Here’s a mild love story about a young woman some of you may know, but I’m not going to tell you her name. Deal with it.

About 10 years ago, she was frankly husband-hunting. It was hard for her, because she is very smart — I’m talking genius here — and she needed someone with at least half a shot at keeping up with her.

As you may know, most men are not that smart. Sorry, guys.

She was pretty, but about 15 pounds overweight, and she figured that even smart guys would be more attracted to a woman who was trimmer. I wasn’t paying much attention, but in about six months, she was a smokin’ hot genius.

How’d she do it so fast? She worked out, but she’d always done that. She made just one change.

She cut her pop intake from 16 ounces per day to zero. That’s it.

What surprised me most about this was not that she was able to lose the weight. I was stunned that she was able to swear off pop. The odds were against her.

There is a long-standing, on-and-off partnership between carbonated drink manufacturers and fast-food companies to addict people to pop, and it works. It started around 1966, when Burger King started giving people extra pop for free. Years later, McDonald’s joined in, and made it semi-permanent. You can get any amount of pop for $1.

Speedy Mac is just lying in the weeds until the day when enough people can’t do without big doses of pop every day, and then they’ll have them. At any price they want.

It’s reminiscent of what the tobacco companies did with servicemen between World War I and 1986. Free cigarettes to calm them during wartime, and addict them to an incredibly dangerous product that they might otherwise never have touched.

Not a good comparison, because pop is relatively harmless? Nah. Just as most people were unaware in World War II that cigarettes were killers, consumers are unaware that pop is killing people now.

Studies indicate that one or two sugary drinks daily make people 25 percent more likely to get diabetes. One daily can of pop increases the risk of heart disease in men by 20 percent.

The stuff that makes cola brown has been linked to cancer and vascular disease.

Pop steadily wars against your metabolism. So it may remove your ability to lose weight, permanently.

The ascorbic acid and potassium benzoate in some drinks can form benzene in the body. You don’t want benzene in your body.

Drinking pop every day can cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

And it goes on and on. And the diet pop has big problems, too.

So why were so many people trying to convince you last year that it’s some kind of sin that the Cook County pop tax would have saved 300 jobs? It’s because of the dough. There’s a lot at stake.

Even at $1 a pop, pop and coffee are almost all margin. That’s why waiters look at you like you’re a criminal when you say, “No, water will be fine, thanks.”

No, it will not be fine. They don’t put that caffeine in so much of the stuff so you can say “No.” Even more than beer, wine and whiskey, pop is in restaurants, especially fast-food joints, so they can make money for just pouring it. Barely any labor necessary.

They don’t like labor. They’re the same people who were telling you last year that hundreds of Cook County government jobs weren’t important, not compared to some poor single mom having to dig deep for the extra 12 cents to give her fat kid another can of pop.

Ever wonder why the drug stores have enormous coolers along one wall? That’s where the free money is.

Ever wonder why fast-food joints have value meals? It’s because of the pop. They want to make sure you get one, every time. Forever.

By the way, the young lady from the beginning of the story, the genius, found a very nice husband, and she’s happily married, and a mother.

She didn’t gain the weight back, because she didn’t go back to sucking down pop — you know, the stuff with so much acid that  people used to clean the chrome on cars with it?

She wouldn’t complain that her government was trying to keep her and her family healthy, and keep services operating in the county she lives in.

That’s because she’s not a sucker. She’s a genius.

I ran into another very smart woman the other day, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. Her pop tax was passed last year, then repealed when she was abandoned, under pressure, by some of the commissioners who had supported her earlier.

I asked her what would have to change to bring back the pop tax.

“There are a number of different commissioners …,” she began, and stopped.

“I think it’s dead, and if we’re going to have revenue, it’s going to be some other kind of revenue.”

I found her unwillingness to give it the old college try rather humorous, considering where she was when she said it. She was in an Oak Park house full of fellow liberals, all in support of retaining women’s right to choose.

Many of them talked bravely about standing up to religious people who are convinced that what they support — abortion — is murder.

