Drinkin' Woman's Blues

Okay, it isn't politically correct or anything, but I'll just say it. I hate water. Play in it? Fine. Wash with it? Okey-dokey. Drink it? YUCK.

So I'm trying to play nice with my Nutrisystem program and do everything I'm supposed to since the whole point of a no-brainer program like NS is to have them tell me what to do so i don't have to think about it.

Except, just like the brilliant Dr. Atkins and everyone else on the planet, yeah, yeah, yeah, need to drink that 64+ ounces of water a day.

Forgive my repetitiveness, but, YUCK.

So I contact my handy-dandy Nutrisystem "counselor" (probably a bored college kid making a few extra bucks) about what, in fact, may I consider water besides, well, water.

Crystal Light counts as water! Yea! I like Crystal Light. Only problem is, along with other major life changes I'd like to reduce my intake of aspartame (or "nasty-tame," as someone once called it--maybe my old buddy Jimmy Moore over at Livin' La Vida Low-Carb).

The greedy gusses at Crystal Light, however, use Splenda in their prefab bottled version, but retain cheaper aspartame in their more affordable powdered version. Now, if I am gonna drink at least 64 ounces of this crap a day, can you imagine how much $$$ it's going to cost to do bottled? (I can answer that: about $5 a day.) And can you imagine how much "nasty-tame" I'll be ingesting if I bottle my own at a much more reasonable 75 cents a day?

What's a thirsty girl to do? And don't tell me "drink water." At the risk of really sounding repetitive: YUCK.

In the Public Interest

If you've been following the lawsuits about the highly carcinogenic benzene being found at alarming levels in soft drinks, you'll be relieved to know that Pepsi has finally joined Coca-Cola and others in agreeing to reformulate their soft drinks to take benzene-containing ingredients out of their beverages.

Information on this latest development can be found on the Beverage Daily website.

The settlement involves PepsiCo, Sunny Delight Beverages Co., Rockstar Inc., Polar Beverages Inc. and Shasta Beverages Inc., according to Forbes magazine.

Coca-Cola settled a couple of months ago and has already reformulated its products.

Duh, I say, and what took so long? I suspect the answer is $$$$$.

As it currently stands, the following products (prior to last week's settlement) had higher-than-acceptable levels of benzene, as determined by the EPA. These are the worst offenders; a complete list can be found here.

Sunkist Orange Soda
Diet Safeway Select Orange
Fanta Pineapple
Bellywashers Blackberry Blast Juice Drink
Sunny D Citrus Punch
Tropicana Orangeade
Kool-Aid Jammers Juice Drink Cherry
Diet Pepsi Twist
Ocean Spray Light Cranberry Juice Cocktail
Ocean Spray Cranberry Blend
Ocean Spray Diet Orange Citrus Spray
Apple & Eve Light Cranberry
Shur Fine Cranberry Juice Cocktail
Harvest Classic Cranberry Juice
Giant Light Fruity Punch Cooler
Giant Light Cranberry Juice Cocktail

Message in a Bottle

I sit here this morning, typing and drinking a Diet Coke. Yes, I know. Horror of horrors. I'm a soda junkie. Not only am I a soda junkie, but I hated the Coke with Splenda, which I thought had a strange citrus-y taste, and am addicted to plain old Diet Coke with--eek--aspartame.

I've studiously avoided all the proclamations about the poisonous effects of aspartame, being old enough to remember the huge public outcry against the carcinogenic effects of saccharine in the 1970s. Which makes me old indeed, but that's another story for another day.

So now here's this new study from Environmental Health Perspectives, where the group of Italian researchers who did the initial damning study of aspartame--irritated that the FDA and European food regulatory agencies say aspartame is safe regardless of how much cancer their little aspartame-fed rats developed--have repeated their study. Results confirm an increase in lymphoma and breast cancer among rats fed a daily aspartame ration equivalent to average human ingestion.

Jeez Louise.

So, what's a girl to do? Well, right now, this girl has a meeting to go to. But I do think I'm gonna have to find a new soda to drink. What do you folks drink? (And if you say "water is all you need," well poo to you. I need SODA!)

Jonesing for a Soda?

So sue me--I am a soda fanatic. I even love Diet Coke, aspartame and all, even though I recognize that it's probably pickling my interior regions with formaldehyde as we speak.

