Diet - 615 Reviews

Health Guard is one pushy company. First they were telling everyone to “Be Happy” and now they have their megaphone out yelling “Be Skinny” to the world. I mean it's a bit presumptuous to think you know what is best for everyone and what people want.

I kid. I know Health Guard isn't a militant group forcing people to be skinny and happy, but the “Be” part of their product names conjures a great Gestapo type vision in my mind, and it makes me laugh.

The shtick of this shot is that you drink it about an hour before meals and it helps to suppress your appetite so that you won't gorge yourself, as many of us are prone to do. I believe it's supposed to trick your body into thinking you're full with a burst of pineapple and cranberry fluid.

Let us start with the flavor. It's a shot, so everything tastes concentrated, which is to be expected. The concentrated pineapple and cranberry flavors are about where you would expect them to be, strong and intense. It's a shot, so you're just supposed to down the whole thing in one go, and the function matters more than the flavor. The problem is in the fact that it tastes like it was made with hose water, and then since it was a shot the hose water taste was also concentrated. I know they didn't actually use hose water, but that is what it tastes like and any saving grace that might have been in the flavor is completely out the window at this point.

As far as functionality goes, I downed this shot, and then an hour later I proceeded to eat an entire loaf of French bread in one sitting. I think it's safe to say that it didn't work very well for me. If there would have been more food around I'm pretty sure I would have kept going. Christ, I am a glutton.

Step One: Buy a sugar free Red Bull.

Step Two: Buy a bunch of sucralose. In my world this would be tricky, because I believe it should be a controlled substance, but in reality you could probably pick some up at the corner store.

Step Three: Crack open the Red Bull and pour a heaping amount of the sucralose in it.

Step Four: Swirl it around.

Step Five: Take a sip.

Step Six: Make a weird face because this tastes way more diet than any other energy drink you've ever tried. So much in fact that the diet starts to overpower the chemical energy taste of candy.

Mission complete. You now know what sugar free Icon tastes like.

When I was in college, pretty exclusively now that I think about it, I ate a lot of oatmeal. It was cheap. Yes I ate my fair amount of ramen but that comes with the territory. Had I known that ten years later I would be drinking oats, I would tell you that would be disgusting. Was ignorant, uneducated, me right? Future, smart, attractive me says, "Eh, 70%."

What you've got is an artificially sweetened apple juice that tastes more like a weak cider than an apple juice which actually give it a better rating that if it were just apple juice flavored apple juice. Where did that extra 30% go? Well it's simple. If you artificially flavored plastic beads to taste like artificially sweetened, light apple cider, you would have it. I can't pinpoint what makes that true but it is as true as non-provable stats can be.

You were close Sneaky Pete, but you left the bottle in the sun too long and let it infuse itself into your drink.

I recently spent a week in Kentucky. I know that sentence sounds weird, but it's true. A good friend lives there and I have never spent much time in Kentucky so I decided to go. Little did I know that Ale 8 One is a staple of Kentucky and it was everywhere. By everywhere I mean you could purchase it at more places than you can in Buffalo. We had already reviewed the original so I took my hand at the diet. I should have known by my friend's reaction when I picked up the bottle at the grocery store that this wasn't going to be good.

She was right. It was pretty gross. Even for a diet soda it was bad. So bad that I got 3 sips in and had to dump the rest. Sorry Kentucky, I don't like your diet soda.

“Drops” are all over the place nowadays. Essentially they are a concentrate of the flavoring they use in their ready to drink products. These have to be a goldmine for the companies. Think about it, it's less packaging and less product, which means it doesn't take up as much warehouse space. On top of that shipping these things has to be dirt cheap when compared to 12-16 ounce bottles. Smart move companies.

I know these things are, for the most part, intended to be used for “on the go,” but I'm not that type of guy. In fact, the only times I have ever drank any drop product is when I review it. After that it goes to Mike for his ladyfriend to use because she doesn't like water, like a crazy person.

