Some flavors are very much a matter of your individual taste buds. I love that 4C's fruit punch is sugar free - but the flavor is one you love or don't love.

I'm sure many of us grew up drinking high-sugar, super-sweet fruit punch with the growing red color that came straight from a nuclear reactor. We drank these punches by the gallon-load and, depending on our level of activity, we either ran around outside like speed demons burning off the sugar load or we turned into blimps while we played more sedentary games.

From a totally "healthy" point of view, I am therefore thrilled that 4C has come out with a fruit punch mix in their totally light line. This is completely sugar free, with zero calories and zero carbs. It has 100% vitamin C. There are no trans fats, hardly any sodium, and no sugars. If kids are being fed fruit punch, THIS is the fruit punch they should be getting. Kids have plenty of natural energy for running around outside (assuming their parents trust them in the dangerous world outside). They definitely don't need liquid sugar being fed into their systems.

However, from a *drinking* point of view, I find this to be insanely sweet tasting. This from a woman who loves ice wine and dessert wines! It's got a sickly sweet "fake fruit" flavor that I just find to be overboard. What's funny is that my boyfriend had made this batch "not strong enough" by accident. Even so, I found it to be too strong.

On the other hand, my boyfriend was loving the sweet flavor, and wanting to make a new batch in the proper, more strong, proportion to get even more flavor. To him it reminded him of that "comfort food" drink of childhood that he had loved. So for him, having this great flavor without any sugar at all was a perfect drink situation.

If someone is really addicted to the high test variety, and you want to feed this to them to "wean them off" to less sweet varieties, then I am all for it. I'm of the mindset that you need to do anything you can to get people to break that addiction to sugar, for their own health. It'll save their teeth, their bodies and in many cases their lives.

However, if someone is doing well with the less sweet varieties of diet drinks, then I definitely do NOT recommend training your tongue to want sweeter things. The issue is if you train yourself to crave sweet - and then are out at a friend's house or restaurant where they don't stock diet drinks - you are far more likely to get the sugary variety to meet the craving. That's really not a long term situation you want to be in.


Lisa Shea's Library of Low Carb Books