So I was surprised--and pleased--to find a new offering at Wally World last week...Wally World, I might add, that in New Orleans since Katrina barely has any regular supply of merchandise at all and can take weeks before a sold-out item is restocked. And, yes, remember the post-Katrina footage of hooligans ransacking a Wal-Mart and hauling out electronics and massive amounts of Nikes? Well, that was my neighborhood Wal-Mart. But I digress.

So there on the shelf was a sugar-free Jones Soda. I was surprised, since the uber-hip, cultish Jones Sodas are known for their radical refusal to sweeten with high-fructose corn syrup. Their bottles, in fact, boast that they are "Pure Cane Sugar Sodas." So to see sugar-free was surprising.

I snapped up an overpriced four-pack and took it home. As I sipped a fizzy, refreshing, extremely tasty Sugar-Free Green Apple (sweetened with Splenda), I read the bottle, about how for years people had been begging them for a sugar-free soda but they never could find a taste they liked and that lived up to their standards.

Well, I guess they found it and I have to agree--it's mighty tasty. I notice on their website that they make sell sugar-free cream soda, root beer, and black cherry soda. Finding it is a bigger challenge, as I don't have much hope that Wal-mart will carry it long-term or in any variety of flavors. I think that was a fluke.

Intestinal Fortitude

So despite my rant a couple of days ago about being bored with my diet, I have to agree with Livin' La Vida Low Carb buddy Jimmy Moore's questioning of the intestinal fortitude of anyone who gets bored eating low carb. Sound like a contradiction? Not really.

I have a character flaw, you see. My name is Suzique and I am a tad obsessive. Well, okay, more than a tad. Suzique needs something to obsess over, diet-wise, and once her eating plan becomes too automatic and easy, she need to shake things up a bit.

Which is why she did some low-carb reading and decided to have a crack at the Four Corners Diet, which is the re-named, updated GO-Diet devised in the late '90s by Drs Jack Goldberg and Karen O'Mara.

If there was ever a diet designed to cater to a middle-aged obsessive, uh, woman of stature, shall we say, this is it. I can count and count and count to my heart's content. I can devise myriad Fitday charts and goals to track. I'm as happy as a melamine-fed pig at a quarantined hog farm (can you tell I'm still really PO'd about this latest federal bunglefest?).

Anyway, the four corners of the table on which this food-happy eating plan stands are:

Corner #1) Low carbs. Limit net carbs to 50 or fewer a day. 50 grams of carbs?? That sounds like a TON. Can I lose weight on 50g a day? Can my 50g of carbs come from Blue Bell ice cream? Well, no. Because part of this #1 Corner is a tad more specific and bans the usual suspects (thankfully): sugar, starches, etc. And a max of 15 net carbs per meal.

Corner #2) High monounsaturated fat. Drs. GO tiptoe cautiously around the issue of saturated fat and don't find themselves willing to go all-out and give sat-fat their blessing. So the program asks not that you limit fat intake at all--the more, the merrier--but that 50% of your fat intake come from monounsaturated fats. Between my great fondness for Cardini Original Caesar salad dressing and anything drenched in olive oil, this will not be a problem.

Corner #3) High fiber, to the tune of a minimum 25-30 grams a day. And I may mean "tune," literally, y'know? Do any of you add flax to your foods? I figure I will snack on a couple of yummy Chocoperfection Chocolate Bars a day, at 14g of fiber each and 2 net carbs, and that requirement will be taken care of, at least until I'm hauled away in the paddywagon to the poor house because I've spent my mortgage payments on the not-so-cheap Chocoperfection Bars (although the best prices I've found on them are at Netrition, fyi).

Corner #4) Pharmafoods. Now, this is an interesting corner to me given my interest in functional foods, though there are still lots of questions about the validity of their claims. The Four Corners plan calls for some form ofprobiotics every day, plus five servings of vegetables per day, as many as possible from the "pharmafoods" group, which they say are foods whose nutritional punch is greater than the sum of their micronutrients: dark green vegetables, nuts and seeds, high-fiber low-sugar fruits such as berries and melon, broccoli, onions, peppers, etc.

Now, if you've stuck with me this far, you'll finally get to the thing I really want to talk about, which is yogurt, namely full fat yogurt without sugar added. Apparently there is a consensus among low carb "experts," thatyogurt carbs aren't "real" carbs as long as the yogurt contains live cultures. (This supposedly also is true of buttermilk but since I don't know what to do with buttermilk other than make cornbread, I don't care.)

Note I said "CONTAINS" live cultures and not "MADE WITH" live cultures. If your yogurt says it's made with live cultures, chances are they aren't live any more. So look for the word "contains." Said cultures feed on the lactose in yogurt, rendering it a non-carb. What's left, the whey, can be strained off the top.

