Sorry, not even remotely connected to RPGs, unless you count the fact that munchies and soft drinks are typical fare at game sessions. But I need to get this out there and I hope it has some effect.
A couple weeks or more ago, my wife and I were shopping and we saw some "Aquafina Flavor Splash Wild Berry" on the shelf. We've enjoyed some stuff that seemed similar such as the various flavored Crystal Geyser sparkling waters. So we buy it and take it home, my wife tastes it, and she says it's horrible. I assume it's just her taste, so I don't actually try the stuff until some time later...but when I do, yuck. This is very obviously artificially sweetened crap. When it comes to artificial sweeteners like sucralose and aspartame, I know there are a lot of people who think they're a threat to health, etc. Maybe they are, but I don't personally worry about it because, not being on a diet, I have no reason to use them. About the only place I find them unobjectionable taste-wise is in chewing gum (almost all gums have some aspartame in them).
So here's what the front of the bottle says:
"0 Calories per serving"No real hint there; water plus a small amount of berry essence isn't going to have very many calories per 8 oz. serving, and the FDA allows the 0 calories claim for anything under 5 calories per "reference amount".
"Wild Berry Naturally Flavored"
"Naturally Flavored Water Beverage"One would think that "Naturally Flavored" means "Naturally Flavored", not "Artificially Flavored with some Natural Flavorings". Unless sweet is not considered a flavor. Which I believe, according to science, it is, one of the four (or five) fundamental ones.
So where am I informed that this product is not, after all, natural water plus berry flavor, but in fact a chemical soup? Well, on the back there's a great deal of text, again mentioning "0 Calories" (three times) "sugar free" (twice) and "Naturally Flavored" (three times). "Sweetened with sucralose" appears exactly once outside the ingredients themselves.
This is the second time I've bought something which was artificially sweetened with sucralose and was rather deceptively packaged. The other time was when I bought a cereal that was packaged as "half the sugar" but at least that had a little Splenda symbol off in a corner. Besides, Aquafina is a brand that trades on its supposed "purity"--even though,
there's an interesting story behind that.
Not like their chief competitors are much better. Dasani flavored water?
Also Splenda. Nestle Pure Life?
Splenda. And neither shows the Splenda logo on the label, as far as I can tell from pictures I've found of the bottles.
So now it seems that anything which is even vaguely marketed as low- or no-calorie must be treated as possibly containing an artificial sweetener (and who knows what else), where once we could take it for granted that anything not labelled as "diet" or "artificially sweetened" would be regular food. Great. :mad: