Natural Brew Draft Root Beer

This blog has veered a little too much into vaccines and vasectomies and things like that, that I've gotten too far off the core idea initially behind this blog, and that's musing about food and nutrition.  Well, one thing worth mentioning is my love of root beer - not always healthy and probably not very wise with all the sugar, but if I'm going to have any vices, its not going to be cancerous foods or neurotoxic drinks, but rather a tasty root beer here and there.

Natural Brew Draft Root Beer is fantastic in that the ingredients are very genuine.  No HFCS, caffiene, aspartame and garbage, but rather things like sweet birch, licorice root, sarsaparilla, and real vanilla.  Whats so nice about this is the rich aftertaste - very flavorful and very delicious.  It is a tad on the pricey side, unfortunately, but it's a very tasty treat.

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VitaminWater10, and some nasty-tasting artificial sweetner content

I sampled some Vitaminwater 10 the other day, and found the flavor absolutely repugnant. This thing is going back to the store. Routinely artificial sweeteners have an awful taste to me (considered safe by the FDA, considered repulsive by me) but this drink doesn't have any of the usual culprits like aspartame, sucralose, splenda, etc. Rather, it's got something in it called "erythritol" (a "natural" sweetener, which I doubt is natural at all) and the flavor is just a wallop of chemical aftertaste. Artificial sweeteners usually dry out my mouth and throat, and if I drink enough, I get a headache, so I avoid this FDA-approved-to-be-safe additive, so I'm not sure what to think about erythritol, because it looks like this is the new artifical sweetener on the block and there's not a lot of information out there about this (here's one link on it on Mercola... good site but I can live without obnoxious pop ups asking for my email. Look, I want information - not a newsletter.)

Stevia is in this drink as well, and I've tried Stevia straight and I just don't get into the taste of it. It just doesn't work the same for me as natural sweeteners do, like sugar and honey. So no more of this for me, unless they find some other natural way to sweeten this (and I mean "natural" in terms of reality, not "natural" as defined by the FDA).

(as a funny side note, it's interesting that when you spell-check the word erythritol the first suggested replacement word is "urethritis". I wonder if that means anything...?)

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