What can be more perfect and more natural than plain old fashion water?  The prefect diet drink of course...water and your favorite Yum Drops® flavoring.

In our story line (1) we mention an article that was published in March 2009 Men's Health Magazine (2).  A synopsis of the editorial focuses on the average consumer drinks more than 450 calories a year in beverages.  That amounts to 29 pounds a year we have to deal with.  We either work it off or we live with it.

Water has been described as one of the best things you can consume when you are dieting, watching your weight and for general good health.  The more you drink the better it is for you and at the same time, curbs your appetite and desires for food. 

"Not all beverages are created equal", is the tile of our recent blog post.

Here’s what Mark Stengler, N.D. says about water in his book “The Natural Physician’s Healing Therapies”-Proven Remedies That Medical Doctors Know About. ” Drinking an adequate amount of water is critical for weight loss. Dehydration, even at a marginal level, actually causes the body to store water, and water retention is a large factor in weight gain. In addition, water is essential for detoxification” We recommend this book as a great reference manual.

 Yum Drops® make drinking more water easier.  The more you like the taste the more you drink, it's as simple as that.  Natural Flavoring drops for water brings an all natural fresh fruit taste of sweet and citrus fruit flavors to your water drinking pleasure.  Our flavoring drops for water enhance the taste experience and turns drinking water into a delightful experience.   The flavoring drops for water approach to enhancing flavors allows you to control the taste, the subtleness or the boldness of the flavoring by the amount of drops you put in.  Flavoring drops for water come in lemon, lemon/lime, acai, blueberry, cherry, kiwi, pomegranate cranberry to mention a few.

• Natural flavoring

• Easy to carry

• Fun to use- anytime, anywhere

• 0 Carbs, 0 Calories, 0 Fats

• No artificial sweeteners

• You control the strength of the flavoring taste and experience

• Natural stevia sweetener

• Can be used by diabetics

To continue on, Harvard Medical School just completed a research report on sugary drinks and diet drinks.  Here's a synopsis and highlights of that report.  It covers everything from consumption of sugary drinks and diet drinks to potentially causing type 2 diabetes.  No surprises here, it follows the same theme from our story line and the article in Men's Health.  This research report is being provided to support our claims of water being the better solution and water with Yum Drops® being the best solution and alternative.  We take no credit for this report but merely provide it here as more back up to our claims about water and diets.  We let you come to your own conclusions in the final analysis.

 

The Nutrition Source

Sugary Drinks or Diet Drinks: What's the Best Choice (3)

Introduction

Just like out storyline, their claim is "soft drinks are the beverage of choice for millions of Americans." Some drink them morning, noon, night, and in between. They're tasty, available everywhere, and inexpensive. They're also a prime source of extra calories that can contribute to weight gain. Once thought of as innocent refreshment, soft drinks are also coming under scrutiny for their contributions to the development of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic conditions. Diet soft drinks, made with artificial sweeteners, may not be the best alternatives to regular soft drinks.

The term "soft drink" covers a lot of ground. It refers to any beverage with added sugar or other sweetener, and includes soda, fruit punch, lemonade and other "ades," sweetened powdered drinks, and sports and energy drinks.

Drunk every now and then, these beverages wouldn't raise an eyebrow among most nutrition experts, any more than does the occasional candy bar or bowl of ice cream. But few people see them as treats. Instead, we drink rivers of the stuff. According to figures from the beverage industry, soft drink makers produce a staggering 10.4 billion gallons of sugary soda pop each year.  That's enough to serve every American a 12-ounce can every day, 365 days a year.

The average can of sugar-sweetened soda or fruit punch provides about 150 calories, almost all of them from sugar, usually high-fructose corn syrup. That's the equivalent of 10 teaspoons of table sugar (sucrose). If you were to drink just one can of a sugar-sweetened soft drink every day, and not cut back on calories elsewhere, you could gain up to 15 pounds in a year.

Soft Drinks and Weight

Historians may someday call the period between the early 1980s and 2009 the fattening of America. Between 1985 and now, the proportion of Americans who are overweight or obese has ballooned from 45 percent in the mid-1960s to 66 percent today. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has an online slide show that shows the spread of obesity in the U.S.) There's no single cause for this increase; instead, there are many contributors. One of them is almost certainly our penchant for quenching our thirst with beverages other than water.

Once upon a time, humans got almost all of their calories from what nature put into food. That changed with the advent of cheap sugar, and then cheaper high-fructose corn syrup. Sugar added to food now accounts for nearly 16 percent of the average American's daily intake. Sweetened soft drinks make up nearly half of that.