Or you can enjoy kefir, which I have trouble finding, or something like Fage Total, which is a strained Greek yogurt that has 7g of carbs per 8-ounce serving. I added a little Torani Sugar-Free Irish Cream syrup to it this morning and it was quite the treat.

So, low-carbers, what's your take on yogurt?

Insanity Report 3.08

A periodic report on the weird, the bad and the downright ugly in our food industry.

Today: The "Healthy" Soft Drink!

In the food industry's determined march toward more "functional foods," and in light of the role of villain the soft drink industry is playing in debates over the "obesity crisis," soft drink makers are fighting back after facing the first decline in sales in their long history. Said decline has apparently been caused by the demonization of sugar, fear of aspartame and an increased consumer interest in health.

Now, I have to 'fess up here. I know they're bad for me, but I drink diet soft drinks. Shame on me, but there you go. And I'll probably keep drinking them.

That being said, however, the latest movements by both Coke and Pepsi to release "healthy" soft drinks strikes me as pretty absurd. "Healthy" by whose standards? These will not be marketed as soft drinks--they're the villain, remember?--but as "sparkling beverages," according to this story in The New York Times.

Coke is planning to roll out Diet Coke Plus this spring. Its gimmick is that it's fortified with niacin, vitamins B6 and B12, magnesium and zinc.

In the fall, Pepsi will roll out Tava, which will be "lightly carbonated," caffeine free and offered in "exotic flavors" containing vitamins B3, B6 and E, plus chromium. The flavors are Brazilian Samba, Caribbean Calypso, Mediterranean Muse and Malaysian Satori. Whatever the heck those are.

Sucralose (Splenda) or a combination of sucralose and Ace-K seem to be the artificial sweeteners of choice but I'm still checking on that.

So, what'cha think? If you're going to drink diet soda anyway, will you try the new "enhanced sparkling beverages?"

Start Me Up

As I sit here thinking I'm kinda edgy, I realize I've just finished my second bottle of Celsius today and it got me to thinking about caffeine.

First off, Celsius is a new bottled "super-water," sold not as a food but as an "energy supplement." On the front of the very cool bottle it says "Celsius: Enjoy the Great Taste of Burning Calories!" It also has a big "No High Fructose Corn Syrup" label on it and you gotta love that.

Ever one to sacrifice myself for blogdom, I bought a case of the stuff to try it out. There's ginger ale, lemon-lime, orange, wild berry, and cola flavors. I had ginger ale and lemon-lime this morning, 16 oz bottle of each. I absolutely adore the taste of ginger, so the fact that both of these flavors are very ginger-heavy is a good thing with me and I love 'em.

Celsius is basically carbonated water sweetened with Splenda and jazzed up with vitamins and a "thermogenic blend" of caffeine, ginger root, green tea extract, guarana extract and taurine...They don't say how much is in their "proprietary blend" (which reads: trade secret), but, boy do I feel GOOD.

Anyhow, I started thinking about caffeine. Coca Cola recently announced that they will begin listing caffeine content labels on all their products, including their much-debated Enviga line. And now Pepsi has announced its own Enviga-like product, Pepsi Max, also laced with caffeine, along with ginseng.

It's all a part of the new buzz, functional foods.

And if that's not enough caffeine for you, sip this through your straw: a recent study has shown that senior adults can benefit from taking in more caffeine. In older adults (over 65), properties in caffeine appear to offer protection against heart disease. The theory is, according to the SUNY researchers, that the older patients' blood pressure is enhanced by the caffeine--the "proactive effect" was only found in patients who didn't have severe high blood pressure.

Interestingly, the protective effect of caffeine was not experienced by people below age 65.

I'm really jiggling my foot now and typing really fast. Wonder if I should save the rest of my Celsius till I turn 65?

Temperature Check

Have you heard about Celsius? It's a new food supplement in the guise of a soft drink. It seems fairly ominous to me, being as I'm reading Michael Pollan's excellent book The Omnivore's Dilemma and am in the chapter about how many foods have been "invented" to accommodate the country's overproduction of corn.

Anywho, Celsius is a Splenda-sweetened soft drink that comes in a number of flavors and--here's the kicker--claims to be thermogenic. It supposedly burns calories while you drink your sugar-free cola or ginger ale or orangeade.

How can they claim this, you might ask, given the wrist-slapping Coke just took over their similar Enviga claims?