I do like that it gives you the ability to make your beverage as light or strong as you wish it to be. One quick squirt and you have a nice light flavored water. A couple more squirts and you have a “juice drink,” or something like that. The more you squeeze the stronger your drink is, but the downside of that is that the stronger it gets, the more you can taste the sucralose. Flavorwise this actually pretty nice and accurate to it's name. You can taste both the cherries and the pomegranate, which I certainly did not expect.

Also, take my advice, as an idiot scientist I assure you that squirting it directly into your mouth is not a good idea. It's so strong…€¦so strong.

Right off the bat I would like to, like a solid jerk, stay on both sides of this fence. On one side, the one with the greener grass, hotter women, and more delicious hot dogs, this is a good energy drink. It tastes like alright lemonade but that's good because it doesn't taste like uber-sweet energy drinks. It doesn't have that offensive diet taste unless you let it sit there and drop to room temperature. That's when the sucrose rears its ugly head. These are all good with a little asterisk next to it what with it being a diet energy drink.

The other side of the fence filled with gross, wet hot dogs, women with poor teeth and even worse personal hygiene, and dead, dog urine soaked grass, come the bad parts. My gosh I would like these heart palpitations to stop. I ate a full lunch. A big old Greek-ish wrap filled with delicious fixins. Still, about a half hour after I started I'm having strange heartbeats. I thought this would be different because I ate but nope. I felt like I could run up and down the stairs a trillion times or that I should to work off the bad beats my ticker was making.

So there you go. Take your side. If you and your heart can take a punch, you are in luck. If you are sensitive to energy drinks I ask you to stay away and just drink coffee for your jolts.

Patrick! What is this garbage? I leave you alone with the business for two weeks so I can have my first vacation in twenty years and I come home to you ruining my company! I wrote you out very specific instructions on how to make our beverages. They were all layed out for you line by line, and it took up only half of a page, yet you still couldn't follow it. You think you know oats better than your brother? You think you know oats better than Pete!?!? I spent years working on this recipe to make sure everything was exactly right. You come in for two weeks, and decide you can do better and throw the instructions out the window? What made you think that making a vat of oatmeal with double the water and just throwing a handful of grapes into the mix would make for a good beverage? What you've created is a gross sludge that no one in their right minds would want to ingest.

You see when done correctly, following my instructions I might add, the oatmeal is not the base for the drink. It's more of a watery juice. Don't get me wrong it has a strong white grape flavor that almost tastes like “original” aloe juice, it just has to be fairly liquidy because when you add in the powdered oats, it needs a little extra fluid to absorb them, so the drink doesn't become too thick. Actually when done correctly the results shouldn't have a consistency all that different from peach juice, you know just a little thicker than water.

If what you created wasn't bad enough, you also didn't even properly mix in the sweetener. I use a mixture of erythritol, evaporated cane juice and stevia in my products It gives it less calories, without tasting too diet. In yours you just through in regular sugar and it's in there in big clumps. Everything about what you have done is wrong and gross.

I wish I could divorce you from being my brother. If this was some sort of retribution prank, you have done terribly. Pranks need to be smarter and well thought out, you know sneaky like I would do. That is why I am called Sneaky Pete. Maybe we should just start calling you Mean Spirited, Lazy Patrick. How would you like that?

Ugh. I'll have to dump this all out and start over. Grab one of the bottles I made before I left from the cooler. See how this is actually a drink and not just slop that isn't fit to feed a pig? You really are the worst Patrick, now get out of my factory and tell mom it looks like I'm going to be late for family dinner, and that she has you to thank for that.

Here is another one of those times where I just can not get down with a drink, but I give it an decent review simply because I know there are a lot of people out there who would truly enjoy it. Everything thing about this drink is organic and perfectly fine, so it would be unfair for me to give it a bad review simply because I do not like this aspect of coconuts.

If coconuts were to be portrayed as a character in the DC universe, they would be Two Face. The Harvey Dent, unscarred side of Two Face would represent coconut water. It's clean and refreshing tasting. It makes you feel good and there is hope for the fruit. I believe in Harvey Dent, or at least his side of the coconut. Then there is the other dark side of the tropical fake nut. It's the side that is toasted and burned, much like the face of this adversary. It's also the side that makes you think of the beach and tanning oil. It's something I certainly cannot get behind. I kind of wish it was thrown into Arkham once and for all.

