Are Zero Fizzy Drinks Healthy?

Pennywise

trailingspouse wrote: »

To return to the original question - is zero fizzy pop healthy. Can you guess what the ingredients are? Could you make it at home? If the answer is no, then it's probably not healthy. So I wouldn't waste my money on it (and this is a money-saving site!)

I take it you don't "waste" your money on alcohol, wines, spirits, etc either then?

Stoke

trailingspouse wrote: »

Junk food.

It's not difficult to tell the difference. Or maybe it is, in which case I apologise.

Maybe I should explain.

Real food is actual meat, or fish, or vegetables that you take home and cook. You can see what it is and where it's come from (not literally the farm, although you often can these days - I mean you can see that the meat came from an animal).

Junk food is so highly processed that it's really quite difficult to know how it's made or what it contains, without a detailed study of the label. You wouldn't be able to make it at home (and fizzy pop comes into this category).

There are some items that fall somewhere between the two - cook chill meals, for example. You could make something similar at home, and you could have a reasonable stab at guessing the ingredients. They tend to be higher in fat, salt and sugar than the home-made version.
I'm not some sort of evangelist that's never eaten a frozen pizza - I just think it's important to avoid the foods that are actively harmful.

To return to the original question - is zero fizzy pop healthy. Can you guess what the ingredients are? Could you make it at home? If the answer is no, then it's probably not healthy. So I wouldn't waste my money on it (and this is a money-saving site!)

I still think you need to consider the post I made before yours. Take every food product and attach a number to it. I still think you are putting too much emphasis on this notion that some foods are 'bad' and some are 'good' just because they're essentially freshly made or not. Superficially, this might be true... McDonald's hamburgers don't really look very good quality compared to a home made burger and you can be sure they contain more fat and calories. However, if you work with the numbers, like I said, rather than the specific ingredients, then you can live a healthy lifestyle eating nothing but 'junk' food.

Just ask this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Gorske

The documentary Fat Head is very good for debunking a lot of the stigma surrounding this.

Red-Squirrel_2

trailingspouse wrote: »

Real food is actual meat, or fish, or vegetables that you take home and cook. You can see what it is and where it's come from (not literally the farm, although you often can these days - I mean you can see that the meat came from an animal).

You're saying all this like its completely objective fact. Actually, a lot of people like myself don't consider meat or fish to be food at all.

You are distinguishing between what you believe to be good and bad food, or worthy and unworthy food, so use those terms!

A bag of skips is just as real as a chicken breast, its just that you think the latter is a better thing to eat.

trailingspouse

You're absolutely right Red-Squirrel - I do think a chicken breast is better to eat than a bag of skips.
And I disagree Stoke that it's only about the calories. The quality of the calories is, I think, more important. Taking your argument to it's logical conclusion, you could live on Haribo and Coke. And yes, you probably could, for a while - but you wouldn't be very healthy.

And the OP was asking about what was healthy.

A sensible amount of good (real, non-junk) food is healthy. It really is that simple.


Pennywise - the money I spend on wine is never wasted... But seriously, using my definition of 'real' food (and drink...), we can make a good guess about what goes into wine, and beer, and spirits, and we could have a go at making them at home. So I wouldn't class them as junk food.

Red-Squirrel_2

trailingspouse wrote: »

So I wouldn't class them as junk food.

Let me guess, you can make an argument for all the things you like to eat being 'real not junk' food? :rotfl:

rach_k

Stoke wrote: »

Does carbonation make a drink significantly worse for you?

I don't know of any reason why carbonation would make a drink inherently worse for you, if the only difference was the carbonation, but carbonation makes things taste bitter so for a fizzy drink to taste as sweet as a still drink you need to add more sugar/sweeteners (which is why flat Coke or Pepsi tastes so sickly sweet when you would've been fine with the sweetness when it was fizzy), which could make the drink worse for you, depending on your overall diet of course.

Stoke

trailingspouse wrote: »

You're absolutely right Red-Squirrel - I do think a chicken breast is better to eat than a bag of skips.
And I disagree Stoke that it's only about the calories. The quality of the calories is, I think, more important. Taking your argument to it's logical conclusion, you could live on Haribo and Coke. And yes, you probably could, for a while - but you wouldn't be very healthy.

And the OP was asking about what was healthy.

A sensible amount of good (real, non-junk) food is healthy. It really is that simple.


Pennywise - the money I spend on wine is never wasted... But seriously, using my definition of 'real' food (and drink...), we can make a good guess about what goes into wine, and beer, and spirits, and we could have a go at making them at home. So I wouldn't class them as junk food.

OK, let me go on a bit of a long one.....

The quality of the calories is mildly important, but the quantity is massively hugely greatly positively 100% more important with regards to your weight and general well-being. This isn't hypothetical, this is absolutely 100% proven Scientific demonstrable fact.... regardless of whether you think otherwise.

Let's provide a simple example for you:
A large fresh apple has 130 calories and weighs roughly 223 grams according to Google, so let's round that 223 grams up to 230 to make things a bit simpler (and is favourable to your theory, technically).

I decide I want to consume some 'good' calories (as you describe them).... so I decide to make a simple fruit juice, specifically Apple juice. Apple's are good calories remember? An apple a day, keeps the doc away and all that malarkey.

