ClemSparks wrote:
I don't get the sugar free thing. I understand too much sugar is a bad thing, but what is substituted for the sugar in this stuff? An artificicial chemical sweetener? In my mind, that's got to be worse than a little sugar.
Unfortunately, it's really rare to find actual cane sugar in any "softdrinks" anymore. It's all corn syrup and such. I think glucose is the primary sugar in the energy drinks, iirc, is that right?
I'm just sayin' the "sugar free" thing sounds like a legal loophole by the folks who are selling this stuff to the brainwashed consumers.
Clem
Its a pick your poison kind of thing. You can drink the one with sugar (or corn syrup in most cases) and accept the hundreds of calories added to your diet. Any calories that you don't burn during the day will be converted and stored as fat. Its not fatty foods that make you fat, its a calorie overload. If it were physically possible to eat enough lettuce to cause a calorie overload you could get fat eating only lettuce.
On the other hand you have artificial sweeteners which have little or no calories but offer up a load of chemicals that may or may not be healthy depending on who you ask. Artificial sweeteners are produced in many different ways and are not sugar though some are created with sugar. They are a chemically engineered product.
So yes a sweetened drink can be sugar free, it is just sweetened with chemical compounds that don't contain carbohydrates, or contain very little as compared to their sweetness. Glucose, fructose, cane sugar, corn syrup, are all naturally occurring sugars, so if the drink had more than a microscopic amount of any of this in it it would not be legal to call it sugar free. Sort of like how non-alcoholic beer actually has about .5% alcohol in it, the government says that any drink below a certain %ABV can be called non-alcoholic. The rules for product labels vary depending on the wording used, so using words like "X Free" or "Low X" have specific limits on amounts per volume.