About a month ago, Cary and I joined a gym, and have been meeting with a trainer once a week. During our first visit with the on-site physician (who also happens to be our trainer), we discussed general health and eating habits. When I mentioned that I drink diet soda, he recommended avoiding them because “aspartame can make you feel tired”. I’ve never heard that before. Though looking up information online, I found some information that suggests that aspartame and other artificial sweeteners can actually fool your body into thinking that sweet foods don’t have any energy benefits. The result is that you eat more sweets and actually can gaing weight.
Now I’ve maintained the same weight (give or take a couple of pounds) for the last 5 years. I dropped about 15 pounds after I stopped drinking sugary soda back in 2000, so I know that drinking diet soda had some benefits. But not drinking any soda is better than drinking diet soda, so I decided to cut soda out of my diet and see what happens.
Luckily, I don’t develop addictions very often, so cutting the caffeine out of my diet didn’t bother me. In the last month, I’ve had zero diet sodas, and I’ve had maybe four regular sodas. I can’t say cutting out soda has given me more energy since I’ve also been doing a lot of other things differently at the same time — but I don’t miss soda like I thought I would. I will occasionally drink a Cherry Coke (non-diet) at Ted’s, but that’s about it.
Except for Liquid ADD, that is.
Liquid ADD is the name I’ve given to Jolly Rancher soda. Cary and I found it a couple of weeks ago, and I decided to pick up a few bottles. I mainly wanted to see how much like a Jolly Rancher this stuff actually tasted. It’s startlingly accurate. We tried the watermelon, grape and green apple flavors, and aside from the facts that the stuff is carbonated, it tastes exactly like it’s hard candy counterpart.
Calorie-wise, it’s on par with most other sodas, but it’s so sweet, it tastes like it has a cup of sugar in it. Luckily for me I can only drink about six ounces of the stuff at a time. I can’t imagine the amount of energy that would be released if a small child drank a 20-ounce bottle of thist stuff.
Jolly Rancher soda is neat in a novelty kind of way, but it’s in no way as bizarre as the Jones Holiday Soda assortment. I don’t have to try that stuff to know it’s evil. With flavors like Cranberry Sauce, Turkey & Gravy, Herb Stuffing and Pumpkin Pie, it seems as though Jones Soda is attempting to catapult the novelty beverage industry into a Jetsonsesque futureworld where an entire meal can be ingested in a single unnatural form (pellets, wafers, gum, etc.) It’s the quaffable Thanksgiving dinner, only without the nutrition and tryptophan-induced coma*.
*I know that the tryptophan in turkey is NOT the reason why thanksgiving dinners make a person pass out, and that it’s really just the overload of carbs. . . but it’s a fun myth to perpetuate.