Friday, September 7, 2007

Lifestyle: Wet and wild -- are these new waters, sports drinks really good for you?

By Katharine Dyson
GPA Contributing Lifestyle Editor

Tips for intelligent drinking Watch for beverages with calorie-adding ingredients. They may certainly be good for you, but moderation can be vital to your weight and health. Look for the following: Sugar, syrup, fructose, milk, cream, corn syrup, fruit concentrate and juices (eating the fruit itself is better). Pay attention to the servings per bottle or cup and the total calories you are consuming. Often the calories in the large print are for just a portion of the total contents of the bottle. Use skim milk instead of 1 percent of 2 percent milk in your coffee. It adds up. Understand the spin. Phrases like "all natural" and "organically sweetened" don't mean they are free of calories. Watch the caffeine: High caffeine levels may actually cause anxiety.

While recently playing golf on a hot sticky day with my friend, we were waiting for the par-3 green to clear.

"I really have to lose some weight," he said. "I'm trying but nothing is working."

He is not alone, as 66 percent of Americans are overweight and struggling.

At the halfway house, he picked up a couple large bottles of FruitWater. Two holes later and one of the bottles was gone. The second went just as quick.

"Good stuff," he said, tossing the bottles in the trash can. "I used to like Coke, but this has all kinds of good stuff and hey, it's mostly water."

Water's got to be good for you, right? Depends.

If you're quenching your thirst with flavored waters like Glacéau's VitaminWater, two 20-ounce bottles add up to 250 calories. Go ahead, read the fine print.

Sales of carbonated beverages are on the decline, while performance drinks -- including enhanced waters, bottled teas, functional beverages and sports drinks -- are hot and getting hotter. A stroll down the beverage aisle of any supermarket and will reveal that more real estate on the shelves is being commandeered by bottles of Glacéau's VitaminWater and FruitWater, Propel, Desani Plus, Diet Coke Plus and Aquafina Alive.

No wonder. Compare an 8-ounce serving of Coke to VitaminWater Essential and Coke has twice the calories (100), twice the sugar (26 grams), plus 30 milligrams of sodium and no significant nutrients. VitaminWater Essential has eight vitamins.

They come with labels and promises to make life better, to provide more energy, to improve thinking and even help you lose weight. That may well be, but a closer look at the other side of VitaminWater Energy's label gives a strong clue as to where all that energy is coming from. It has 50 milligrams of caffeine and 13 grams of sugar.

The labels are a fun read too. VitaminWater Essential reads, "gulp it down and don't miss the bus." VitaminWater Energy's label states, "We added b vitamins and guarana to give you an extra kick (pun intended) so now when you're watching soccer, playing soccer, coaching soccer or doing anything that starts with "socc" and ends with "er", you too can have the energy of a raving lunatic to yell "goooooooal."

The bottles come in a rainbow of colors, flavors and functions and all this clever, hip marketing is working. How many people do you know that now have those orange or green, blue, yellow or pink bottles of hyped-up waters, teas and performance drinks in their fridges?

The big beverage companies know this and are scurrying to keep in the loop. In 2000, Pepsi bought Gatorade, while recently Coke paid $4.1 billion to buy 10-year-old Glacéau's VitaminWater.

But are these drinks really doing the job? Are they good for us and what are the downsides?

Take my friend. During our recent round, he actually consumed about 400 calories in his drinks and probably more when he got home. Is it a mystery why dropping weight is difficult?

You would think tea would have zero calories, so why not bottled teas? Well, think again.

The fancy label on New Leaf White Tea says "organically sweetened." Sure it is -- with "evaporated cane juice." You know what that means: sugar, and lots of it. A cup of this beverage has 80 to 160 calories per bottle. No wonder it tastes so good.

And what about those energy drinks? Information Resources, a market-research firm, reported that U.S. consumers spent $744 million on caffeinated energy beverages ending June 17, a 34 percent increase over the previous year.

In testing beverages with names like Red Bull and Rockstar, Consumer Reports noted: "Anyone who guzzles the whole container (about 20-oz.) consumes up to 200 mg of caffeine and up to 260 calories." As a comparison, a cup of coffee has about 100 milligrams.

Of the drinks tested, Consumer Reports found that 8-ounces of Red Bull had 106 calories and 80 mg of caffeine, while Celius, an energy supplement that is said to burn calories, contained only 7 calories but had 145 mg of caffeine plus guarana and green tea. (Green tea, guarana and yerba mate supply caffeine while ginseng may amplify caffeine's effects.) Drink the whole bottle of Celius and you are talking about maxing out the recommended caffeine intake for the day (300 mg).

And the list of designer and sports drinks goes on.

A typical smoothie (24-oz.) contains about 450 calories. Graduate to the 30-oz. size and now you're talking more than 600 calories. A Starbucks designer coffee can deliver more than 350 calories; a large soda served in a movie theater can add up to more than 500 calories; those double Big Gulps (64-oz.) of soda chalk up a whopping 800 calories and a Starbucks Chai Iced Tea Latte (16-oz. Grande) contains 260 calories.

So the next time you want to quench your thirst, be aware of what you are drinking. If you want to lose weight, consider at least limiting your bottled specialty drinks, purified waters -- like Glacéau's electrolytes-enhanced Smartwater -- or drinking just plain old water. Period.

And consider this: If you can eliminate 500 liquid calories from your daily diet or 3,500 calories a week, you can possibly trim 50 pounds in a year. Just think of what it will do to your swing. We're talking flexibility, subtleness, lean and mean.