De-fuzed

It's a cool autumn evening and after a long walk around the small ponds with Ira (he has short legs) enjoying the fall colors I prepared a big sippy-cup of watered down juice made from concentrate for him to drink, thinking I was so clever to give him something he loved so much, but in a rationed and controlled way. However, it dawned on me that I might be doing my son a dis-service, preparing and training him to only recognize and consume beverages that aren't all they profess to be.

Okay, so I'm exaggerating a bit, but I was really surprised this week with a small discovery. A friend I frequently eat lunch with at work has been sporting some fancy fuze fruit drinks lately, whose packaging oozes with the image of some amazing fruit drink with exotic flavors, like my beloved Brazilian Acai. I inspected the packaging expecting to see some marketing to the effect of "With this fruit drink you get XX servings of fruit". Luckily they weren't that blatant in their deception.

They had above the nutrition facts boldly printed 5% juice. Clearly they must be pumping it full of the vitamins a real fruit drink would give you. As I moved to the ingredient list I was extremely surprised that there were only two, that's right, two ingredients that made up 99.5% of the drink. Water and apple juice. The packaging then declared that 'less than .5%' of a long list of stabilizers, mostly foreign sounding (unless you are a chemist), and flavoring made up the rest.

I inspected several flavor varieties of the drink over the next few days of lunch and noticed they all had only two main ingredients, water and apple juice. I asked him, 'They are basically selling you watered down apple juice. Do you feel ripped off?' I was stunned at his reply. 'No. It tastes like the flavor I expect to taste. I can't complain.' I suppose that will do in some circles.

As I reflected I wondered what other products I might be consuming that are less than what they claim to be. Thoughts?

P.S. I wanted to work something in here about Mio, which I guess is this dye you squeeze into water to make juice? I don't even know. All I know is that when I see the yellow dye defusing through the water in the ads on hulu I'm a little disturbed.