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The Soda Situation - Succulent Drinks w/o the Sweets?
Ticron asks: "Like most of you, my job and lifestyle revolves around drinking lots and lots of caffeine - usually in the form of soda. I've been trying to cut back on my sugar intake lately, and am interested in what some of you drink that isn't loaded down with the sweet stuff. Diet drinks have little to no flavor, and fruit punches have almost (sometimes more!) sugar than sodas themselves. Is there anything out there that maintains the convenience of a canned drink, but without all the sugar?"
I write this as a suck down the sweet sweet taste of Diet Dr. Pepper. Did you know it tastes more like regular Dr. Pepper? I'm sure you have heard that, and from the sounds of it, you don't agree. I tried diet sodas on and off but, like you, I found them repulsive. Then with nothing else in the house (other than water, YUK!) I committed to finishing the case of diet that I bought. By the time I finished consuming it I honestly couldn't tell it was diet. It was as if a switch in my head went off. Ever since then regular sodas syrupy and too sweet. So, while I cannot recommend an alternative, I do encourage you to give it another try. And if you're like me, you'll stop consuming 1/2 your daily caloric intake from soft drinks. (8 sodas X 110 calories each = poking new notches in belt)
Bonus, it does/n't cause cancer! FDA Reviewing Italian Aspartame Study
how bout coffee...
I know, it doesn't fit the requirements capture (being tasteless) but I would highly recommend water. Tap, preferably because it's cheap, but bottled is good too. If you can get used to it you'll save a bundle and it's a lot healther (and generally more refreshing.)
Otherwise, my favorite beverage is milk, but that's not very convienient.
Coffee. Black.
Tea. Black || Green.
Easy, convenient, and zero sugar.
They have a free sample too
Crisp refreshing and good for you. I recomend Perrier or San Pellegrino which you can also get in various citrus flavors. Some people also like Apollinaris but it tastes muddy to me.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
Giving up soda (really, caffeine in general) is really a great thing. You feel better overall, and your waking hours feel much more... Awake. But, I'd also suggest tea. No sugar at all. Iced tea is really refreshing, and you get your caffeine (if you want, unlike sodas there is no taste sacrifice for decafe).
to a good friend of mine called Diet Mountain Dew... Ah... Let me count the ways...
Do a 50/50 mix of club soda a fruit juice just make sure it is pure fruit juice. Not the stuff with "high fructose corn syrup". This cuts the sugar, still gives some sweet but has no artifical stuff.
Propel Water tastes good with very little sugar. It's what I drink.
you buy product shillings by the pound.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Diet Coke with Splenda has all the sickening sweetness of regular Coke.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Actually, fructose is the problem with corn syrup, specifically high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).
You see fructose doesn't raise your glucose levels because your body can use it without the need for insulin. Unfortunately, this means your liver can process it into triglycerides really quickly and your fat cells can suck it up rapidly too; this is why corn syrup is linked to obesity.
I wouldn't stress too much about fruit juice in the diet, though. You'd be better off drinking water and eating fruit, but it's still a lot better for you than carbonated beverages.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I actually like Crystal Light Orange drink and lemon drink. They are fairly sweet tasting, but the sugar intake isn't so bad. They also come in neat single services that you can put in bottled water.
Crystal Light makes little one-serving tubes that work well with a 16oz bottle of water, and I have a variety of those sitting in my cube at all times. After I drink my bottle of Mountain Dew in the morning, I hit the water cooler in the break room, fill the bottle with water, and optionally add Crystal Light to the mix. It isn't bad, really. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Buy a home soda maker from Soda Club. It's basically a plastic case around an aluminum CO2 canister. There's a good selection of flavors with near-replacements for the big ones: coke, dr pepper, mountain dew, root beer. You screw the bottle of tap water on, press the button a few times until it buzzes, unscrew it, and pour in a capful of syrup.
I bought one because the drinks are flavored with Splenda and have 1/3 the calories. The regular ones still have some high fructose corn syrup in. Because you're mixing the syrup and selzter yourself you can adjust the carbonation and sweetness to your taste. I make it quite a bit less sweet and with less carbonation than store-bought, and I've been really happy with it.
There is also a cost savings argument. I haven't sat down and checked it myself, but it's on the site somewhere. Cheaper or not, I'm glad I don't have to deal with recycling two-liter bottles and aluminum cans all the time. Although I mostly drink the diet mountain dew flavor, it's nice that I can make some root beer, orange drink, or something obscure when I feel like it.