So how many Apple's do I need to make my healthy juice:

2.5KG of Weighed Apples can produce a Litre of Apple Juice (source at the bottom). Now I'm used to drinking 500ML of Coke Zero, so let's say that's how much I want.

2.5KG = 2500 Grams
2500 / 230 = 10.869565217 Apples required. To be nice (and again weight the maths in your favour), I'll round that down to 10 apples, but really, it's more like 11, isn't it? I want 500ML.....

So following on from that, it takes 5 apples approximately (technically more), to create a 500ML bottle of apple juice for my consumption

5 * 130 = 650 calories! And that is best case scenario with all the maths in your favour. In reality, 650 calories is almost 100% guaranteed to be under the actual figure, seeing as I rounded the numbers in your favour.... the actual scientific calorie intake could be 700 calories or even more.

So, 650 of your finest, bestest, goodiest calories....... and yes, if you drink two (1300 calories) or three of them a day (1950 calories) while consuming other food, no matter how good those calories are for you, you will gain weight and probably end up with diabetes from the high sugar intake. They might be the best damned calories in your kitchen, but once again, it's all down to the numbers!! I always find it funny how people try to turn people off smoothies and ground fruit juices by over complicating it:

Blending apples causes the natural sugars to release and this results in blah blah blah blah"...... No, it's so much simpler than that and can essentially summed up by this:

"To make a 500ML glass of apple juice, you need more than one apple. More apples, more calories and more sugar. More calories increase your chances of weight gain and a high sugar intake, natural or not, isn't all that healthy. Simple."

As a side note, by blending it into a juice, you also completely negate any 'satisfaction' those individual apples provide. You wouldn't eat 5 apples in a row, as you would feel full, but 5 apples will make 500ML of juice and you can comfortably drink that. So you will probably drink your good calorie apple fruit juice and then eat some good calorie fresh porridge as well.

To coin an old phrase: QED - Calorie counting works for a reason.

It's nothing to do with 'sugars releasing' or quantum molecular bio-!!!!!!!!..... it's just maths. Simple arithmetic... hence why these seriously dedicated body builders who make evil looking 'green shakes' use things like leek, spinach etc..... why not Apple's? They're good calories after all?

Nothing to do with good calories

It's all a numbers game. Nothing to do with 'good' or 'bad.... that's just personal preference/opinion. Food is food.

Your other point about Haribo is also a complete non-starter because you aren't comparing like with like. In this scenario, you're not talking about the quality of calories but the variety of calories/nutrition or specifically a nutritionally balanced diet. If you have a McDonald's chicken burger, you've got bread, meat, pickle, other salad etc.... there is a variety (albeit not much) of the food groups and some nutrition. If you eat nothing but Haribo, you'll also probably get diabetes and be nutritionally starved. Not a fair comparison.

At the end of the day, people hate calorie counting which is why things like SW and WW exist. It's a real pain to look at the back of every food item in ASDA and work out whether you should be eating it or not.... but assuming you're eating balanced meals then the calorie intake is absolutely the only thing that matters, not the 'quality' of the produce. Your body does not discriminate. I suspect the reason why you've been able to maintain such a healthy weight is not so much the 'good' food, but the fact your food is lower in calories than the McDonald's equivalents You can eat more, and remain within your calorie intake. McDonald's food is high calorie and not particularly satisfying.... home cooked food more often than not is lower in calories and there's more of it, so you feel fuller for longer.

My Source: https://www.orangepippintrees.co.uk/articles/apple-juice

I'm afraid you can't often fool science.... It's just science. Biology.... Simple, factually acknowledged, peer reviewed, science.

theoretica

Stoke wrote: »

to create a 500ML bottle of apple juice for my consumption

5 * 130 = 650 calories! And that is best case scenario with all the maths in your favour. In reality, 650 calories is almost 100% guaranteed to be under the actual figure, seeing as I rounded the numbers in your favour.... the actual scientific calorie intake could be 700 calories or even more.

Except you are way off in your estimate. When you press an apple for juice you have quite a bit of pulp left and that has calories left in it. Easy enough to check the ball park of the figure against published calories in commercial apple juice.



Here for instance, fresh pressed applejuice 250 calories in 500ml juice.


http://calorielab.com/brands/trader-joes-fresh-pressed-apple-juice/46/2004466

MrsStepford

I used to be addicted to Diet Pepsi. Fizzy drinks, diet sodas - call them what you want, there's zero nutrition in them. Flavoured waters can be sugary too.

Husband and I drink bottled water (Evian for me, Badoit for him) and Honest Kids Organic juice drinks - no added sugar, low in carbs, come in three flavours in packs of six - I buy them from ASDA.

QuackQuackOops

anotheruser wrote: »

I get that the use of wording isn't the best but Zero'd fizzy drinks have next to no sugar in them these days.

So is the time of looking at fizzy drinks as un-healthy over?
Are they actually not that bad?

I believe that the sugar drinks are healthier, if thats the right word for it.
Sugar, even though it goes through a refining process, is a natural product and we have been eating it for many a year.
Artifical sweeteners, on the other hand are just that. Artificial and not good for us.
I would never feed my child a drink made with artifical sweeteners.