes among adolescents rose from 9 percent to 23 percent.

“I can’t get my head around the correlation that consumption is down, diabetes is up, and somehow soda is responsible for diabetes,” she said.

She offered a list of 500 products that would require labels if SB 1000 became law, including Capri Sun and V8. Energy drinks likely would be covered, as well, although they’re not part of CalBev’s coalition.

In El Monte and Richmond, voters in 2012 rejected ballot measures that would have raised taxes by a penny per ounce. The margins were staggeringly against: 67 percent and 77 percent, respectively.

But the idea might be gaining favor statewide: According to a Field Poll of 1,002 residents in February, two-thirds supported a tax, as long as the proceeds were used for nutrition and physical-fitness programs for kids. Seventy-four percent favored a labeling requirement like Monning’s bill.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2221 or lhall@ocregister.com