Thursday, April 19, 2018

So What Am I Supposed to Drink?

To my horror, I discovered about a week ago that Robinson's "Fruit and Barley" has now reformulated to remove the added sugar and replace it with artificial sweeteners. With the net effect that that's another thing I now can't drink. (Rather naively, I had assumed that diluting fruit juices were sweetened with, you know, fruit, and so wouldn't include masses of additional sugar. I guess not.)

Anyway, this caused me to go have a look at the various brands that are available... and the results are not good. Pretty much all of the big brands and all of the 'own' brands loudly trumpet that they have "no added sugar", which translates as "added sweeteners", which translates as "you can't drink this". There are a very few more obscure brands, mostly the very expensive niche brands, that are still not using sweeteners but there's no indication as to how long this will last.

I also learned yesterday that San Pellegrino had also reformulated to reduce sugar and added artificial sweeteners. So that's another thing I can't drink.

I'm rapidly coming to a point where there is very little I actually can drink, and those options are significantly flawed: either they include huge amounts of caffeine (Coke and Pepsi), or they're hugely expensive (Fentimans), or they're very much niche products and so not widely available. Or, of course, there are alcoholic drinks, but they don't work when I often have to drive.

So I'm left with a question: just what am I supposed to drink? Is the answer seriously going to be water and nothing else?

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