So there I am, enjoying a lemon-flavored Spindrift Sparkling Water under the impression that it contains zero fucking calories, like every other sparkling fucking water on the sparkling fucking market. I’m really guzzling it, y’know — giving myself the ol’ throat shower. But then I spin the can around, and what do I fucking see? I see it contains three fucking calories. Three fucking calories!
In that moment, I realize I’ve been betrayed, cheated, deceived. My day is ruined, and my diet is now entirely off the rails. An emotional blastwave of disappointment emits from my body as I, in true Kyle fashion, chuck my goddamn Spindrift can against my goddamn wall.
I’m seething, man. How could Spindrift do me like this? How?! Well, I’ll tell you how.
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All Spindrift products contain a minuscule drop of real juice — lemon juice, grapefruit juice, cucumber juice and sometimes even orange juice — and that drop has a few calories. “There must be one gram of carb coming from the little bit of actual lemon juice,” says Cate Shanahan, biochemist, past director of the Los Angeles Lakers PRO Nutrition program and author of The Fatburn Fix. “One gram of starchy carb would have four calories.” However, food labels are notorious for undercounting calories, which might be how they landed on three.
All in all, it sounds like there could be some caloric fuckery going on, which actually makes sense, especially when dealing with such few calories in the first place. In fact, the FDA allows manufacturers to claim their products contain zero calories if they have “less than 5 calories per typical serving amount.” That means Spindrift is actually being extra honest about the calories in their products, because they could just claim zero if they really wanted to.
Moreover, many flavored sparkling waters rely on incredibly unhealthy artificial sugars in order to make their “zero calories” statement, whereas Spindrift is using real juice, which is a whole lot healthier, even though it has a few calories. And even with its three fucking calories, sparkling water is still a good choice compared to many other beverages. According to UChicago Medicine, “Sparkling water provides true hydration, and it’s a much better option than drinking regular soda or even diet soda, which don’t provide adequate hydration.”
Guess I better pry my goddamn Spindrift can out of my goddamn wall then. Fuck.
Ian Lecklitner
Ian Lecklitner is a staff writer at MEL Magazine. He mostly writes about everyone's favorite things: Sex, drugs and food.
