Drug me
I had a lot of caffeine today before lunch, so when it came time to choose a drink I decided to go for something less likely to cause heart palpitations — a bottle of water. More specifically, a bottle of fruit-flavored water. Most specifically, the a selection from the “infused” line of “O Beverages”:http://www.obeverages.com/products_infused.asp O Water.
Now, I thought this was just water with a little bit of fruit flavoring. And indeed, the water did taste almost _exactly_ like a mass-market out-of-season grocery-store forced-to-ripe ultra-bland strawberry. But it had … something more.
Each bottle has roughly:
* 128mg “natural” caffeine
* 106mg ginseng
* 106mg guarana
* 8mg yerba mate
By comparison, a cup of coffee has ~80 - ~175 mg caffeine depending on how you brew it. “Guaranine” is a stimulant essentially the same as caffeine. It comes from the guarana tree. So do we have 106 mg of guarana? Or 106mg of guaranine?
Yerba mate is kind of hip drink right now, which is probably why it’s included. I suspect you would need far more than 8mg to notice an effect, however — a 6oz yerba mate drink usually contains ~50 to ~100 mg of its caffeine analogue. So I think it, like the ginseng, is there for marketing purposes.
Likewise, what’s up with “natural” caffeine?
Bottled water is enough of a ride to begin with; all the extra marketing zazzle makes me feel even more like a moron for buying it.
