V8 Juice: What it takes to convert original to the diet

March 31, 2012 |

When occasionally plain pure water is not available, I choose V8 original vegetable juice with its only 50 calories per 8 OZ serving.  It’s a healthy stuff! The Diet V8 Splash  is a “diet” version of V8 Splash with “all the flavor and vitamins of regular V8 Splash—but with just 10 calories and 3 grams of carbohydrates per 8-ounce serving” as it is said on the website. Let’s take a look what it takes the manufacturer to convert their nutritious and delicious 100% vegetable juice to the diet one.

DyeDiet Doesn’t Buy It!

Diet V8 Splash: Risk, Nutrition and Dye ContentDiet V8 Splash: Risk, Nutrition and Dye Content

To say in short, it takes to make unhealthy product from the healthy one. Look at the DyeDiet risk diagram, it is almost half-red now (potentially harmful chemicals are added). In my opinion, the original V8 vegetable juice IS a diet beverage by all the definitions: nutritious, low calorie, low sugar. What else to wish? For a long time V8 vegetable juices have been recognized as the product line free of any potentially harmful chemicals.  But obviously the manufacturer decided to tap into the hot diet beverage market with an innovative product. Well, looks like they caught the old primitive infectious idea instead: they now make their “diet” product with 16 mg of Red 40 artificial colorant per serving (123 mg in the whole bottle!) and a bunch of sucralose: the chlorinated sugar. As always, to mask unpleasant weird aftertaste of sucralose they add another dangerous sugar substitute: acesulfame potassium.  The artificial sweeteners, at a very least, can be very confusing to the human biochemistry: A Role for Sweet Taste Calorie Predictive Relations in Energy Regulation.

Consumers now have the two choices. If you have a problem controlling your sugary sodas consumption to a single serving per week  with mostly plain water being drunk, here is your “diet” version with almost zero calorie but stuffed with the other health damaging chemicals. Consider the third choice though: an educated consumer doesn’t drink either ones!  Read Behavior, Learning and Health: The Dietary Connection.

Indeed, why to expose yourself and your lovely family to the unnecessary chemical risks  of DDFI = 25/20 ~ 1.3   when receiving poor nutritional charge of DDNF = 20/40 ~ 0.5? While these numbers are not as awful as those of the Diet and Zero Coke, they still indicate your today’s elevated health risks and increased medical bills in the future. See the health risks of 250 food additives to the American diet: Risk Factors of Food Additives.

Bottom line. There is no doubt, the “old faithful” V8 Original vegetable juice is way better dietary alternative to the chemically corrupted “innovative” Diet V8 Splash. In addition, the original types of V8 give you 13 – 29 times (!) dietary potassium you find in Gatorade, the fake electrolyte. You may want to try V8 Fusion which has no dangerous food additives too.  But please don’t you ever forget: only plain pure water is our natural, zero calorie preferred everyday drink. I hope this report helps to add more healthy habits to your lifestyle!

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Category: Food Dyes Exposure, Juices, Soft drinks

Comments (1)

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  1. benamore says:

    To turn the original into diet they take out the sugar, replace it with aspartame, sucralose, and/or acesulfame potassium, and they add an artificial colorant (such as red 40).