Dozens of studies have explored possible links between soft drinks and weight. It isn't an easy task, for several reasons (read Sorting Out Studies on Soft Drinks and Weight to learn why). Despite these research challenges, studies consistently show that increased consumption of soft drinks is associated with increased energy intake. In a meta-analysis of 30 studies in this area, 10 of 12 cross-sectional studies, five of five longitudinal studies, and four of four long-term experimental studies showed this positive association. A different meta-analysis of 88 studies showed that the effect appeared to be stronger in women, studies focusing on sugar-sweetened soft drinks, and studies not funded by the food industry.  Studies in children and adults have also shown that cutting back on sugary drinks can lead to weight loss.

On the surface, it makes sense that the more ounces of sugar-rich soft drink a person has each day, the more calories he or she takes in. Yet that runs counter to what happens with solid foods. People tend to compensate for a bigger than usual meal or for a snack by taking in fewer calories later. That's how weight stays stable. This compensation doesn't seem to happen with soft drinks. No one knows for sure why this happens, but there are several possibilities:

• Fluids may not be as satiating as solid foods. That means they don't provide the same feeling of fullness or satisfaction that solid foods do, which might prompt you to keep eating.

• The body doesn't seem to "register" fluid calories as carefully as it does those from solid food. This would mean they are added on top of calories from the rest of the diet.

• It is possible that sweet-tasting soft drinks—regardless of whether they are sweetened with sugar or a calorie-free sugar substitute—might stimulate the appetite for other sweet, high-carbohydrate foods.

Soft Drinks and Diabetes

Gulping the equivalent of 10 teaspoons of sugar over the course of a few minutes gives the body's blood sugar controls a run for their money. Most people handle a blast of blood sugar just fine. Over time, though, a diet rich in easily digested carbohydrates may lead to type 2 diabetes (once called non-insulin-dependent diabetes and adult-onset diabetes).

Strong evidence indicates that sugar-sweetened soft drinks contribute to the development of this potentially disabling disease. The Nurses' Health Study explored this connection by following the health of more than 90,000 women for eight years. The nurses who said they had one or more servings a day of a sugar-sweetened soft drink or fruit punch were twice as likely to have developed type 2 diabetes during the study than those who rarely had these beverages. (8)

A similar increase in risk of diabetes with increasing soft drink and fruit drink consumption was seen recently in the Black Women's Health Study, an ongoing long-term study of nearly 60,000 African-American women from all parts of the United States. (9) Interestingly, the increased risk with soft drinks was tightly linked to increased weight.

In the Framingham Heart Study, men and women who had one or more soft drinks a day were 25 percent more likely to have developed trouble managing blood sugar and nearly 50 percent more likely to have developed metabolic syndrome. This is a constellation of factors—high blood pressure; high insulin levels; excess weight, especially around the abdomen; high levels of triglycerides; and low levels of HDL (good) cholesterol—that is one step short of full blown diabetes and boosts the odds of developing heart disease.

Soft Drinks and Heart Disease

Obesity and diabetes are both strong risk factors for heart disease, the number one killer of men and women in the U.S. Given that drinking sugary beverages increases the risk of both obesity and diabetes, it is a natural question to ask whether drinking sugary beverages increases the risk of heart disease, too. 

The answer from the first long-term study to ask that question is a resounding yes: The Nurses' Health Study, which tracked the health of nearly 90,000 women over two decades, found that women who drank more than two servings of sugary beverage each day had a 40 percent higher risk of heart attacks or death from heart disease than women who rarely drank sugary beverages.

Of course, people who drink a lot of sugary drinks often tend to weigh more—and eat less healthfully—than people who don't drink sugary drinks, and the volunteers in the Nurses' Health Study were no exception. But researchers accounted for differences in diet quality, energy intake, and weight among the study volunteers. They found that having an otherwise healthy diet, or being at a healthy weight, only slightly diminished the risk associated with drinking sugary beverages. 

This suggests that weighing too much, or simply eating too many calories, may only partly explain the relationship between sugary drinks and heart disease. The adverse effects of the high glycemic load from these beverages on blood glucose, cholesterol fractions, and inflammatory factors probably also contribute to the higher risk of heart disease. 

The right choice seems obvious.  The only logical conclusion seems to be water as the best choice and alternative.  While we can't take credit for water, we can take credit for enhancing the flavor of water by using natural flavor concentrates as drops. 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

End Note References:

(1) Yum Drops® Our storyline: May 2009

(2) Men's Health Magazine: March 2009

(3) Harvard School of Public Health: May 2009- http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-drinks/sugary-vs-diet-drinks/index.html