This beverage does not taste like toasted coconuts, but it unfortunately really tastes like you're trying to catch some rays and you lick a little too far past your lips and taste your tanning oil. It actually is like someone took that oil and really sweetened it up. There is erythritol in here, so it's a cool, sweetened tanning oil. It's strange. It has the makings of some sort of candy that half the population would absolutely love and the rest of us rational people would hate.

A part of me really wanted to like this. I love cola, and I occasionally like lime flavored drinks. Ok, more than occasionally. I think if this weren't diet I'd love it. And normally I can ignore the gross diet flavor of soda, but this one is impossible. I think the diet and the lime have teamed up and just cut through the cola and into the back of your throat like a ninja in battle with other ninjas. There's a marketing campaign, rename this Diet Pepsi Ninja Battle Lime and then people will know what to expect.

We're talking about a diet root beer here, friends. I'm about to tell you that it is actually good. They must have pumped the diet so full of root beer flavor that it is no longer gross. This is sweetened with aspartame and they have managed to do a pretty good job of keeping a dark root beer flavor and not making this taste like something a fat housewife would drink while she's watching her stories. I mean it. A dark, diet root beer that I haven't spit all over my monitor.

I'll say the titular line...Dang! That's good root beer.

Are you a weakling? Do you wish you were strong like the muscle men on the TV? Are you afraid of hair loss and shrinkage? Well do we have the steroid alternative for you! Powerade gives you the “aid” to need to get “powerful.” See what I did there? The dumbest spelling out of a name's origin you will ever see.

You may find yourself saying, sir I have seen Powerade around for years. Isn't it just a knock off of Gatorade? Yes you would be correct, but Gatorade does not have these fancy little concentrate bottles that you can keep in your purse/fanny pack. This way you don't have to worry about the bulk of the big bottles, and you can add it to water anywhere you go; your home, the gym, that fancy French restaurant you go to on your anniversary. Literally anywhere.

The real bonus of this product comes in the fact that you can squeeze to flavor it however you want. If you find regular Powerade too watery, you can just squeeze a little more in and make it a bit stronger. There are no calories and no sugar so there are no worries about how much you add.

This has that fake blue raspberry flavor that many drinks/candies have. You know what it tastes like, but it's got sucralose, so it's a tad on the diet side, but not much. It's actually much better than I expected and I will probably drink more than one cup of it before passing it on to someone else.

There's concentrated orange juice in this? Whatever, i'll still take the crab juice.

It's been sad times out on the old horse farm. You see horse thieves have come by and done what they do and now the farm is horseless. I know horse thieves in this day and age? It's a sad but true reality in the world that we live in. Without the ridiculous amounts of money that the owners pulled in from all of those 4H shows at county fairs, they don't know how they are going to make ends meet. The mortgage is due, the electricity is in fear of being shut off and everyone's bellies are rumbling. One would think that a farm would have some sort of food growing, but you would be wrong. The only edible things on the entire farm are the bins of oats that were once used to feed the horses before they were thieved in the night.

They have been staving off hunger with a steady diet of oatmeal, but Teddy decided to use the oats to add a little something-something to his beverage. To begin with his drink was really nothing more that water, stevia and some natural peach flavoring (aka the ruminants of a can of peaches that he has been stretching for weeks. He was getting no nutritional value out of the drink, so he pureed a bunch of oats and mixed them in for fiber. As we all know fiber is a very important thing when your life is on a farm.

The results of his experiment were shocking. He had expected it to be a thick drink, with chunks of oats in it, kind of like the milk at the end of a bowl of granola. Apparently the house had a super blender, because it was pure liquid; there was not a single chunk to be found. The oat flavor was to a minimum as well; perhaps it was because it had been drying out in the bins for so long. It really just tasted like peaches and stevia albeit lightly. There was a slight oat flavor that could have been turned up a little bit more. It would have been nice for it to taste a little bit like oatmeal. Even though it was not what he expected Teddy proclaimed it to be “Oatstanding!,” to which all of the rest of the farms hands just shook their head and continues to bale hay for the ghost of horses past.

