Ok, I know this post sounds sensational, but its not. It’s literal.

I bought a case of LaCroix flavored sparkling water either at Costco or Kroger, I can’t remember which. All it is, is lightly flavored sparkling water and I thought perhaps it might be a more healthy alternative to all of the Coke I drink.

Well, I was wrong. You see, it’s only an “alternative” if you can actually drink it. But I thought this stuff was disgusting! Instead of just throwing it out, I thought I’d give it to my dogs as a treat. But even that didn’t work! One of my dogs drank a little of it, then stopped. The other one took one little taste and then refused to drink another drop!

I’m not kidding, I can’t even get my dog to drink it! And here is the photographic proof. (Click on the photo to see her actually running away from it!)
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Today while driving from Minneapolis to St. Paul, Minnesota I spotted a White Castle and immediately detoured so that I could relish in the experience made famous by Harold and Kumar as well as the Beastie Boys.

I went inside and immediately spotted the folks at the grill working on those tiny little square burgers that make White Castle famous, and then began to peruse the menu for a half dozen or so cheeseburgers - all the while imagining the delicous taste that was heading my way.
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Wow, this is very bad news considering my complete and utter addiction to Coke. But Dr. Chi-Tang Ho, professor of food science at Rutgers University has uncovered evidence that our addiction to canned drinks is directly linked to diabetes because of the high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

HFCS is a sweetener found in many foods and beverages, including non-diet soda pop, baked goods, and condiments. It is has become the sweetener of choice for many food manufacturers because it is considered more economical, sweeter and more easy to blend into beverages than table sugar. Some researchers have suggested that high-fructose corn syrup may contribute to an increased risk of diabetes as well as obesity, a claim which the food industry disputes. Until now, little laboratory evidence has been available on the topic.

In the current study, Chi-Tang Ho, Ph.D., conducted chemical tests among 11 different carbonated soft drinks containing HFCS. He found ‘astonishingly high’ levels of reactive carbonyls in those beverages. These undesirable and highly-reactive compounds associated with “unbound” fructose and glucose molecules are believed to cause tissue damage, says Ho, a professor of food science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. By contrast, reactive carbonyls are not present in table sugar, whose fructose and glucose components are “bound” and chemically stable, the researcher notes.

So, I went shopping after I read this article with a renewed interest in avoiding products with high fructose corn syrup in them, and I could not believe how many of my every day items are on the list…
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One nice thing about hotels is that they usually have commercial ice makers which are great for filling up coolers. But what about when you don’t have a cooler, but you have a few drinks that you’d like to ice down over night? Well, all you need to do is convert the sink into a makeshift cooler!

I never want to pay hotel rates for drinks, so I will typically stop at a store and pick up a few drinks. In order to cool them down I close the sink drain, lay the drinks in the sink, and proceed to fill it completely full of ice.
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Let’s say you’re having a group of friends over, and people show up with warm drinks. Clearly they need to be cooled down, but if you put them in the fridge or a cooler it’s going to take hours.

Well, here’s a little video that demonstrates how to drop those baby down to about 40 degrees in 2 minutes flat.

This works on the same principle as a homemade ice cream maker, but if you’ve never used one of those it basically just involves adding salt to an ice-water mix.
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This Mad TV video had me laughing so hard Coke shot out my nose. And I guess that’s all it really takes to get me to post it here.
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How about that alliteration huh? Seriously, cheesy though it may be, I found 44 pretty cool facts about food. Just be thankful I didn’t drag it out even longer (think Peter Piper picked a peck…).
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Below is an excellent little video that shows exactly how much sugar is in a can of coke. And before you watch it, if you do a little math, here are some staggering figures:

• There are 12 ounces (340 grams) in a can of coke.
• There are 39 grams (1.38 ounces) of sugar in a can.
• 340 grams / 39 grams = Coke is over 10% pure sugar!
• If you typically drink the equivalent of 6 cans a day you are consuming over 8 ounces or 1/2 pound of pure sugar per day.
• 24 oz. at lunch
• 2 cans during the day
• 24 oz. at dinner
• That level of sugar consumption equates to about 15 pounds of raw sugar per month, or 182.5 pounds per year. (This happens to be about my body weight.)
• Don’t drink that much Coke? Well, 3 cans a day still equals 7.5 pounds per month or 91.25 pounds per year that your body has to either burn off or store as fat.
• Sweet Tea has almost the same amount of sugar
• Sweetened Coffee counts too. A heaping tablespoon of sugar is about 20 grams.

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With all the bad news about Coke making people fat and generally being bad for you, finally some good news!

Researchers at the University of Maryland did a little test by dropping teeth into 12 different beverages for 2 weeks to see what happens to enamel over roughly the period of a decade in your mouth.

Surprisingly, Coke was the least harmful of all the drinks tested!
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According to the US Agricultural Research Service, the average American consumes 74 pounds of added sugar each year.

That’s about 23 teaspoons of added sugars every day–or 460 calories that supply no additional nutrients. To put that in perspective, your average guy would need to do high impact aerobics for a full hour every day just to burn off those calories.
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Wired Magazine (August 2006) reports that Autodesk founder (you know… AutoCAD) and Hacker’s Diet author, John Walker, claims you can lose 10 pounds in two months by simply eating less.

1. Multiply the pounds you want to lose by the number of calories in a pound of fat: 10 x 3,500 = 35,000
2. Divide the total by the days you’ll diet: 35,000 / 60 = 583
3. Eat that many fewer calories each day.

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