Last year, we wrote about the popular trend of “watertok.” People shared videos of beverages they concocted from water and flavored syrups and powders.
The drinks were predominantly made of sugar-free and calorie-free flavor agents. However, there was a lot of arguing over whether they were healthy as they were packed with artificial flavors and sweeteners. And doctors worried if they were as healthy as people thought.
Now, the world is obsessed with overly complicated concocted drinks again. The wildly successful “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” TV show has made a wider audience aware of soda shop culture. The soda shops sell sodas filled with syrups, creamer, juices and candy.
Swig, FiiZ, Quench It Sodalicious and other soda shop chains flourish in areas with a high density of LDS Church members. Members of the LDS Church cannot drink “hot drinks” like coffee and tea. So they get their caffeine elsewhere. They also do not drink alcohol, and these beverages have morphed from sodas into complicated mocktail-like drinks.
One of the most popular drinks is a Dirty Coke. It’s Coca-Cola, lime juice, coconut syrup and healthy cream. But there are as many variations as there are sodas, syrups and creamers. Any combination under the sun has been tried. The drinks are sold in 32-ounce cups. They are pure sugar.
Copycat recipes appear online. Some claim to be healthier. One recipe for a Dirty Diet Coke used sugar-free coconut syrup. However, it still added half and half to the beverage. Diet Coke isn’t a healthy drink; adding extra sweeteners and fat to it can only make it worse.
When it came to watertok, we were largely nonjudgemental. We recommended reading labels and washing your mouth out after drinking acidic things. With this trend, we feel it’s much easier to come to a conclusion. Dirty sodas — even the diet versions — aren’t something anyone should drink frequently.
If you love soda and it’s a treat you work into your day, we get it. But pay close attention when you start doctoring it with other ingredients. A diet soda can go from something that isn’t healthy to something downright damaging very quickly based on what you add to it.
It is fine to have a treat now and then. If you know what the nutrition of something is, and you plan around it, you can enjoy any food. But a dirty soda isn’t a healthy treat, no matter what steps you take to make it less harmful. You should be able to eat and drink what you want, of course you should. But we shouldn’t be normalizing making an already not-great-for-you drink even worse.
