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?"

Coffee?

[Gulthek]

Coffee. Black.
Tea. Black || Green.

Easy, convenient, and zero sugar.

Chaser Energy Drinks

[Doytch]

They have a free sample too [chaserenergy.com]

Sparkling Mineral Water

[jbrader]

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.

Fruit juice and club soda

[jsimon12]

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

[pkmugg]

Propel Water tastes good with very little sugar. It's what I drink.

Splenda - not NutraSweet(tm)

[sconeu]

Diet Coke with Splenda has all the sickening sweetness of regular Coke.

I drink a lot of Crystal Light.

[Richard Steiner]

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. :-)

Re:There is a saying I go by.

[Mattcelt]

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 [polandspring.com] 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 [adirondackbeverages.com] 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.

The best diet soda

[techno-vampire]

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 [hansens.com] 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.

Re:If first you don't succeed...

[Cocoshimmy]

It may not cause cancer. Then again it might, seeing as when aspartame motabolizes in your body it produces methanol and formaldehyde [holisticmed.com] (highly toxic in humans and animals). Who cares if it causes cancer (even though it probably does)? Formaldehyde is likely to kill you one way or another.

Vitamin Water

[SecureTheNet]

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.

Re:If first you don't succeed...

[magicchex]

I totally agree.

Once you get past that first week or so, you can go from completely hating diet pop (like I used to) to finding regular pop FAR too sweet. Since then, I only drink diet. I lost about 15 or 20 pounds from the pop alone, then a few more by watching my food. (From ~195 to ~165lbs)

Re:Give it up. Honestly

[try_anything]

I know two very smart and busy people who gave up caffeine. They both say that before they gave up caffeine, they were acutely aware (and appreciative) of the intense caffeine-based alertness, but they never realized that they spent most of the day in a fog, getting little done. Without caffeine, they don't reach the highs they used to, but they get more done because they can actually work for six hours out of their eight-hour work day instead of just three or four.

Based on their experience, I'm considering it, but I love the taste of coffee... and, yes, that transitory caffeine high in which I work like a maniac for an hour or so before I vague out and start surfing the web.

Re:Er, no

[tomhudson]

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 [eiatrack.org] because of their effects http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/newscience/oncompou nds/phthalates/phthalates.htm [ourstolenfuture.org].

They're everywhere http://www.ewg.org/news/story.php?id=4830 [ewg.org], 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.

Re:Splenda - not NutraSweet(tm)

[twisty]

} Diet Coke with Splenda has all the sickening sweetness of regular Coke.

"Actually, they both taste like malted battery acid. Let's go for a milk."

Re:Water is only half the story - CYCLAMATE

[jthayden]

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.

Re:Splenda - not NutraSweet(tm)

[Money for Nothin']

Bad sample? Did you buy the second bottle from the same store in the same 1-2 days? If so, it's possible you gotten bottles from the same bad batch.

Also try the cans; I speak from experience when I say they are "fizzy".

Regardless, the fizziness has nothing to do with whether the drink is sweetened by Splenda or NutraSweet. The fizziness is CO2 injected after mixing the syrup; those sweeteners are mixed-in while making the syrup...

Filter the tap water, dummies

[silicon not in the v]

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.