Anyway, I love the thing. But let me assure you they are not kidding when the warning says to add syrup only after carbonating the water. God help you if you put any syrup in first. You get a real nice soda fountain when you unscrew it to the great and undying hilarity of everyone around.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
I second this opinion. Several soft drink companies here in the eastern US have perfected some very tasty flavored carbonated waters. (I'm inferring from the use of 'hospital' instead of 'the hospital' that the submitter is British; I have no idea if these sorts of drinks are available in the UK.)
Here are some links:
Poland Spring makes some of the best flavored seltzer I've ever had. Raspberry Lime kicks ass and has become a staple of my diet (at least two litres daily). Lime, lemon, orange and plain are the other flavors and are good in decreasing order, IMHO.
Adirondack is what I drink when I can't find Poland Spring around. They have a great raspberry lime and lemon-lime and are truly delicious. (And they're certified Kosher, if that makes a difference to you.)
The best part is that the flavors are more of an essence than a true additive, so they have -0- Calories, -0- sodium, -0- cabohydrates, and -0- fat.
They are awesome. I love them. As far as I am concerned, they are the perfect substitute for sugared sodas, but YMMV.
Like you, I never cared for diet soda. Then I developed Type II diabetes and had no choice. I soon learned to love Hansen's diet sodas. All Handen's sodas use all natural flavorings and no coloring. The diet ones all use Splendra for sweetining, and that's my preferred non-sugar. They have a great taste and zero calories. Alas, they also don't use caffine, but you can't always have everything. If you have to drink a diet soda, I reccoemend theirs. If you don't need a diet soda, try their regular mixtures, they're just as good.
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I was going to write about this, but you beat me to the punch. My gf got me into vitamin water a couple weeks ago. The different flavors have different vitamins in them, so there's quite a variety. I haven't seen the website yet (going to check it out now) but the humor on the bottles is pretty good as well. We pick them up at the local grocery story in the water section.
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Dancing may not cause cancer... then again it might, seeing as I am dancing the give-gullible-people-head-cancer-dance.
Come off it. Most of this aspartame-is-lethal crap is due to an internet hoax email and a bunch of unscrupulous "alternative therapy practitioners". Your link goes to holisticmed.com! Funny how it's all "energy flow" and "meridians" and "magnetism" and "special chinese herbs" and "homeopathy" until they want to scare someone off something - then they pull out the list of scary chemical names of poisons, because scared people tend not to engage their brain. Hmm.
Methanol is dangerous because it converts to formaldehyde - but it's funny how both are mentioned; sounds twice as scary that way! (oh, was that the point, hmm?)
Even if aspartame does produce formaldehyde it's not in any great quantity - aspartame works by being about 200 times sweeter than sugar, so only a miniscule amount is required. Even those small Equal tablets are largely buffer compound; if they were just pure aspartame they'd be too damn small to handle. And even then only 10% of that is potentially convertible; but there is disagreement as to whether that really is the end product.
Get yourself a kettle {NB, this will need a supply of about 10 amps; and if you're outside the UK, it will have to be earthed [if you're in the UK then it already is earthed]}, a filter jug, a china mug {with parallel sides or a temporary narrowing just below the mouth}, a steel teaspoon with the stiffest shank you can find, some teabags and some full-cream milk {not skimmed, not semi skimmed, it must be blue top for the authentic taste}. The milk must be as close as possible to 0 degrees and as far as possible from its expiry date.
Pour one litre of filtered water in the kettle. This will make up to three cups of tea {a standard mug holds 250ml but you should never empty the kettle completely}. Start the kettle boiling.
Whilst the kettle is heating up {use the formula: time in seconds = ([100 - T] * 4.17 * V) / P, where V = volume of water in litres, P = power of heating element in kW and T = initial temperature of water}, place a teabag and a stiff-shanked teaspoon in a china mug. This should ideally have a wide base, then a constriction before belling out; this shape works to minimise evaporative cooling losses and hence maintain OST {optimum sipping temperature} as long as possible. Failing that, a traditional, parallel-sided mug can be used.
The very instant the kettle boils, pour about 200ml. of boiling water, as close as possible to 100 degrees, over the teabag. Leave alone for 15 seconds, then begin mashing the hell out of the teabag with the spoon. Keep going until the tea stops getting any darker. Finally, crush the teabag hard between the bowl of the spoon and the wall of the mug to remove as much liquid as possible, and hike it out. It's biodegradable and can be composted.
