Slashdot Mirror
Calorie Burning Coke Coming Soon
The Fun Guy writes "Coca-Cola and Nestle are getting together to introduce a new beverage "proven to burn calories". Enviga will be in the U.S. Northeast in November, nationwide in January 2007. How does it burn calories? With green tea extracts, calcium, and caffeine. No word on how many milligrams caffeine per can. "
"Enviga increases calorie burning. It represents the perfect partnership of science and nature," said Dr. Rhona Applebaum, chief scientist, The Coca-Cola Company. "Enviga contains the optimum blend of green tea extracts (EGCG), caffeine and naturally active plant micronutrients designed to work with your body to increase calorie burning, thus creating a negative calorie effect.
Oh man this is such a lie..... Did they perform metabolic chamber analysis? Where is the published paper? Why do people *always* seem to fall for marketing nonsense like this? Look, the only way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you consume. It's calories in versus calories out and Enviga, metabolically will not let you magically burn more calories by consuming it unless it can somehow short circuit the electron transport chain or mitochondrial respiration and that is dangerous as hell. (Think poisons like dinitrophenol or proteins in brown fat like thermogenin).
It's too bad, because I like Coca Cola products, but this claim that it will burn excess or extra calories is simply a marketing lie. And yes, I *do* have a PhD in physiology and am calling out Dr. Rhona Applebaum to back up her words with some scientific evidence that shows these claims are more than specious marketingspeak designed to increase the bottom line.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
So here's a picture of the cans.
On another note I can think of one beverage that is zero calories and makes you feel great. Just plain old water. I started drinking a couple liters of it a day about 2 years ago and I've never felt better. No more dehydration to make me feel sluggish and tired. That's way better than any caffiene buzz (which just exacerbates dehydration by the way). I love caffiene, but I think it's overused.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Already been called on this marketing lie..h ocker-enviga-doesnt-actually-burn-calories-208357. php
http://www.consumerist.com/consumer/soft-drinks/s
This product does not burn calories....
- F1 NEWS
Even without a PhD in physiology I would agree that it burns extra calories. This is however not so hard to achieve, so why should it be a marketing lie?
You are certainly right that you have to burn more calories than you consume but why should there be no "magic" thing that increases the amount of burned calories without having so much calories itself? I think this is exactly what is happening here. Lets say the drink contains 50 calories, increases your metabolism to burn 20 extra calories per hour through caffeine, green tea or something else. After three hours this drink has the claimed "negative calorie effect".
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/enviga-fat- burning-tea-snake-oil-scam-just-as-you-predicted-2 08488.php
Maybe if you got a few more editors there, you would have known that every other news site on the face of the internet reported AND debunked the claims over a week ago.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Oh YouTube how I love thee... ride the snake.
Funny how, as others have mentioned, one can never get a copy of any of the supposed studies which 'prove' whatever it is the product claims. Like Kevn Trudeau and his scam or the now discredited DHEA claim, this too will be shown to be a false promise of getting something for nothing.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Wired had a similar product featured in "Found: Artifacts from the future" back in August. This is probably the fastest time between Wired imagining a product and it actually hitting the market.
o und.jpg
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/images/f
So it does make you "burn" energy, but doesn't cause any weight loss. It's the perfect product!
You may not see the NutraSweet logo anymore, but look for the PHENYLKETONURICS: CONTAINS PHENYLALANINE warning in fairly bold letters near the ingredients list. It's required (in the US) to be hard to miss, and it's a sure indicator of aspartame, provided that you take the five seconds to pick up the package and turn it over. But that's better than the 30 seconds it may take to squint your way through the ingredients list.
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
Still, there's a good reason to believe that Coke's new Enviga drink, advertised as "The Calorie Burner," is a total scam, and Mouseprint has finely combed the small print to showcase the absurdity. For one thing, the study that 'proved' that Enviga burned calories was only 32 people of normal weight. No one actually burned any fat, even when they were on placebos, but heck... "energy expenditure" was higher for Enviga drinkers. Whatever the hell that means. Yes, I wonder what "energy expenditure" in humans could possibly have to do with calories...
Look, it's no marketing lie. EGCG/caffeine is the cornerstone of green tea's thermogenic effect, and alters many slight parameters to increase fat loss over time, and many studies have proven this. Search for green tea and obesity in PubMed. The data's all there.
This may have the "sounds too good to be true" feeling, but here's the thing: the effect is very slight. It was slight in green tea, and it's even more slight in this.
No drug, with the possible exception of large amounts of DNP, is going to "treat obesity". But choosing functional foods is very important. Most all natural foods (fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, etc) are more satiating than processed food, and all have these slight indirect effects in improving health, fighting cancer, and fighting obesity.
This product indeed burns calories, and this shouldn't be surprising, because what Coke did here is basically steal the most active ingredients from green tea, which most certainly do burn calories. Personally, I'd recommend you just drink green tea instead. It's more powerful, healthier, and cheaper. In fact, I'd recommend you eat more functional, natural, healthy food in general. You'll get these slightly beneficial effects from many sources then.
