Last year, I gave up drinking soda forever. More specifically I gave up drinking high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It is extremely bad for ones health, and something I no longer want to consume.
On a roadtrip to Madison, WI with my girlfriend I ventured into the energy drink cooler of a gas station and pulled out a Sobe Essential Energy drink. I scanned the ingredients to find no HFCS and I was happy. A new potentially healthy energy drink with no high fructose corn syrup. The drink tasted good but my mouth & tongue had a developed a very familiar slime. At our next pit stop I reexamined the ingredients to find:
Crystalline Fructose
What the hell is Crystalline Fructose....it sounded bad.
A big part of this blog is searching for natural sodas & healthy energy drinks that basically serve as a replacement for my craving for coke. While this is obviously an unrealistic dream, it is even more upsetting that products labelling themselves as 'Natural' have unspecified things like Crystalline Fructose in their ingredients.
I did some research.
I found some amazing posts at the Fit Shack about this very same topic. Here is a quote from the fit shacks posts about Crystalline Fructose:
"I have learned that Crystalline Fructose contains 99.5% minimum of fructose assay, which is an even higher percentage of fructose than what makes up HFCS. Another ingredient of crystalline fructose is arsenic. I don't know about you, but I don't care what the amount is (in this case the chemical specs state 1 mg/kg maximum), I don't want to be ingesting arsenic."
The Fit Shack also goes on to list 23 drinks that have Crystalline Fructose in their can or bottle, they are:
Cytomax Sport Drink, FUZE HEALTHY INFUZIONS, FUZE Slender Energy, FUZE Vitalize, Glaceau VitaminWater, HYDRIVE Energy Drink, Inko’s White Tea Energy, IQ H2O, Mistic RE, SoBe Essential Energy, W2O For Women. (this list was borrowed from The Fit Shack which is an amazing post)
Avoid these drinks even more so than the killer sodas. It is a sad day to see so many terrible things in our drinks, we already have disgusting fluoride and prescription drugs in our water.
Do not drink Crystalline Fructose, do not drink High Fructose Corn Syrup and visit The Fit Shack to learn more about what you should be drinking instead.
4 comments:
Hi William,
Thanks for the links to my posts re: crystalline fructose! But beyond that, WTG on investigating what's in that supposedly "healthy" drink, and then figuring out that it's a waste of $$. ;)
Keep up the great work of staying off the corn sugars, and actually I recommend abstaining from all refined sugars - refined sugar offers 0 nutritional value and only serves to create ups and downs of sugar cravings, mood swings, and very often leads to overeating/weight gain. Yep, I'm addicted to refined sugar and white flour and when I stay off of it, life is much better. :)
Thank you for this article and link to The Fit Shack. I will write about this topic in my blog. How terrible, you think you're choosing a healthier alternative to HFCS and this option could potentially be worse!
~elaine
Thanks for sharing the fact about Fructose. Hi you're my featured link on my entrecard. Have nice day
Can you believe I recently purchased a liquid vitamin without looking at the ingredient, and that's when I discovered about crystalline fructose! I buy liquid vitamins of course because they ingest directly into your bloodstream so I get a lot better response, but the ones I have purchased in the past had no sugar or preservatives in them. As I began to read the ingredients I saw this strange name and went to the internet for researc and found your blog amongst other resourses. I will be on the lookout for this ingredient in future purchases. What made me wonder was I had a huge increase in my desire for sweets when I started taking this vitamin (Liquid Life for Complete Nutrition). It has great ingredients besides vitamins, but it just ruined the authenticity of the product after I discovered this ingredient. I will never be in such a rush that I don't thoroughly read the ingredients of anything I ingest in the future......
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