The ingredients on the strawberry-kiwi I'm currently drinking reads:
purified water with
strawberry, kiwi and other natural flavors
That's it. No preservatives, no chemicals, no artificial substances. Just great, clean water and a hint of flavor.
Drinking ample water is very critical to a healthy life, no matter what your weight or diet style. Drinking soda is never a good idea. Sugar-filled soda fills you with calories while providing no nutrition and damaging your body. Is sugar-free soda really any better? You're still pumping your body full of chemicals and maintaining your sweet tooth.
No matter how you look at it, drinking water and flavored water is FAR better than those alternatives. So, now assuming that you are looking through waters and related options, how does Hint hold up to its neighbors?
First, they really instruct that you serve this ice cold. We tried our flavors at a variety of temperatures and see why. When served warm, this isn't nearly as refreshing as drinking regular water. It tastes perhaps "musty". The hint of flavor turns into a hint of "something not quite right".
When it is cold, it is nice, with the hint of flavor being very subtle. If I handed you the lime, you would taste a tiny hint of lime but none of the citrus bite. Depending on your point of view this could be great or disappointing. If you tried the strawberry-kiwi without knowing what it was, you might be hard pressed to make a guess. The flavor really is that mild.
So my concern here would be that I'm not always in a situation where I'm reaching in the fridge. Sometimes I have a bottle sitting on my desk that I'm working through over a while. Sometimes I'm running out shopping and have a bottle I've brought with me in the car. There are numerous situations where I want water with me but am not going to glug it straight from the fridge. So this pretty much automatically is not something I'd want in those situations. When there are so many other waters that you can enjoy at all temperatures, it would be hard for me to choose one that was limited in this fashion.
There is also the greater issue with bottled drinks of any type - that they are using up tons of plastics to produce and also using a ton of gas to distribute. Yes, you can recycle them - but the mere fact that you're buying bottles is keeping that production chain going. It's far more efficient to buy powders and to make your own drinks at home with local water, perhaps filtered water if necessary. The volume of pollution the bottle-making and bottle-transporting processes creates every day is staggering.
So on one hand I applaud Hint. Anything we can do to get people to stop drinking sodas of any kind is a GREAT thing. If someone loves Hint and this is what gets them to convert, then kudos! But for us, the light flavor is just a bit too light, and its mustiness when not cold means it restricts its use too much. And, long term, I would much rather see the industry moving towards powders which transport and package more easily, that the user mixes with their home water. A Hint powder, that you could mix to your own preferred strength with your own home water, would probably be the ideal drink solution I could imagine!
Lisa Shea's Library of Low Carb Books