True, but it is a very, very, very small amount that it burns. Calorie vs calorie is a few orders of magnitude difference.
Forsooth! But these claimed negative calorie beverage are most likely to operate in the little-c range than the big-C range.
500 mL of my Xtal Geezer bubble water, raised from room temp (18C) to body temp (37C), that's about 19 degrees x 500g of water = 9,500 calorie or 9.5 Calorie, about the amount of energy in one Lifesaver candy, IIRC.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Not quite. Phenylalanine is an essential amino acid that happens to be one component of aspartame. Almost all protein rich foods contain a fair amount of it. People with PKU typically need to cut out meat, fish, poulty, milk, eggs, cheese, legumes, nuts and so forth - not just aspartame.
And no, phenylanine does not break down to methanol. Aspartame is a methyl ester of two amino acids (phenylalanine and aspartic acid). This can hydrolize to methanol, which is then metabolized into a trace amount of methanol. Though this sounds scary, the amount release is far below toxic levels, and in fact you get far more exposure from drinking a glass of many common juices than you do from diet soda.
Also, the temperature aspartame breaks down is not simple 80dF. It actually varies by pH levels; at nuetral levels it doesn't break down until 86dC (or about 187dF).
Some people, however, have the condition phenylketonuria (PKU), an inability to convert phenylalanine into tyrosine. For them, tyrosine becomes essential in the diet, and consumption of phenylalanine becomes dangerous, because phenylalanine and its breakdown products will accumulate, which can damage the brain (hence the warning on diet soda cans).
Also of interest in the aspartame molecule is the methyl ester on the end- in the presence of heat and acid or base, the ester bond breaks to form methanol. The enzyme that begins the process of alcohol metabolism, alcohol dehydrogenase, cannot distinguish between methanol and ethanol, and so it oxidizes methanol to methanal, better known as formaldehyde. Two things to keep in mind about this process: there are other natural human metabolic processes that also produce methanol, and aspartame is 180 times sweeter than sugar, so there is not very much at all in diet soda. For some people, the health effects of aspartame are certainly real, and they should avoid it- in my personal case, though, I consider sugar to be more dangerous in the long run.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Don't find it too hilarious :) Professional grade drain cleaners are often mostly sulfuric acid. You need the acid to attack paper - the base type won't attack toilet paper or maxi-pad clogs. Google it if you must...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You do indeed get it - in the UK it's called HipShift, and it's far superior for many uses, notable bathroom drains clogged with hair - it essentially turns all organic materials to flaky charcoal (or renders them at least brittle enough that they break up when flushed). It's harder to get as it's used more by professionals, but if you go to a decent builder's/plumbers centre they'll have it.
Caustic Soda/Lye generally only works well on fats (turns them to soluble soap). Hydrochloric is also sold here as "Spirits of Salts" and is really the only thing to shift heavy limescale (we moved into a flat where someone had never given the toilet bowl a good scrub with cream cleaner - it was encrusted with about a 3mm layer of discoloured limescale. One small bottle of HCl, it was gleaming in 30 minutes.) Great on the drip-marks on baths and crusty/rough-looking taps too (but keep the concentration down a bit so it won't bite through the nickel plating).
-- Sig Sig Sputnik
Two words: Jerry Garcia. Admitedly he's dead, but he was most definately a fat coke user.
When drinking cold water, it takes approximately 1 nutritional calorie to heat 1 ounce of water from just above the melting point of ice to body temperature.
1 calorie per gram per degree, moveing from 0.8C to 36.8C takes 36 degrees, about 28 grams/ounce = 36*28 = 1008, /1000 to get the nutrional calories = approximately 1 calorie to heat 1 ounce of just melted water to body temperature. I rounded a bit, but just melted could be heated a bit more, so it is near the correct number.
So for a 32 ounce drink, you only burn about 32 calories, not 105.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It well fits within thermodynamics. Caffeine causes lipolysis of adipose tissue, and increased cAMP levels within cells via adenosine antagonism and phosphordiatese inhibition. EGCG, among other things, is also a COMT inhibitor, preventing the breakdown of epinephrine and norepinephrine to a limited extent. Epi and NE act on alpha and beta adrenergic receptors in a synergistic fashion with the effects of caffeine to increase the rate at which mitochondria use energy. This is shown in CO2 breath analysis and temperature measurements, as well as long term studies of weight loss. So yes, quite literally, the person runs a little hotter.
And you can expect to consume more calories than you burn and not gain weight, to a certain extent. Carbohydrates are absorbed with less than 50% efficiency, and the body is very reluctant to metabolize protein at all. And here is where another property of EGCG comes in-- it interferes with an enzyme involved in carbohydrate digestion, and further lowers the efficiency of which you metabolize carbohydrates. To a significant degree? No, not really, but it's a few less calories.
The human body is a very complex, dynamic system. Only at the mitochondrial level does thermodynamics make sense. Psychological eating factors, nutrient partitioning, storage, excretion, and absorption all play major roles.
Again, this drink does in fact burn calories. Hell, ice water burns calories. In neither case though, is it a significant amount of calories.