It's all in the way the laws of food versus "food supplements" is set up. Food supplements are not under the jurisdiction of the Food & Drug Administration and therefore are not regulated in what claims they are allowed to make--or at least that's my understanding of it. (If that's not right, let me know!)

So, what's in Celsius?

The usual suspects. Green tea extract, guarana seed and caffeine, among other "thermogenic" ingredients.

On the other hand, at least their website (see link above) rails against the evils of High Fructose Corn Syrup. I may try one and see if it gives me heart palpitations. Is it a magic fat-burning potion? No. Is it a reasonable alternative to regular old diet soda? Why not? At least it isn't loaded with sugar or HFCS or aspartame.

Silly Wabbit--Trix are for Kids

I remember the baffling dilemma of breakfast cereal as a kid. It was before the days of "nutritional eating"--what the heck did we know (or care) about carbs or fiber or childhood obesity? Well, maybe the latter as I squeezed into my "chubby" size clothes.

All I knew was that I had a deep and abiding love for Frosted Flakes and Tony the Tiger. That, like Boo Boo the bear, I couldn't get enough of that Sugar Crisp. That I kept begging my mom for the "new" Lucky Charms cereal with marshmallow stars and clover and then wouldn't eat it because it wasn't sweet enough.

Was breakfast cereal marketed to kids way back in the day? You bet it was.

So, as King Solomon notes, there's nothing new under the sun, and it should come as no surprise that General Mills has rolled out a new group of breakfast cereals to be produced in conjunction with Disney.


The new Disney-themed breakfast cereals includes Princess Fairytale Flakes, which are coated in pink sugar; Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Berry Crunch, which contains no real berries; Honey B's, a honey-graham concoction; and Little Einstein Fruity Stars, which are about as fruity as Froot Loops (another of my childhood favorites). All three cereals, say the folks at General Mills, "are made from whole-grain corn" and are "lightly sweetened." All to make not-so-savvy consumers think of them as "healthy."

And here's the kicker. In a day when a box of breakfast cereal can run you $4, the cereals will retail for $1.99 a box, appealing not only to the clamoring sugar-crazed toddlers but the wallets of their parents.

They're sure to be a hit.

Odds and Ends

Clearing my folders of things that have been languishing a while...

* From UCLA, this study is sort of mind-boggling in that it supports a strange phenomenon known as the "obesity paradox." Apparently, the one time in your life when it pays to be obese is if you're hospitalized for heart failure. The heavier you are, the better your chance of survival. The researchers think that obese people have more nutritional reserves to draw upon as they fight the heart failure. I have no idea what practical purpose the study will serve--can't imagine it would cause any docs to advocate weight gain!--but it's interesting, nonetheless.

* The Brits may be in trouble. In this study, scientists have discovered that all the antioxidant benefits of drinking tea are erased if you add milk to your tea. Most "Yanks" don't have milk with their afternoon tea--we're more apt to add sugar!--but it's quite common in Europe. Has something to do with the milk preventing the tea's artery-relaxing properties from kicking in.

* If you're starting a new exercise routine, you might want to drink a cup of coffee before you start. The newest issue of the Journal of Pain has a study that the caffeine equivalent of two cups of coffee cuts post-workout pain by 48 percent. The downside? If you're already a moderate coffee drinker, your body is probably immune to the caffeine effects and it might not work.

Drinkin' Man Blues

Start Date: Aug 6, 2006 Lost to date: 40.8 lbs. Still to go: Triple digits

Okay, I'll just admit it right up front--I don't like water. The idea of sitting down to a big old glass of the clear stuff rates right up there with vacuuming and dish washing. It's a chore. While in the past I have told myself beautiful lies about how diet soda counts as water, deep inside I knew it didn't, and besides how much pickling of my innards is all that aspartame doing anyway?

So now we have a new generation of waters, with flavors in them and sweetened with Splenda. I don't really know if they should count as "real" water but they are clear and they aren't carbonated and they don't have formaldehyde-inducing aspartame in them, so I'm counting them.

And counting them, and counting them.

How much water are we really supposed to drink? I heard an ounce for every pound you weight. Well, that ain't happening. I'd float out to sea. So, let's go for an ounce of water for every pound of what I want to weigh. That's still a lot of water, 130 ounces, let's say. That's 8.125 of my 16-ounce bottles of Fruit20. My record so far is three bottles. If I try to drink eight a day, I'll go broke.

That is, if I don't float away first.