I'm fairly certain there was a mix up with shipping at the plant where 989 is made. You see each week they normally get a shipment in of the oddly tasty Flintstone chewable children's vitamins. They then dump them into this gigantic electronic pestle and mortar that they have in the back and it turns them into a nice fine powder to which they add their personal blend of ionic minerals and electrolytes. From the smell/taste of this I think someone screwed up in the shipping department and ordered a bunch of old people vitamins instead. You know, the kind that always smells stale, and you don't want their taste on your tongue at all. Whoever accepted the shipment must have just shrugged and loaded them in anyways.

The rest of this line has ranged from acceptable to tasty, with very few real complaints from us. This grape unfortunately does not cut it. It smells like a mixture of white grape juice and Centrum. Actually that's pretty much how it tastes as well, except there is also a more than heaping serving of stevia in there as well, so you have a cooling adult vitamin flavor. It's not something that I can say I enjoy.

I would also like to point out that I was with a three year old when I drank this, and they were so completely excited about it. The twisting of the cap so that the vitamin powder mixed it elicited cheering and clapping. She could not get this drink to her lips fat enough to drink it down. Then as soon as mouth contact was made, she immediately stopped, handed the bottle back to me, whilst making a grossed out looking face and simply said, “I don't like that.” Even kids can tell there is something wrong here.

I saw a twelve pack of these at a barbecue I was at today and decided I would drink it to review it. I normally don't mix the two, social drinking and reviewing, but I couldn't possibly drink any more Arizona Sweet Tea. I had one glass and it was just one glass too much. I cracked it open and wanted to enjoy the ride but the only place it took me was right on down to the crappy gates of Dietburg, a town that, for reasons unbeknownst to me, is guarded by gates. I looked at the ingredients and there it was: the dreaded Aspartame.

I thought we were done with that one. This with a slew of other diet sweeteners both artificial and natural could have potentially saved this drink. I mean, cherry and grapefruit could have been a wonderful match but instead it tasted like cherry and tart diet generic citrus. Aspartame really took a dump all over this drink. Wegman's, I thought you were better than that. I was wrong. Now I know what a disappointed dad feels like twice today because my son threw a handful of rocks at another kid with simultaneously disobeying me as I cried out "Don't throw those rocks." Giant bags of sadness and disgusting drinks for all!

Seeing as Derek is vegan and Mike doesn't believe in strenuous activity I have become the de facto protein shake reviewer here at the offices of Thirsty Dudes. Of course by offices I mean my computer room in my apartment, Mike's desk at his day job and wherever it is what Derek does his writing. We live the glamorous lives of the beverage reviewer and there is no one that can take that away from us.

I got done with my work for the day early, but no one else was around, so I decided to go on a bike ride. I meant to just ride around for an hour or so, and maybe check out some neighborhoods that I've never been to around my house. That led to a much longer ride that took me over nearly 30 miles of road. Did I mention it was ridiculously hot and humid as well? I don't know if I have ever sweat so much in my life. I was literally able to ring sweat out of my clothes after I got home. After bringing my bike into the house I dragged myself to the kitchen and grabbed this out of the fridge, because of course what you want when you're ridiculously dehydrated and are so tired that you don't think you'll be able to move much more is a nice milkshake that has bananas in it aka the worst fruit ever.

The protein gods were shining down upon me as this is the first beverage that I have ever had that contains banana that didn't taste exactly like the grossest of all fruit. This has more of a creamy base with a nice strawberry flavor added to it. It's light in flavor, but for some reason the banana flavor is hardly there. I certainly wish it would have been just strawberry in flavor, but I can't complain about the minimum banana that I was presented with. It's also sweetened with stevia, so perhaps it was that natural zero calorie sweetener that hid the banana for me. It also didn't end up tasting very diet at all. This was actually down right enjoyable for a protein drink. I'm sure I would have liked it even more had I had more moisture in my body.

Of course as soon as I was done with this I downed a gigantic coconut water to rehydrate. It took about a half hour after that for my muscles to work again and then I was ready for new adventures.

