More Corporate Bullshit

Coca-Cola’s New Fruitwater Contains No Fruit, But Will Anyone Care?

As soda sales dip, Coke hopes Fruitwater will pick up slack.

You may be celebrating the fact that soda consumption has been fizzling out, but don’t expect the beverage industry to walk away from you (or your wallet) so easily.

Yesterday, soda giant Coca-Cola confirmed it’s launching a new line called Fruitwater. Just don’t look for any real fruit in the dazzling, bubbly drinks. There isn’t any. But it will contain the artificial sweetener Splenda, also known as sucralose, and will come in zippy flavors like black raspberry, watermelon punch, strawberry kiwi and more. The new beverage line, launching April 1, will fall under Coke’s Glaceau unit, which produces Vitaminwater and Smartwater.

“Such an ‘unsoda,’ fizzy and sweetened but packaged like bottled water, could lure people who are looking for an alternative to sugary carbonated drinks,” writes Candice Choi for the Associated Press.

In the midst of our nation’s obesity epidemic, beverage companies are hoping low- and zero-calorie soda alternatives will be the next robust market. Choi notes that the company’s Vitaminwater sales were up four percent, while Smartwater was up 25 percent.

But it hasn’t all been calm waters for Coca-Cola. Despite Vitaminwater’s nutritious-sounding name, the Center for Science in the Public Interest filed a class-action lawsuit in 2009, claiming the product used deceptive health claims in marketing the drink. Coca-Cola’s defense countered that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage or was composed only of vitamins and water because the sweet taste of Vitaminwater puts consumers on notice that the product contains sugar.”

For fruitless Fruitwater, an emerging environmental concern may cause the most waves.

Source: Take Part Read more

Opinion:

I have a heap of issues over this.

Using names like Smartwater, Vitaminwater, Fruitwater, H2OH, etc, should be banned because they are misleading.

What’s next eWater?

OMG! I just googled it expecting to find some humorous images and I find the stuff already exists; revitalising units and lotions (with gold no less).

Anyway, back on the subject.

Coca Cola’s assumption (defence) that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage…” is bullshit, the majority of consumers are hoodwinked by advertising and believe everything that is dished out to them and never think to question claims, even if the claim is built into the product name.

The use of ‘fruit’ for something that does not have fruit in it is misleading in the extreme. Coke is battling for market share and they will use every dirty trick in the book, and some that aren’t yet there, to increase profits.

Consumer interest and protection groups should be jumping on the bandwagon and proclaiming, denouncing, and prosecuting, not only Coke, but all these bastard corporations.

By using the name Fruitwater they are misleading a gullible public. A public that needs protecting from the corporate wolves.

Just because Fruitwater uses sucralose, in place of the poison aspartame, doesn’t resolve the issue. Sucralose is a chlorinated form of sucrose (sugar). It is not processed by the body, once it does it’s sweetening act, 90% passes right through your system and into the toilet.

Great, it’s gone!

But has it disappeared?

Not on your life. It remains in the sewerage, it bypasses the sewerage treatment because it is not affected by the sewerage system and passes on into the planets water supply.

Scientists have already detected elevated levels and admit that they don’t know what the effects are, or are going to be.

Are we putting our fish and seafood on a crash diet? No-one knows. People use this stuff to lose weight. Will it have the same effect on our aquatic life? Are we dooming all aquatic life to become anorexic, just skin and bones and no meat for humans to eat? Are we destabilising the one remaining food source on the planet?

Once again, we are paying scant regard to the environment.

We Must Act… NOW!

The wastage of food on this planet has reached epic proportions. It’s time to stop!

Alarming figures are appearing, that we waste 50% of our food from the farm to the table and beyond, that half of the turkeys we produce for Christmas and Thanksgiving Day end up in the bin not eaten.

If this figures don’t shock you, nothing will?

We desperately need to return to the old ways where our larders looked liked this.

The reliance on corporative food products has to be stemmed.

Pre-war advertising – Click the image for an excellent post

Very soon we will need this to survive.

Don’t scoff at the idea.

“It takes roughly 20 gallons of water to make a pint of beer, as much as 132 gallons of water to make a 2-liter bottle of soda, a typical hamburger takes 630 gallons of water to produce.” – Wall Street Journal

We have all heard about ‘carbon footprints’ but what we haven’t heard much about is the ‘water footprint’.

The water footprint is the hidden amount of water used to produce food, and nearly all other products. It’s the amount we don’t see.

1lb of beef cost $7.99 and 2,500 gallons of water

Take another example; “To date, probably the most reliable and widely-accepted water estimate to produce a pound of beef is the figure of 2,500 gallons/pound. Newsweek once put it another way: “the water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float a destroyer.” – vegsource

Our supplies of water are dwindling, fast.

Gone are the days when we just used river water, now we are stealing from the aquifers, the underground water that supplies the rivers and lakes.

We are not only stealing that water, we are polluting that water with practices like fracking. The aquifers take thousands of years to regenerate.

Once the aquifers are gone, so are we!

Tinkering Around on Tuesday

Apparently, it doesn’t matter how green your car is; it creates more pollution to make it, from the mine pits to the sales room, than it will ever create in its lifetime.

Maybe we are barking up the wrong tree… again.

We should be more concerned with the pollution created in making cars, than the pollution the cars themselves produce.

Par for the course. Another case of the tail wagging the dog.

Visual Pollution

When we mention pollution our thoughts immediately spring to plastic bags, smog, rubbish and recycling. But pollution is not limited to these blights on humanity’s existence.

Visual Pollution

Pollution incorporates anything that impairs the natural order. Noise and the visual are also included, but often dismissed in favour of carbon footprints and global warming.

Advertising, billboards mounted at every turn in the city and along our highways are visual pollution. They are an eyesore, a corporate canker eating at our senses.

São Paulo, nary a billboard in sight

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“In 2006, Gilberto Kassab, mayor of São Paulo, Brazil, passed the ‘Clean City Law.’ Citing growing concerns about rampant pollution in his city, Kassab decided enough was enough. But this was no ordinary piece of pollution legislation. Rather than going after car emissions or litterbugs, Kassab went after the billboards. Yes, you read that right: Kassab wanted to crack down on ‘visual pollution.'”

Source: Good Cities Read more

Opinion:

It’s interesting to note the opinions of the corporations and companies, that before the ban they didn’t realise how ineffective billboard advertising was.

Pity more cities didn’t take the same stance.