And no, that's not a typo for "getting out."

According to a report in the British Medical Journal, sugar-sweetened soft drinks are linked to an increased risk of getting gout, a disease that causes painful swelling of the joints known to mostly afflict middle-aged men. The findings come from a study done on 46,393 men over 12 years. The risk of developing gout was 85% higher among men who consume 2+ cans of soda as compared to those who drank less than one soda a month. Sweetened soft drinks contain large amounts of fructose, which causes excess uric acid in the blood, eventually leading to uric acid crystals collecting around the joints.

Of course, the study also found that men who consumed high-fructose fruits like apples and oranges had increased risk of getting gout by 102%.

When most people choose a diet soda over a regular one, they are doing it for their waistline. In other words, they are only paying attention to the zero or low calorie number. Very rarely are they looking at the caffeine content.

If you are watching your caffeine intake, it's worth noting that most diet versions of their regular counterparts contain more caffeine. Though it's not the highest content among all diet drinks, Diet Coke has 30% more caffeine that regular Coke! To get an idea of how much of a difference there is, and to see how the diet sodas stack up against each other, Diet Blog has put together a list of the 10 Most Caffeinated Diet Drinks. Number one? Pepsi Max, with 69 mg of caffeine. As a reference point, 1 tsp of instant coffee powder has 57 mg of caffeine.

Of course, if you're "dieting," then you might actually appreciate that extra caffeine.

There is something about Japanese soft drinks, food, and candy treats that fascinates us here at Slashfood, and their chocolate bars are definitely no exception. Could you imagine biting into a Kit Kat stick, but rather than the regular chocolate and wafer flavor, you taste apple? If that isn't strange enough, how about Cherry Blossom or Melon?

The Japanese have certainly cornered the market on different varieties of the Kit Kat bar, with flavors ranging from Green Tea to Red Azuki Bean, to the premium "Exotic Tokyo" - a Japanese limited edition made with milk chocolate, passion fruit, raspberry, strawberry, cherry, blackcurrant and pepper. They even have an adult, Wine-flavored version, just in case the others are a little too tame for you.

In fact, as the folks over at InventorSpot have pointed out, Wikipedia now lists over 80 different varieties of the chocolate bar that have been in production at one point or another. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed this morning when I checked in at my local store and only found two different kinds available, but as we've said before, for some reason the flavored varieties just don't seem to do well over here or in the UK.

(thanks, Michelle!)

One could scarcely call a pale-green soft drink Pepsi. Nonetheless, here it is. Pepsi Ice Cucumber is an actual product, not a parody along the lines of Beef Twinkies. This bizarre beverage went on sale this week in Japan. As with many new products that experiment with flavors, it's only available for a limited time. I've savored sake with slivers of cucumber in it, but this green concoction strikes me as some sort of Zimalike mutant.

While I'd love to think that Pepsi limited the supply of this new creation to boost future sales, after reading some reactions from bloggers in Japan, I'm not so sure. Japan Probe notes that the label describes the drink as a combination of cucumber and cola, but concludes that it has very little cola flavor. The blogger goes on to say that after the first few intriguing sips, the artificial cucumber renders it nasty. Japan Probe also has a post of some YouTube reactions to Pepsi Ice Cucumber. One fellow said it has a "green flavor, kind of like Satan's in my mouth." Mmm ... devil cola.

Advertising companies and politicians like to play with semantics for the purpose of changing images. Big soda companies seem to be heavily invested in changing their images this year - with Pepsi completely revamping their packaging and Coke teaming up witt Jay-Z to promote Coke Zero - so it isn't entirely shocking to hear that they no longer want soda to be thought of as "carbonated soft drinks." Instead, they're "sparkling beverages."

