"ncaa" news and stories

Well, no. Not exactly. For the average joe, Vitamin Water, one of those brightly colored, highly sweetened drinks that most people think is healthy (it's got the word vitamin right in the name!), is just fine to keep drinking.

However, if you're an NCAA athlete, you might want to take another look. According to Advertising Age, it has come to light that there are six flavors of Vitamin Water that contain some of the NCAA's impermissible substances. These substances include guarana seed-extract, caffeine, ginseng, taurine, L-theanine, green-tea extract and glucosamine. These additives are banned because they can cause a false positive on the mandatory substances tests that the NCAA requires its players take on a regular basis.

This wouldn't be such a big deal, except for the fact that the NCAA and Coca-Cola (Vitamin Water's parent company) recently inked a multi-year deal, making Vitamin Water Revive (a particular flavor, which does not include any of the banned substances) an NCAA sponsor. Seems like an odd conflict of interest to me!

Source

If you're like me, you've been flipping back and forth between the Food Network (for obvious reasons) and broadcast TV the last few days. I'm watching the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. In other words, it's all about March Madness.

This weekend, the Elite Eight are battling it out to make it to the Final Four. In honor of the Elite Eight, here are eight lovely posts from around the food blogosphere that have us cheering for action in the home kitchen:

1. Is it Spring yet? At Seven Spoons, a Spring pea soup says it is!
2. Maona makes lotus root chips
3. Feeling sick? How about an elixir of limoncello from Welcome to my Pantry
4. Berries are in season somewhere in the world - and da*xiang's clafouti is a perfect way to use them
5. Do you eat flowers? If they are rose petals on Toast's walnut cake!
6. Onion rings aren't health food, but if they're oven-fried by Engineers, maybe they aren't so bad.
7. Hopefully you didn't give up fruit and cheese for Lent, otherwise, stay away from mini cream cheese tarts
8. Zen Foodism has lamb-bahs with yellow tomato herb salsa and roasted red peppers

[photo: Seven Spoons]