Water, Water, Everywhere

New Age Beverages - it's the name given by the food industry to a category of beverages that includes quaffs like herbal teas, smoothies and flavoured waters - alternatives to soft drinks. A lot of people may check the labels on teas and smoothies, looking for a calorie count. While they're doing that, they could end up reading the ingredient list. Most people, however, tend to think of water as calorie-free, and so no label reading would take place. You might want to take a minute for a little label perusal, if you are a flavoured water enthusiast. Although the waters generally make use of natural sugar cane or fructose rather than the high fructose corn syrup dumped into most soft drinks, some of those 16 ounce water bottles can still pad your waist with up to 180 calories. The real heads-up should be the number of syllables or capitalized letters involved in an ingredient. My general guideline is that any item that sounds like it comes from a science experiment is not something I want to imbibe.
Check those labels for this one, in particular, EDTA. It has a most fascinating list of uses, among which is included industrial cleaning, agrochemicals, laundry detergents, and the pulp and paper industry, to name a few. Yes, it has been approved by the FDA as a preservative, but you don't normally think of water as a preservative, do you?
Anyway, read those labels first, and then decide if you still want to chug back that water.