Monday, December 10, 2007

Soda does NOT burn calories, stupid

The Coca-Cola Company teamed up with Nestle last year to release Enviga, the third canned green tea to be featured on this blog. What's the big deal? First, it has sparkles. Second, in their very own study, healthy 18-to-35-year-olds who drank three cans a day showed an increase in calorie burn (on average) by 106 calories a day. Enviga was 'the only ready-to-drink green tea' proven to do this.

Whoa, that sounds like an easy way to drink off the pounds! Until you realize that two classic Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are 260 calories alone. (Imagine that 400ml Mint Chip Mocha you had this morning--or, GASP, THANKSGIVING!) It's true that green tea boosts your metabolism, but honestly, claiming that the 5 calories in Enviga are "effectively cancelled out" by green tea's calorie-burning powers (in effect, you're drinking 'negative calories') reminds me of those old Subway commercials that implied you could get away with God knows what because you had Subway today. (Not to mention the people involved in the study had healthy lifestyles anyhow, and didn't seem to be in any urgent need to shed pounds in the first place.)

If you don't like calories, drink something that doesn't have them--plain, ordinary tea. This looks like just another good chance for all of us to NOT give Coke our money.

Sources:
http://www.enviga.com/#CalorieBurning
http://www.hersheys.com/reeses/products/detail.asp?name=pb-cups

ps. This actually wasn't the reason I decided to write this post, though I'd wanted to write about Enviga for a while. No, I was researching hockey for a few scenes in a story of mine, and came across this buried in Wikipedia's 'hat trick', the term used when a player scores three goals in a game. It apparently came from magicians who pulled three rabbits out of a hat, one after the other, but that's not the funny part. Here is an actual quote from the article:

If a member of the home team in ice hockey scores a hat-trick, fans acknowledge it by throwing their own hats from the stands onto the ice, often causing a delay in play. This custom was started in Guelph, Ontario with the Guelph Biltmore Mad Hatters, sponsored by Biltmore Hats. Mr. Biltmore would throw his tophat onto the ice for the player that scored 3 goals. Fans soon followed his lead and offered their hats to the player as well. In 1996, the Florida Panthers fans celebrated goals (not just hat-tricks) by throwing plastic rats onto the ice, which were then cleaned up by men dressed in Orkin exterminator outfits. The history of this goes back to an incident in December 1995, when Scott Mellanby scored what teammate John Vanbiesbrouck dubbed a "rat trick" after ridding the Panthers' locker room at Miami Arena of an unwanted rat with his stick on the same night he scored a pair of goals. When Mellanby scored a hat trick in a later game some fans threw plastic rats on the ice, mimicking the octopus thrown by Detroit Red Wings fans, and the practice soon became universal for Panthers home goals. The NHL later responded by banning the throwing of objects onto the ice by fans at the cost of a penalty for the home team, but specifically allowed the traditional throwing of hats to continue. There appears to be some leeway with regards to what can be thrown onto the ice following a hat trick, as witnessed after the Nashville Predators' Paul Kariya scored a hat trick on April 18, 2006 when two catfish were thrown on the ice and no penalty was given.


They let someone into a sporting event with a pair of catfish, and when I was a kid I couldn't take fresh fruit into the movie theater with me? It probably has half the calories of popcorn, or something.

3 comments:

Zac said...

In response to your comment on my blog-

I'm not British/English, I'm an American! The gym I was talking about is Primal Fitness, located in Washington DC. (www.primal-fitness.com)

If you're interested in Parkour, feel free to IM or email me, all my contact info is available in my profile. I'd love to talk to you more!

Laura said...

Hey GT!
Just wanted to stop by and say Happy New Year!
Looking forward to learning more and trying out a bunch of new teas this year!

Ta

Jelter said...

catfish?!?! they wont even let you bring bottle caps into rock concerts these days!