Is Flavored Favored?

If you’re thirsty, what do you drink? These days, there is a good chance that your choice is a bottle of flavored water. Many people don’t like plain water very much, but they don’t want drinks with a lot of sugar in them. They feel that flavored waters are a healthier choice. Many companies that traditionally made colas and other very sweet soft drinks now offer products for young adults and parents who want healthy diets. People want carbonated drinks with flavor, but without the sugar and chemical flavorings of traditional soft drinks. In the US, sales of sparkling water became bigger than sales of traditional carbonated drinks for the first time in 2016, so all of the big beverage companies are trying to create new, interesting flavors with natural ingredients and little or no sugar. In the past, doctors worried that Americans did not drink enough water. The “go-to” drink was usually a very unhealthy soft drink with sugar as its main ingredient. As people became more interested in healthy foods and more worried about obesity, especially in children, they started to make changes in their diets. From the 1970s through the 1990s, diet soft drinks with artificial sweeteners were very popular, but a lot of people don’t like the taste of diet drinks, and many of them still have unhealthy ingredients like caffeine. All of the large beverage companies now offer carbonated flavored waters, but the popularity of flavored water began with products from smaller beverage companies. These companies could not sell as many traditional soft drinks as the big companies, so they decided to go in a different direction, and they started producing carbonated water with natural fruit flavorings. In the beginning, they marketed their flavored water mainly to women as a diet product. However, with the growing interest in health and fitness, the companies decided to advertise their flavored waters as health products, not diet products. At first, most men preferred sports drinks, but most of those drinks have as much sugar as traditional soft drinks, and many men wanted drinks with less sugar. The water companies created ads with men and women doing sports and other healthy activities, and they showed that their products had natural fruit flavoring, not artificial flavorings. The advertising worked, and now it is common to see both men and women, especially millennials, drinking flavored water.

Source: https://www.macmillaneducationeverywhere.com/