So Preckwinkle was willing to disappoint people who are sure that they have God on their side, but she’s terrified of taking another shot at irritating those who don’t want to pay extra for Coca-Cola?

Who’s in charge of all this terror?

The drivers of the anti-pop-tax movement are marketers paid handsomely to lobby on behalf of the sugar growers and pop manufacturers.

But that’s not so scary. The religious people have money for lobbying, too — plus they have the support of the pope, the fellow with that big house in Italy.

There’s something else that’s deterring Preckwinkle. It’s “The Nanny State.”

The pop partisans drummed that concept into the ears of the electorate, as well as the stupider side of the Chicago media, which predominates. To wit: “You don’t need any of these nanny-state liberals telling you what to put in your mouth. If you know anything, you know how to eat.”

The truth is, if you live in or around Chicago, you probably do not know how to eat. Sorry again, guys.

Chicago is the town where deep-dish pizza rules. Deep-dish is pizza for those who don’t think the regular flattish kind provides enough nourishment.

Several people I know say that the best sandwich in Chicago is sold at Ricobene’s on 26th Street. It’s a breaded steak rolled into a loaf of bread, and it’s too cumbersome for a smallish person to safely carry away from the counter.

On the subject of steaks — how many dozen places are there that still sell big porterhouse steaks? And prime ribs? Other than Texas, where else do people eat such things?

Chicago is the place where someone invented frying shrimp in butter and garlic. Also, Chicken Vesuvio, which is literally a volcanic mountain of food.

I could go on and on. But suffice to say that outside Illinois, many people think of us as those guys in the Saturday Night Live “Bill Swerski’s Superfans” sketches. You know, the dudes who sat around talking about Da Bears while eating ridiculous amounts of dead animal flesh, including a chunk of polish sausage that got stuck in the Chris Farley character’s heart.

Ever wonder why the drug stores have enormous coolers along one wall? That’s where the free money is.

They think of us this way because this is who we are. If anyone needs nannies, we do.

The whole Nanny State argument, however, is dishonest at base, Illinois State Rep. Robyn Gabel (D-Evanston) said last week.

Prior to the Cook County tax law, Gabel authored failed General Assembly pop-tax bills. The penny-per-ounce tax would have raised $600 million per year, some of which could be used to fight obesity. But more importantly, she said, it would cut into the $6 billion in annual state outlays due to obesity-related health problems, just by making them less prevalent.

“You’re telling people not to drink pop,” some of her fellow legislators complained, she said.

“Nobody’s telling you not to drink pop. We’re telling you that when you buy it, you should be actually paying the cost to society.”

The local efforts at pop taxes have been painted as brazen cash grabs engineered by Chicago-area Democrats, backed, to a greater or lesser extent, by Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropic arm, which failed to convince the former New York City mayor’s home town to follow along.

Not so much. The World Health Organization recommended soda taxes in 2015. Not just for crazy Cook County, but for everywhere.

Philadelphia, Seattle, Boulder, and the California cities of Berkeley, San Francisco and Albany all have pop taxes now, as do dozens of whole countries, including Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa.

Mexico has taxed pop since 2014. Sugary drink purchases there dropped 5.5 percent in 2014 and 9.7 percent in 2015. What that means to the health of Mexico, a nation known as one of the largest consumers of soft drinks — with 7-of-10 adults categorized as obese, and 14 percent suffering from diabetes — isn’t obvious yet. Scientists from the United States are gathering statistics.

Gabel said she’s unlikely to try to push for a new bill until their reports cross the border.

“We’re watching closely the results in Mexico to see if it reduces obesity and improves the public health,” she said.

Diabetes is the number one cause of death in Mexico, taking about 80,000 people annually. How much would that number have to be cut before people in Illinois stop talking about The Nanny State?

Almost 13 percent of Illinoisans have diabetes. It killed 10,440 in 2015, and the number is expected to rise almost 25 percent by 2020.

The total annual cost of diabetes in Illinois is $14 billion.

But everything is OK, because pop is still cheap.

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— Leavitt: A sweet tale of romance, carbonated —-