Calorie Burning Coke Coming Soon 383
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. "
Bogus... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Interesting cans, but quite the scam... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Cancer (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.consumerist.com/consumer/soft-drinks/s
This product does not burn calories....
does not have to be bogus... (Score:2, Informative)
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".
Re:Bogus... (Score:4, Informative)
OK, true and in fact at some points in history, tapeworm eggs were used as a means to "diet", although I don't know anyone who would really want to be doing that as the negative health effects are significant. They don't call it parasitism for nothing.
Also dysentary (sic) is another solution to lose weight without exercize and reducing your calorie intake.
True, but here we are talking dehydration or water weight, not fat loss and it should be noted that dysentery is one of the leading causes of death in the world.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ride the snake? (Score:3, Informative)
Just like the DHEA scam (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bogus... (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously missed my post here [slashdot.org] explaining this fallacy.
And yes, though their methodology wasn't mentioned in this article,
Do you believe *all* press releases?
P.S. I call shenanigans on your Ph.D. Either that, or you just didn't read the article. Either way.
Feel free to check out my formal CV [utah.edu] any time you would like and you should know earning it obtained reading a not insignificantly greater amount of material than a few press releases.
That was fast... (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/images/f
Re:Bogus... (Score:3, Informative)
If you control your diet its very easy to hack your body to do things that on the surface seem impossible. There are lots of ways for a body to effectively burn excess calories.
Re:Cancer (Score:5, Informative)
So it does make you "burn" energy, but doesn't cause any weight loss. It's the perfect product!
Re:Bogus... (Score:4, Informative)
You should also consider that caffeine inhibits the sodium reuptake pump in the kidney which leads to a net water loss (i.e. mild diuretic).
Re:Bogus... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just like the DHEA scam (Score:2, Informative)
Efficacy of a green tea extract rich in catechin polyphenols and caffeine in increasing 24-h energy expenditure and fat oxidation in humans [ajcn.org]
From the abstract: "Conclusions: Green tea has thermogenic properties and promotes fat oxidation beyond that explained by its caffeine content per se. The green tea extract may play a role in the control of body composition via sympathetic activation of thermogenesis, fat oxidation, or both."
Re:Bogus... (Score:3, Informative)
Changing the types of food you eat changes the way your body decides to pass/store/or burn energy. That's what all the ketonic diets are about.
Also even after you stopped exercising and following your diet, all that time you spent exercising increased your muscle mass and therefore your base metabolism (muscle burns more calories than fat).
But it is still true that a pound of fat gained is 3500 calories consumed and not burned or passed.
Re:And the sweetener is? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cancer (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Yea and verily (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:And the sweetener is? (Score:3, Informative)
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).
Re:And the sweetener is? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Cancer (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cancer (Score:2, Informative)
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).
Re:Cancer (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Or even better - Diet Pepsi Slurpee (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Wrong, numerous medical studies confirm this (Score:3, Informative)
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.