My first thought when I saw this was “Dammit, why doesn't this exist in a non diet form?!” Seriously white cranberry-apple green tea? That just sounds like a wonderful treat. It is always the diet drinks that have the extravagant flavors though isn't it? They are probably trying to make up for the lack of calories, and more importantly the gross diet flavor.

I ended up taking this with me to a party, because I was assuming I wouldn't like it all that much, due to the sucralose, and it would help me to not down it all instantly. As you can probably guess, that didn't work out well for me. While this does have the sucralose undertones, it is played down by the other flavors. It's one of those drinks that you can tell is diet, but you still like it anyways. Arizona is not trying to trick you into thinking that this isn't a zero calorie beverage, they are just saying, “So what? It still tastes great doesn't it?”

Arizona was my gateway into green tea, but the thing is their green tea has a very specific taste that other companies' versions don't. I don't know if it's the excessive sweeteners or what, but they do it their own way, and it is enjoyable in its own way. So that is the sucralose-laden base here. Then, they added a soft cran-apple flavor to it. I say flavor, because there is no juice whatsoever in this bottle, but I can forgive them that. Before I knew what was happening I had polished off the bottle, and I was left wishing I had more. It was pouring out, so I was left to drink a lone bottle of Coke that was meant for mixer drinks. I planned that out poorly.

Yesterday, after many months of looking, I got myself a spinning bike. I love riding bikes and in the time I can't go out and ride for one reason or another, I always wanted to ride in the privacy of my own house. I hauled that thing in the basement, put on a record, turned on the fan, and started pedaling away. I put in a good half hour before I started to get uncomfortable for I am not as fit as I once was. I watch what I eat but I still eat things I shouldn't, which brings us to today.

On this fitness thing, I've got to watch what I eat so I thought what better way to watch my caloric intake than to intake no calories? Queue Fruit Water. It's fruit punch and watermelon, sparkling, and zero calories. Win? Well, almost. Initially it tastes like a good gum but soon thereafter comes the rush of "the catch."

What catch? Well with anything diet, you're almost certain to get something disappointing. As the years go on, science is catching up and making good diet drinks. This one just went on it's own and did things the old fashioned way, with a terrible artificial sweetener. Sucralose is awful in every way, shape, and form. It kills a lot of otherwise good drinks. This initially had the promise of being good but, once again, sucralose killed it. Sucralose, you are the Hitler of artificial sweeteners.

Here we have the five calorie aka diet version of Bai's Jamiaca Blueberry. I'm sure if I drank this and the original back to back I could tell the difference easily, but from memory I sure could be fooled. Bai has done a great job of making a sweeten beverage with only 2g of sugar and 5 calories not taste diet. About that, when did the word diet become such a no-no word? Everything that would have been called diet ten years ago is now referred to as “light,” “zero,” or “low calorie.” They all amount to the same thing, but companies seem afraid to label their drinks diet. Was there some vocal backlash that I am unaware of, or are they afraid that the word diet is too closely tied to aspartame and sucralose (you know the devil's sweeteners)?

Bai uses both erythritol and stevia in a way that it doesn't distort the flavor of the juice. Even though there are zero calorie sweeteners and other berries in here as well, the blueberry really shines through and tastes like fruit. That's really all you can ask for in something diet (I'm still not afraid to use the word).

It's impossible to drink this without singing the well known bossa-nova tune from the sixty's The Girl From Ipanema. I was fine with that. I enjoy that song. More songs today should adapt that sound versus those garage/garbage sounds from a similar era. Not my cup of tea, that stuff. I'm a groove man.

I have had many bottles of this prior to review. Why didn't I review it before? Oh, I don't know. Maybe because I might want to enjoy a drink with a meal without having to remember how it taste to bring it home and write all about it. Sometimes I just enjoy drinking drinks. This though, it's worth drinking three times. It's got a great pomegranate taste and the erythritol does wonders to actually compliment the bitterness of a real pomegranate. It doesn't taste too sweet and the sweetener doesn't junk up the flavor. I really like it, can you tell? It's one of the best Bai drinks and an easy decision when it comes to buying a drink at the store with a meal since it's only ten calories per bottle.

Getting smarter, drink makers. Getting smarter. Keep it up, Bai. You're one of the good ones.