A matter of taste

Flickr photo by Jordan Dickson

Packed into cold display cases like a box of Crayola, glacéau vitaminwater is liquid colour you can drink.

Priced at most convenience stores for $1.99 plus tax, it can sometimes cost over $3 at those less-than convenient locations.

Holding the “defense” flavour in hand, a sweet, yet light mix of raspberry and apple flavour and a (tasteless) vitamin combination of C plus zinc, the label (cheekily) describes its benefits as follows:

"if you’ve had to use sick days because you’re actually been sick then you’re seriously missing out my friends. see, the trick is to stay healthy and use sick days to just um, not go in. so drink up. the combination of zinc and fortifying vitamins keep you healthy as a horse.”

The medicinal ingredients are listed below: vitamin C (ascorbic acid) at 90 mg for the 591 ml bottle, and zinc at 3.75 mg. The bottle also contains vitamin B3 (niacinamide) at 5 mg, B6 (pyridoxine HCI) 0.5 mg, and 1.5 mcg of B12 (cyanocobalamin). The water itself has undergone a treatment of “reverse osmosis” – another way of saying “filtered.”

There's a saying: if you can’t pronounce it, you shouldn’t eat it. Does the average person really know what the health benefits of 5 mg of vitamin B3 is? Eating one orange should supply a person with more than their daily requirement of vitamin C.

In the winter issue of U of T Magazine, Andrew Miall, a U of T geology professor calculated the cost of basic bottled water was 300 to 3,000 times more than tap water – and bottled does not make better quality.

National Post columnist Diane Francis picked-up on Miall’s calculations at the Saskatchewan Festival of Words in Moose Jaw. “Bottled water is the biggest consumer/taxpayer rip-off ever,” she said, declaring it “consumer stupidity”, not to mention the environmental impact of packaging and transporting H20. Yet one excuse for buying bottled, is that convenience continues to play a large part in our grab-and-go lifestyle.

During his recent Toronto appearance at U of T Hart House, New York Times columnist and author Mark Bittman – whose latest book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating is a discourse on how our diets are destroying ourselves and the planet – said:

"Basic one-ingredient foods – the foods that don’t have any ingredients, because they are the ingredient – don’t make anybody any real money. No one wants to sell you oat bran. They want to sell you oat bran in a granola bar."

Bittman's statement is easily applied to water-marketing. Why have tap water when you can buy “cleaner” filtered tap-water. Why buy filtered tap water when you can buy “flavoured” and vitamin-enhanced water? Coca-Cola, who now owns glacéau, is counting on consumers drinking-up water containing another non-medicinal ingredient: cane sugar (should we be happy it’s not artificial?)

The brand has staying-power, having launched in the U.S. nearly 9 years ago (in Toronto, it seemed to arrive overnight in one colourful wave), even though the U.S. Centre for Science in the Public Interest has declared it to be nothing more than junk food disguised as a health product.

So choose to drink vitamin water for the ease, the taste, the popularity – not the “health” benefits. To drink to your health, pour yourself a glass of tap water. Read the Canadian Food Guide, and get your daily fix of vitamins from the likes of fruits and vegetables.

Would a celebrity be willing to market that?