In what some might describe as a blending of advertising and politics, the name change represents some social climbing on the part of soda companies. They are trying to distance themselves from their high-calorie, junk food roots, which politicians and other people in positions of power continually hold against them. Unfortunately for the cola companies, soda is so popular that no matter what Coke and Pepsi executives decide to call it, changing the name for the product to "sparkling beverage" is like trying to change the word for "beer": it's just not going to happen.

The highest court in India has demanded that Coca-Cola and Pepsi reveal the chemical composition and ingredients of their products after a study that was released on Wednesday showed that the soft drinks contain high levels of insecticides.

The two presiding justices have given both Coca Cola and Pepsi just four weeks to submit a reply, otherwise the court will suspend sales in India. However, Shreyas Patel, a lawyer at Fox Mandal Little realizes that "no one is going to give away a 120-year-old secret, especially in a country like India. Someone would go and make it themselves."

Obviously, he never met these ladies, who already have.

I noticed at the ex-Queens Head in Henley (now called the Idle Hour) that they have a super range of soft drinks - various fruit juice mixes even Root Beer, Dandelion and Burdock and 'real' lemonade and ginger beer. It would seem there is trend developing, as mentioned in yesterday's Independent, for style bars to offer such delights. Even I, partaker of vast quantities of Breakspears and Mount Gay Golden and Coke, have drunk more than a few recently.

The Independent recommends three 'soft options' available from supermarkets and on the high street -

• Bon Grape Low Sugar Sparkling Grape Juice (Tesco £1.29) "low sugar means artifical additives must be used but the lively flavours make them worthwhile"
• Grove Fresh Original Tomato and Vegetable Juice (Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsburys £2.39-£2.79) "improbably good for you and entirely delicious"
• Fever-Tree Ginger Ale (Oddbins, Waitrose £2.99 for 4) "From themakers of the best tonic water around comes the best ginger ale. Great with proper rum"

Teen consumption of energy drinks is way up and the reason for their popularity is primarily their caffeine content. A Red Bull has 9.64mg of caffeine per ounce, while a Coke only has 2.83 mg per ounce (Pepsi has 3.17mg). The extra caffeine can help to keep the chronically sleep-deprived awake, but more interesting to the students this time of year is the fact that caffeine can potentially help them concentrate slightly better in class or on exams by making them more alert.  Columnists at the Mercury News - judged to be amateur, moderate or pro caffeine consumers - tested three popular drinks: Red Bull, Rockstar (9.38mg/oz.) and Monster (8.75mg/oz.). They rated them on taste and how long it took the boost to kick in. Not completely scientific, perhaps, but an interesting look at the drinks and certainly a good start for anyone looking to get through finals. 

 

If you had asked me ten years ago if I would drink diet soda, or any drink without sugar or with a sugar substitute, I would have laughed and said, "Of course not!" I couldn't stand the taste of diet drinks. But now? All I drink is diet soda. I can't drink regular Coke or Pepsi because it just tastes too sweet and syrupy (same thing with milk - I only drink non-fat milk now because whole milk tastes like heavy cream or something).

But there's one drink where I just can't bring myself to drink in a diet or sugar substitute version: iced tea. In fact, I can't even stand "real" iced tea. It just tastes like ... well, a cold cup of tea. Give me the sugar-filled packaged stuff any day. Over at The Atlantic, Cory Kummer has a piece (subscription required, but there's an excerpt) on the amount of sugar they're putting in soft drinks, diabetes, and how one of the world's oldest drinks might help solve the sugar epidemic problem.

I swear Asians have the weirdest things to drink. This was first made clear to me when I would take a small can of an orange juice-like drink called Sac Sac to school. The drink has lots of the tiny mandarin orange pulp sacs, which is really not all that different from fresh squeezed range juice that hasn't been strained of its pulp, but the name, Sac Sac was weird. I won't even go into the grape drink that has peeled whole grapes in it that feels like I'm eating eyeballs.

