7up Gets A Healthy Marketing Makeover
7up has recently been showing up in a slew of commercials claiming it is now 100% natural. Look at that gorgeous can, growing on a tree. They claim it now is only 5 "natural" ingrediants: 1. filtered carbonated water
2. high fructose corn syrup
3. natural citric acid
4. natural flavors
5. natural potassium citrate
The problem with the claim "natural" is it is subjective. For example, would I find filtered carbonated water in nature? No. But would I personally consider it a natural ingrediant? Sure. Our joke of an FDA doesn't have any official definition on what "all natural" means in foods. To me, shouldn't there at least be lemons and limes in a "natural" lemon & lime drink? I would think so. And speaking of that, I don't see how "natural flavors" <-plural, counts as one ingrediant.
But my biggest problem with the ingrediants is the High Fructose Corn Syrup. This is ridiculously NOT natural. In fact, HFCS has to be chemically altered so that it is stable enough to be used as an ingrediant, and that ain't natural. HFCS has been linked to obesity and diabetes and their biggest dose of this crap comes from sodas.
*Please note this post has been typed in 100% natural green letters.
posted by Anonymous @ 2:23 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I don't think you'll find carbonated water in nature. But this reminds me of a discussion I had with this girl in my ALS class. Her family produced this energy drink (the name slips my mind). I was drinking a Fire "Elements" drink, which has sugar, ginseng and real fruit juice. She goes off on this rant about how it's a horrible drink becuase the sugar gives me a quick "high" then I would crash very quickly. So she gave me one of her family's drinks. Which has carbonated water, caffeine and some vitamins. Now my drink didn't list the vitamins it contained, but it does have natural fruit juice (and we all know fruits contain vitamins). So I told her, "Hey caffeine and carbonated water are way worse than sugar. Caffeine is addictive and has a way worse crash then sugar, plus carbonated water is bad for the oxygen in your blood." So this other girl in my class (who's not at all part of the conversation) says, "Sugar is way more addictive then caffeine, my sister has been diagnosed as addicted to sugar." Since the interrupter was an avid coffee drinker I replied with, "Well if you don't drink a cup of coffee in the morning you get a headache right?" She said yes. I then said, "Do you put sugar in your coffee everyday?" She said yes. I said, "So do you get a headache if you forget to put sugar in your coffee?" She said, "That's totally different." I fucking hate people.
BTW, good article Evan.
I agree with you that caffeine is probably worse than sugar.
HOWEVER, upon doing some quick reseach, FIRE contains:
Ingredients: water, high fructose corn syrup, pear juice from concentrate, citric acid, natural dragonfruit, raspberry, strawberry, and lime flavors with other natural flavors, extracts of ginseng and guarana, dragonfgruit puree, caffeine, red 40, blue 1
So your drink contains caffeine as well. I wouldn't drink it. It doesn't have sugar, it has high fructose corn syrup, which I avoid as much as I can.
High fructose corn syrup is unnessesary, organic drinks often use sugar cane juice or something to that affect. The reason hfcs is so common is because corn is so common, and it's a cheaper sweetener. However, sugar is glucose, which can be broken down by any given cell in your body, fructose has to be done in the liver. In mice, test showed liver damage equivilent to like if someone had been an alcoholic all their life. But that's in extremely high doses, BUT when you start to look at the ingrediants of what you're eating, hfcs is in EVERYTHING. Even bread. It's surprising. You can find equivilent products in the store often, but it takes some ingrediants checking. Bread is especially tough, but sometimes you can luck out and find some sweetened with honey.
Touche salesman, touche
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