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. "

Just Ask a Scientician

[eldavojohn]

"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. It makes this product stand out as unique. Enviga brings the benefits of green tea to the forefront in a convenient and accessible, great tasting beverage."

Ok, so "Dr." Rhona Applebaum (a chief scientist, mind you) is quoted as saying the above. What part of that has even an ounce of scientific data in it? I didn't realize a job of a chief scientist is to relay selling points to the public.

"Optimum blend of green tea extracts (EGCG)" ... how do you define optimum? Optimum taste? Optimum health benefits? Or have you magically optimized both of those qualities? And what the hell does Epigallocatechin do for us? Wait, don't tell me, the Chinese used it for thousands of years so it must be good. Yep, the Chinese lived forever and it was all in the green tea. Not the fact that they ate low fat diets with rice. Not the fact that I got my fudd rucked last night (1 lb. red meat burger) and then drank myself stupid. Nope, no other factors hinting at why they lived longer than I will.

Nearly every single word on here is marketing buzz speak. Boo.

I don't know what University Dr. Applebaum threw money at to call herself a doctor but I certainly hope I never attend it. Call me a hardass but Applebaum just lost any respect from me that 'doctor' & 'chief scientist' could have given her.

Did anyone else notice that this sounded like a 3 am infomercial for Bowflex?

To be drunk with

[Silver Sloth]

The wagon wheel sized pizza and six candy bars.

Coke will never be part of a healthy diet and should stop pretending.

Re:I've discovered a calorie burning beverage!

[Rob T Firefly]

It already is their greatest scam. [wikipedia.org]

Re:Bogus...

[BWJones]

Have you considered that perhaps it's digestion/metabolization ends up burning more calories than it can provide?

Yes, it's called the thermic effect of food or TEF and can be simplified to the following: TEF = total kcals consumed x 10% which of course means that 10% of anything you consume *might* be burned off leaving you with net positive calories. Think of it this way.... organisms eat to survive, not to lose weight.

Re:Bogus...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your immune system burns those calories fighting the tapeworm. Dysentry causes the calories not to be absorbed in the first place. You may be comsuming the food, but it's not being absorbed. The grandparent post is still correct.

Re:I've discovered a calorie burning beverage!

[smbarbour]

They already tried that (and it actually worked).

The realized that they could take the water they were using to make Coca-Cola, don't carbonate it or add anything to it, put it in 20 oz bottles, call it Dasani and charge the people more for it than Coca-Cola.

Re:Bogus...

[Zenaku]

It's a perfectly valid claim, it just doens't mean that much. ANYTHING you put in your body requires calories to process. Even distilled water will cause your body to move the substance through your system and adjust the hormones that regulate hydration, and everything the body does requires energy to do. We have dozens and dozens of 0 calorie beverages which provide no nutrional value and no energy input whatsoever. In a sense, these drinks could already be marketed as "calorie burning". Consuming them takes more energy than they provide. All Coke and Nestle are doing here is creating another zero calorie drink, that happens to contain substances known to ramp up your heart rate and metabolism. In that sense, it is a calorie burning drink. What makes the marketing dishonest is merely that the drink differs from water and coke zero only in that the very small amount of calories that would be burned by drinking it is slightly higher than the very small amount that would be burned by drinking other zero cal things.

Wrong, numerous medical studies confirm this

[Frangible]

If you're going to debunk someone on medical grounds, can't you at least search PubMed first?

There have been many, many studies about green tea (which contains a lot of EGCG) and obesity. This data is years old too... EGCG being useful in obesity isn't even news. Magic? Not hardly. Yes, 2,4-DNP is still the king of obesity drugs, but it hasn't been legal since 1930 in humans for a reason.

There are many ways to fight obesity, upregulating the metabolism is one of them. Decreasing the effeciency of processing/storing food, which results in more calories excreted in feces, is another. (think leptin signalling, hypothalamic setpoint, PPARalpha agonists, Xenical/chitosan... oh and EGCG does this with carbs) Changing behavior underlying emotional eating (low serotonin), food compulsions (neuropeptide Y), or lack of energy/desire to exercise is another. (antidepressants, stimulants) Changing hunger/fed signalling by improving leptin sensitivity/transport, insulin sensitivity, etc makes a difference too. (omega-3 fatty acids, oh and EGCG improves insulin sensitivity...)

EGCG:
1. Inhibits fatty acid synthase
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=164 04708&query_hl=165&itool=pubmed_DocSum [nih.gov]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=166 11078&query_hl=165&itool=pubmed_docsum [nih.gov]

2. Upgrades hypothalamic AMPK to suppress adipogenesis and induce apoptosis of adipocytes
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=162 36247&query_hl=165&itool=pubmed_DocSum [nih.gov]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=159 76140&query_hl=165&itool=pubmed_DocSum [nih.gov]
3. Increases fat oxidation, metabolism (likely through COMT inhibition and indirect gene expression)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=10584049 [nih.gov]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itoo l=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstrac tplus&list_uids=10702779 [nih.gov]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=p ubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=157 38931&query_hl=165&itool=pubmed_DocSum [nih.gov]
http://ww [nih.gov]

Drinking cold water makes you burn calories

[tizan]

Any liquid that have less calories that is needed to bring its temperature to body temperature can be considered ...calorie burning... is it a significant amount of calories ? no Ah marketing... anybody willing to advertise cold water as calorie burning ?

