Glucoholic - Sugar Free Snacks

Happy Memorial Day! We thought we would celebrate this important holiday with another reader-requested review. We received quite the response to our Sierra Mist Free Cranberry Splash review, and amongst them were several requests for a review of Diet Sierra Mist Ruby Splash. We actually had to look for a while before we found them in stores, but they have arrived and we’re hapy to make wishes come true. There seems to be some evidence that the Ruby Splash flavor will stick around as a full-time edition of Sierra Mist, unlike the Cranberry Splash. If you’re a fan of both, and want to raise you voice to have both as full-time options, make your opinion known at Sierra Mist’s Facebook Page.

If you like grapefruit, then you’re going to like Diet Sierra Mist Ruby Splash. We’re not generally fans of sugar free drinks sweetened with aspartame and acesulfame potassium, but we’ve got to make an exception here. The distinct tartness of a pinch of grapefruit seems to completely mask the aspartame aftertaste. The marriage of the traditional lemon-lime flavor with the grapefruit flavor is a good one. In our opinion, this rendition of Sierra Mist is also much less carbonated than the others, which we think is a bonus. It’s cool and refreshing, and would make a great addition to those Memorial Day cook-outs this afternoon. With only 35mg of sodium and 65mg of potassium, it’s also a pretty healthy choice!

The Glucoholic used to have a very serious problem with Mountain Dew. Anyone out there who’s also suffered with this addiction knows what we’re talking about - those school days when you reached the soda machine only to find that the precious was sold out. Simultaneous feelings of paralyzing fear and vein-popping anger rushed through your body. The Glucoholic quit cold turkey and suffered a horrible detoxification process, and since has avoided anything Dew for fear of returning to those dark days. That is, until now. Enter Caffeine Free Diet Mountain Dew! You get the familiar taste of Mountain Dew, without all the things you need to seek treatment for. No sugar. No caffeine. Just neon green goodness.

The taste of Caffeine Free Diet Mountain Dew is quite good. There is a very slight aftertaste that hints of the aspartame inside, but the pinch of acesulfame potassium and sucralose really keep this to a minimum. The aftertaste is an order of magnitude more acceptable than most other diet drinks that contain aspartame. We can’t recall finding any other diet drink that actually uses all three. Of course, we would have preferred sucralose only, but we’re not complaining. As far as nutrition goes, you’ll get 35mg of sodium in each eight ounce serving and that’s it. If you’ve ever enjoyed Mountain Dew as much as we used to, you owe it to yourself to give Caffeine Free Diet Mountain Dew a try.

Ten years ago, would you have believed that their would be so many flavored waters on the market today? It seems like every time we say “we’re through with the flavored waters for a while” we find another one just begging to be reviewed. This time we’re talking about Fruit2O Natural Grape. First of all, we love the name. You have to try a product with a name this good. We’re really glad we did. This is a tasty little beverage. The flavor is bold, but not overbearing. There is adequate sweetness, and the grape flavor does seem authentic. This is a real advantage over some of the other grape flavored waters that taste like they are from powdered mix that didn’t get shaken enough.

Fruit2O Natural Grape contains no calories, no fat, and no carbohydrates. Each eight ounce serving only contains 35mg of sodium. This water is sweetened with sucralose, which is always a good decision. Though we can’t rate it quite as high as SoBe Lifewater Black and Blue Berry, we can give Fruit2O Natural Grape a very high rating. It’s one of the best sugar free drinks we’ve sampled, and we can’t wait to try the other flavors!

Given these tough economic times, The Glucoholic could not afford to go to SXSW this year to check out the latest and greatest in nerddom and music. Like so many others, we here at Glucoholic.com were forced to follow the event via the intarwebs. While perusing various sites we came across several mentions of Sweet Leaf Tea, an Austin company, providing refreshments. The word “sweet” always gets our attention, so we went looking for a sugar free drink offering from Sweet Leaf Tea. Their entertaining and informative website not only told us where we could find it locally, but might be the only Flash-based drink site on the planet with music turned OFF by default. We were very happy to see that our local retailer did carry Sweet Leaf Tea, and had the diet variety as well!

This tea was very enjoyable. It’s simple and sweet, and has a very refreshing aftertaste. The ingredients list only contains carbon-filtered water, organic black tea, citric acid, and sucralose. The citric acid probably provides that tiny hint of lemon, and it’s obvious that Sweet Leaf has caught on to the fact that sucralose can actually be used to sweeten beverages enough to be indistinguishable from sugar-sweetened competitors. Bravo! We highly recommend this drink. The nutrition label informs us that there is zero of everything you don’t want. What the label does not tell you is that there is one hundred percent of what you do want in a sugar free drink in Sweet Leaf Tea Diet Sweet Tea - great taste.

The vitamin water market is flush with competitors trying to sell you their version of health in a bottle. SoBe is hoping that being one of the first players to successfully use PureVia sweetener in a sugar free drink will help them leave the competition in the dust. PureVia is derived from the stevia plant, which contains natural sweetener. We decided to put SoBe’s Black and Blue Berry Lifewater to the test, and were pleasantly surprised at how flavorful this water is. To start things off, we can’t go without saying how compelling the bottling and labeling is. This is par for the course for SoBe, but you really have to take a look at the bottle in good light to see how much time and effort went in to making a stunning package for this product.

The taste of this product is strikingly sweet. Truthfully, we were expecting something really bitter; or perhaps weak and unsatisfying. The berry and the sweetener are a great couple, and the only aftertaste is one slightly akin to candy. It’s hard to believe that you can get this much taste from 6 grams of carbohydrates and 25mg of sodium, but somehow they did it. We are definitely looking forward to trying some of the many other Lifewater flavors. An eight ounce serving also contains 100 percent of the recommended daily intake of Vitamin C, 20 percent of Vitamin E, and 10 percent of several important B vitamins. This water also contains grape seed extracts and mixed berry extracts.