Now comes Grass Jelly Drink, which I tried for the first time a couple of days ago and am now thoroughly addicted. Grass jelly (in Chinese: sh?o xi?n c?o) is an Asian food made by boiling a special type of grass in the mint family with potassium carbonate. As the liquid cools, it gels. The jelly is cut into tiny cubes and mixed with a sweet, flavored liquid to make the drink. Mine was litchi flavored.

The only bad thing about the drink is that the grass jelly sinks to the bottom of the can. You have to shake it before you drink it, but unless you pound the whole thing in one big gulp from the can, the grass jellies sink back to the bottom. 

I've also seen grass jelly as an "add on" in boba teas.

Today, the American Beverage Association and its members agreed to voluntarily remove sugary sodas from public schools across the country. Companies including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cadbury Schweppes are all members of the ABA. Public high schools that still permit diet sodas will still be able to buy them for their campuses, and they will also be sold drinks that are considered have some nutritional value, juice, sports drinks and low-fat milk, though whole milk will no longer be offered because of its calorie content. Elementary and middle schools will only be sold unsweetened juice, low-fat milk and water. Part of the reason that the soda companies have agreed to this deal, which was made in conjunction with the William J. Clinton Foundation, is that on-campus soda sales make up a very small percentage of their overall sales, not to mention that a voluntary withdrawal looks better, from a PR perspective, than being banned.

 

While it appears that the folks over at The Knowledge for Thirst have been reviewing beverages for a while, it looks like they've really stepped their game up in the past few weeks. The humorous and helpful drink reviews from Joshua Allen and Kevin Fanning have been showing up with much more regularity. I've yet to try most of the drinks they review, and, thanks to the reviews, I can, with good conscience pass up a few of them. Here's an excerpt from their less than glowing review of Coke Blak: "After the first sip, my brain went: “Really? That?”

Keep them coming, guys.

The Guardian recently featured several excerpts from Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser's new book Chew On This, a kid-oriented exploration of the fast food industry. Schlosser uses plain English and, of course, plenty of alarming statistics to show young readers the basics of fast food marketing and food processing. The Guardian samples focus on television marketing (American kids watch an average of 25 hours of TV each week, Schlosser says) and how McDonald's has changed the soft drink industry. According to Schlosser, 20 percent of one- and two-year-olds in America drink soft drinks daily and the average American adult drinks 500 cans of soda each year.

At the end of last year, Nick posted about Coca Sek, a soft drink that was being produced by the Nasa community, indigenous people to southern Colombia. The carbonated, citrus-flavored soft drink is made from coca leaves, the same coca leaves that are processed with solvents and other chemicals to produce cocaine. However, the narcotic form, cocaine, is foreign to the Nasa people, for whom the coca leaf is sacred. Nasa people consume coca leaves by simply chewing them and in the form of food and tea.

Despite controversy with respect to indigenous peoples' rights, drugs, economies, Coca Sek sales are gaining ground. What was initially a production volume of 3,000 bottles a week has almost tripled. Governments are backing off the Nasa people who are claiming sovereignty, the Nasa people are trying to "mainstream" coca leaves by promoting their pain-killing, nutritive, and spiritual benefits. Additionally, the producers of Coca-Sek are paying a higher price for coca leaves - about $15/bag of leaves - which is higher than what drug traffickers offer. That makes Coca-Sek an effective weapon in the war on drugs because "each leaf that goes to making the drink is one leaf less for the narcos."

Still, I highly doubt that Coca Sek will ever make it to the US.

Snapple is launching a line of new white teas, due to hit shelves during the summer. White teas are made with young tea leaves and are high in antioxidants. They are known for their light, delicate flavor, which Snapple has blended with fruit flavors, including apple, nectarine and raspberry. The company plans to market the beverages, which will be sampled in stores nationwide, for its health benefits and all natural ingredients, as well as the facts that white teas are naturally decaffeinated and the drink has 30% fewer calories than other Snapple teas, though it is still sweetened with real sugar, not artificial sweeteners.