This could be quite a big section, covering everything from furry animals to Numberplates. We could be some time. Watch out Wikipedia.
No, really this page is just an excuse to have a rant about a few ingredients that you'll find in lots of other drinks - but not, obviously, in ours.
Rants = bad energy, so I suggest you move swiftly on to a nicer section. But if you really want the full rantathon...
We'll NEVER put artificial sweeteners in any of our drinks.
Firstly, they taste awful - that weird aftertaste.
Secondly, more importantly, they're not natural. And we just don't think we should be putting lots of chemicals in our bodies.
And thirdly, there's quite a bit of recent research that suggests that artificial sweeteners mess up our appetites and therefore make us put on weight.
A team at Purdue University (Indiana) found that rats fed yoghurts sweetened with saccharine gained more weight than those given yoghurt sweetened with glucose.
And meanwhile, over at the University of Minnesota, scientists have been following 9,500 men and women for nine years, and found that "surprisingly, the risk of developing metabolic syndrome" [obesity, high cholestorol, high blood pressure, diabetes risk] "was 34 percent higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared to those who drank none".
Zero calorie does NOT mean zero-evil.
We'll NEVER add refined sugar to our drinks.
Yes, our drinks contain natural sugars, from fruits or organic agave nectar.
But sugar - sucrose, "beet sugar", "cane sugar", "fructose", whatever you want to call it - is just not a good thing. It contains no goodness at all. It floods your blood with glucose, putting a strain on the insulin system. And we all consume way too much of it - 90 million tonnes a year (2½ million tonnes in the UK), of which a shocking 20% goes into soft drinks.
So soft drinks companies are pouring about 8 KILOS of sugar down the average British throat every year. Think of it.
That can't be a good thing. The correlations between per-capita soft drinks consumption and Type II diabetes could be a coincidence, of course. But we may look back one day with horror and wonder how sugary soft drinks were ever allowed to sponsor events like the Olympic games...
For more on the not-so-lovely Sugar industry, read this BBC article or track down the brilliant Panorama from a few years back on "The Trouble with sugar".
We don't like these either.
You can see why food companies do it. Curing meat traditionally to make, say, Parma ham, takes 12 months in an old cellar. Adding sodium nitrite or potassium whatnot takes a few seconds in a factory. So it's cheaper. And more people get to eat cheap bacon or salami.
But it's also less good for you. And that's not a trade-off we're prepared to make.
Here's a few you might see on other drinks labels:
Sodium Benzoate (E211) and Potassium Benzoate (E212) - these are banned in Japan and other countries. They're legal in the UK, but scientists have recently shown that they can react with vitamin C to form Benzene (a known carcinogen). There's also talk of damage to Mitochondrial DNA - which, according to Professor Piper at Sheffield University, could speed up "Parkinson's and quite a lot of neuro-degenerative diseases, but above all the whole process of aging." Here's an article from the Independent
Preservatives work by killing everything "living" - all the bugs - and preventing them from reproducing. But that means we're consuming things that are designed to kill organisms. It just doesn't sound sensible.
So we'll stick to flash-pasteurising - heating the drink up, like fresh milk. It's not easy - you need sturdy bottles, etc... But much, much better than having something in the drink that's basically harmful.
