Activate Drinks: The Only Way to Drink Your Vitamins?
Functional beverages are this year's buzz product. Almost every week a new kind of enhanced water or drink is hitting the shelves.
One of these drinks is Activate - which, despite looking like any other flashy new drink - has a completely different mechanism for combining vitamins with liquid.
On Activate's website - they immediately draw focus to a common warning on the side of a vitamin bottle:
"Keep Vitamins in a Cool, Dry Place".
I know they are giving us sales hyperbole but it does make one wonder about the plethora of vitamin waters available. Some of which apparently contain just about every vitamin known to mankind.
Activate uses a cap with a moisture-resistant compartment inside it. When you are ready to drink, the special cap must be twisted, releasing the vitamins into the drink.
This promo/youtube video shows people enjoying the gimmicky aspect of watching colorful powders dropping into the drink.
I'm not sure what to think. The fact that the drink is sweetened with sucralose (Splenda) is an irony - we have little evidence to show that artificial sweeteners can be classified as health-enhancing.
The ideal is, of course, to obtain your vitamin needs entirely from whole foods. However our typical modern diet is sadly lacking in this area - can 'vitamin-enhanced' waters be relied upon?
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"The ideal is, of course, to obtain your vitamin needs entirely from whole foods. However our typical modern diet is sadly lacking in this area...."
How do we know? Who told us that the food we eat is nutritionally poorer than the food we used to eat? Was it the vitamin sellers, by any chance?
I agree that some people eat a nutritionally poor diet, but I am fed up with vitamin peddlers insinuating that everyone needs extra vitamins. Most of us don't. Ask a dietician!
ReplyGood points, Angie... While I've seen data to suggest that pruduce isn't as nutrient dense as it once was, I thing vitamin companies have turned it into a full-blown fear-mongering sales tactic.
ReplyThe problem isn't that our whole foods have less vitamins than they used it, it's that the North American diet consists of relatively few vegetables and greens, where one gets these vitamins. So people have to take supplements of some sort to get their RDA, and thus become susceptible to this sort of product. Or, you could try eating whole foods and skip the vitamin industry.
ReplyI don't believe that food has fewer vitamins than it used to. Most fruits/vegetables/meats/etc. have similar vitamin content to their predecessors. But you have to look at the whole history of vitamin supplementation to American diets as a whole. People started taking vitamins to replace foods that they couldn't/didn't consume. Back in the day, some people couldn't get certain foods on a regular basis (my mother in law likes to tell me stories about how a lot of her relatives got goiters prior to iodized table salt because they got little to no seafood in their diets). So pharmaceutical/food companies started adding vitamins to food so people could get enough vitamins to prevent deficiencies.
ReplyI don't know about vitamins, but studies have shown, at least in the UK, that the mineral content of produce is declining, e.g. something like a 50% decline in the amount of iron over the last 60 years. This shouldn't be surprising, since modern agriculture strips nutrients from the soil. If plants like spinach take up even small amounts of, e.g., iron from the soil, and those minerals aren't replaced, then over time the levels in the soil will drop, and future harvests will reflect that.
I believe I have also read studies that show that (some) conventionally farmed produce has been found to have lower levels of nutrients than organic.
So in that sense I think that it may very well be that our 'modern diet' is lacking in nutrients, even if we try to eat in a healthy manner.
Having said that, I wouldn't drink this stuff if they gave it away.
ReplyPeople don't eat as much vegetables and fruit - and instead eat more processed food. So perhaps the argument is: does our diet (heavy in highly processed food) meet our vitamin needs as much as a whole-foods diet does?
ReplyI would say no. Nutritionists have found that whole foods contain other compounds besides vitamins and minerals (many that haven't been discovered yet) that help our bodies absorb and use the vitamins and minerals and also interact with the vitamins, minerals, and other cofactors that you can't get from a pill.
ReplyIt's nutrigenomics v.s. Michael Pollan
Let the battle begin
ReplyMy money's on Pollan.
ReplyI have to say I'm completely against this type of product, and the fact that it has Splenda in it seals the deal for me.
Don't waste your money folks, it's a gimmick as Jim rightly said.
ReplyHype....Scare....Market....Sell....same old story.
Hype - You Need your Vitamins or else you will get sick and lose your hair
Scare - Foods don't have anymore vitamins as global warming has killed them all off
Market - But wait....our product is here to save you from scurvy...and is cool looking so it must be good
Sell - Make millions, laugh all the way to the bank
Apply to any company who is in the business of making money.....which would be all of them....
ReplyYou're right... but, do you really think that this idea will be successful? I think it's got novelty appeal, but...
ReplyI try to get most of my vitamins from the food I eat, but I know I need extra calcium, so I take a supplement for that. A lot of people think more is better when it comes to vitamins, but some vitamins can actually be toxic when consumed in excess (like vitamin D, for example). I think most Americans probably do eat a diet that's poor in vitamins and high in calories and for those people, maybe a multivitamin supplement would be a good idea. But it'd be a lot cheaper to just buy a pill supplement instead of overpriced, sweetened, water.
ReplyI agree with Spectra...I'll get my vitamins from foods and supplements and just drink my plain ol'fashioned water.
ReplyCompared to the vitamins found in whole foods, these fractionated vitamins, synthetics, etc. are just no good. This stuff probably looks the same coming out as it did going in.
Biggest laugh I had at this practice was "vitamin E" in that new Snapple water. Fat-soluble vitamins in water, oh really?
Reply*chuckles*
My mum bought vitamin E oil once. Might be the brand, but it was like glue! Hm, wonder how it tastes though.
... o.O
ReplyMy essential vitamins list:
greens powder (C & K)
liver tablets (B)
cod liver oil (A & D)
mixed nuts (E)
With the daily consumption of these four items, all my micro-nutritional needs are well met, in a whole food format.
Of course, I can skip the liver tabs and oil on those days I eat beef liver or mollusks. And skip the greens powder when I have broccoli, kale, spinach, etc.
I find this all very simple to manage, and would put my regimen to the test against anything a mega-food corp could brand and market to air-headed fools.
Replythey should replace the splenda with honey
Replyor nectar from blue aguavas
it all make sense, as you know constipation causes slow metabolism, and therefore weight gain, so whole meal and fibre rich food helps a lot with weight loss
ReplyI think these drinks are an example of clever marketing. You can gain all the nutrients you need from a balanced diet. People who are not aware may buy into the idea though.
ReplyTHIS PRODUCT IS LAME AND FRAUDULENT JUST LIKE THE COMPANY'S OWNER!
The president of PowerCap- manufacturer Liquid Health Labs has refuted Anders Eisner’s claim that his company had an exclusive contract to use the innovative packaging as part of Eisner's new enhanced water brand.
Eisner – son of former Disney Chairman and CEO Michael Eisner – last week told Beverage Digest that his company, Activate Drinks, had secured an “exclusive license” for the cap he planned to use.
ReplyBut that’s not the case, according to Derek Hopkins, president of Liquid Health Labs. Hopkins said Activate purchases the caps from Liquid Health Labs, but the relationship is not exclusive.
Maybe this has changed since your review, but every bottle of Activate I've bought in the past month has been Naturally Sweetened with Stevia Extract... not even pureVia or Truvia, and certainly not sucralose as you claim. It's distributed by Rising Beverage Co in LA. www.activatedrinks.com
I've been having a hard time finding a better alternative sweetened drink for miday breaks, except maybe Pre. www.prebeverages.com
Reply