Replace the spoon in the mug {it's acting as a heatsink} and add about 50ml of ice-cold milk to the tea. Stir immediately. Remove spoon and sip gently. Feel sensation as though you are receiving kind words and a hug on a tropical beach with crystal-clear water and silver sands and everything is generally all right with the world or better.
NB: Add more cold water to the kettle as soon as possible after boiling. This will cool it down, so slowing the rate of heat loss and minimising TTNM {time to next mashing}. Don't keep the filter jug in the fridge, you're already paying to heat it, you don't want to pay to cool it so you can heat it more.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
For all this "extra work", bottled water STILL ends up with more bacteria 2 weeks later than ordinary tap water, as well as more contaminants. There are a ton of regulations governing the purity of the water you drink from the tap - none of which apply after its bottled and sold to you.
As for the "pipes that haven't been clean in 50 years", I don't know where you live, but the pipes here are flushed on a regular basis. It's not a hard process - they just dump some extra chlorine into the system, open the fire hydrant at the end of the loop and let it run. This removes any "dead zones". Also, if you've ever done any home plumbing, you'd know that even 50-year-old copper pipe is in decent shape inside, after decades of attack by chlorine, ozone, and good old H2O.
And if you're concerned about energy consumption, there's a lot more energy consumed trucking that water all over the place, as well as in the manufacture of the bottles, etc., than in just pumping it through the muni pipes. And most water bottles end up in the dump (the blue-tinted ones are harder to recycle anyway).
Plus, last I heard, copper and cast-iron water pipes don't have issues with phthalates leeching from the plastic water bottles. You know, those plastics that contaminate the water in the bottle, your peanut butter, etc., 6 types of which have already been permanently banned in Europe http://www.eiatrack.org/reg_alerts/regulatory_aler t_detail.php?id=882 because of their effects http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/newscience/oncompou nds/phthalates/phthalates.htm.
They're everywhere http://www.ewg.org/news/story.php?id=4830, they help explain the huge decline in male fertility over the last 50 years, and we'll have to phase them out if we want to reduce the cancers they cause.
I also favor Splenda over Nutrasweet (Aspartame) every time. Which do you prefer, sucralose's looser bowel movements, or aspartame's headaches? The U.S. Air Force tells pilots not to drink Nutrasweet/Aspartame, as it slows the responses of their nervous systems.
Another big differenc is sugar. In the US, the main form of sugar is usually high fructose corn syrup. In most of Europe it seems to me they use plain old sugar. This makes the European versions taste better to me. Same with Snickers bars, they taste much better with real sugar.
When I was in the service, we just called them hookers ;)
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
Jeez, it's not hard to get the good taste with the cheap water. We have a faucet-mounted water filter at our kitchen sink at home, and we just keep a pitcher of that going in the fridge. Where I work, I've seen several people that use those pitchers with the Brita filters in the top of them--not hard at all.
It's definitely cheaper because those filters are good for hundreds(?) of gallons of water. I hate seeing all those little plastic water bottles getting thrown away. Get one of those hard plastic re-useable water bottles please, so you can just wash it out every few days and not produce more unecessary trash/recycling.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
I actually like Crystal Light Orange drink and lemon drink. They are fairly sweet tasting, but the sugar intake isn't so bad. They also come in neat single services that you can put in bottled water.
I'm curious what the infatuation is with at least Americans and hummingbird types of refreshment.
2 or 3 generations ago, soft drinks were more like a luxury or occasional beverage. Children used to drink more milk than soda.
Now, it seems like these void of nutrition, unhealthy, and weight/diabetes creating drinks are required to be at our side during waking hours.
I believe that even diet drinks cause weight gain due to the change in metabolism due to the body's perception of their actually being real sweet (fructose or sucrose) content in there. (Its common perception to give the diet drink to fat people and a regular drink to a thin person.)
Believe it or not, your body is thirsty for water, not a hummingbird solution.
Sweets are appealing because a few years ago, sweet fruits were those that were at the peak of their ripeness and had the most nutrients in them. Now, sweets are meaningless and unhealthy.
Which leads to what works for me (techie *girls* aren't nearly as forgiven for getting fat, ahem): Not buying the stuff! If it isn't in the house, you're ten times less likely to eat/drink it--and if you *really* need some, go out and buy one! **ONE, mind you** In other words, put your laziness to work for you. You'll save some pretty serious $$ too. -PKSC
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." - Prof. Irwin Corey