Re:tapeworms

[BWJones]

Since nobody has these parasites nowadays, these diseases are now more common.

Tapeworms are *very* common in some areas of the world. For instance, just last week I saw the MRI of a patient with trichinosis. Parasites in the brain are a baaaad thing and not as uncommon as you might think.

Re:Bogus...

[IAmTheDave]

Not to mention the heart palpitations that this caffeine/"natural caffeine" cause me. Let's make your heart pump faster! Now there's a good idea!

Well, aren't you a walking argument against....

[chaboud]

...post-graduate work?

First off, your sentence is broken because you inserted "obtained" recklessly. Secondly, your position disagrees with Snopes [snopes.com].

Thirdly, your use of the thermic effect of food is a bit wonky. 10% is, first off, an average estimate. Protein can cost you as much as 30%. Fat costs you very little. Secondly, TEF describes how many calories you will spend consuming the food in question. Conversely, it can be used to calculate how many calories of a given type of food one would need to recover from expenditure. What a bomb calorimeter gets from food is clearly not the same as what a human body gets from it. There are plenty of things that humans can eat that cannot sustain them calorically. Just ask Metamucil...

Fourthly (never had to go that far before), just think about it:

Even drinking cold water causes you to burn calories. Your body ends up doing the work to bring the water up to body temperature. How would digesting a highly fibrous water-stalk not take effort?

Yes, celery has a few digestible kcals per stalk, but you more than outstrip that in digestion. Will those extra burned calories make a marked difference? God no, but you're still on the wrong side of the argument. Whipping out your PhD just shows how much trouble you are having defending your position. I certainly hope I never need any of your work. To be considered right in an argument, it helps to actually be right. I don't have a PhD, but if the point of getting one is to have something to wave around when you're clearly wrong, I think I'll pass.

In English

[rootEToTheIPi]

"We've seen a shift in consumers' attitudes toward diet and health and wellness, with more consumers seeking product choices that support active lifestyles, rather than just eliminating things from their diet"

Potential English translations:

1. Some people want to be healthier, so they have stopped (or limited) their consumption of coca-cola products. Now coke needs another avenue of income.

2. Other people want to be healthier, but don't want to do it the right way, so coke needs to find a way to cash in on that.

Myself? I just drink water and tea and juice most of the time. I avoid things like high fructose corn syrup, caffeine and elevators.

Re:Wrong, numerous medical studies confirm this

[BWJones]

Good on you for searching Pubmed and for your mad physiology skills. However, the claim is that this product will help people to burn calories by consuming the beverage. There are lots of studies that can be made looking at hormonal modifications, protein interactions, endocrine signaling and psychological motivations. However, the fundamental argument is that by consuming this drink, you will somehow upregulate metabolism to a point where you will burn more calories than you consume. Where compounds in green tea (EGCG and caffeine) may help one to modulate physiology so that you accumulate less fat and may exercise more, the fundamental issue is that thermodynamics is not wrong. You cannot consume more calories than you burn and expect not to gain weight.

Re:Cancer

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there's an element of danger in this approach, but it seems managable. Lot safer than being fat.

The most serious of these dangers would be a runaway infection of the deep fatty tissues.

If you are constricting blood flow to the area you are slowing the arrival of neutrophils, as well as providing a smorgasbord for bacteria. The worst of these would be Staph. aureus which is easy to introduce into fatty tissues through small skin wounds. When S. aureus is introduced into another subdermal tissue with (normally) limited blood flow -- the fascia -- the result is usually an aggressive infection, necrotizing fasciitis. There is much more food energy for opportunistic microbes in dying adipose tissues, and many of them are much more mobile than macrophages when there is lowered blood flow.

The second problem is what happens to the stored fats. They don't just vanish into thin air. There are one of two possibilities: they're released into the blood stream until they are stored as fat elsewhere (or until you die of hypertriglyceredemia), or they are excreted (hard on the liver, hard on the kidneys, risk of cholesterol stone formations). They aren't just "burned" because at 9kcal/g significant weight loss through a non-excretory pathway would result in serious hyperthermia.

Whether it is riskier to carry a huge triglyceride burden around in one's blood and other ECF fluids (obese people may already be doing that, but increasing blood fatty acid levels is likely to provoke a nonlinear response) or to deal with the breakdown products in an elimination process, is unclear.

What needs to be understood is to what extent the breakdown of adipose tissues in this fashion drives weight loss because the mice are too ill to eat. The third and second last paragraphs in the article you linked to points that out, but doesn't stress enough how rigorously this would have to be tested before being considered reasonably safe for (even morbidly obese) humans.