When buying organic and natural-food brands, such as Kashi and Naked Juice, you may think you're supporting small, independent companies. But often these brands are actually owned by major conglomerates: Kellogg, in the case of Kashi, and Pepsi for Naked Juice.
I was excited to find this very cool chart in the latest issue of Good magazine, which breaks down most of the major natural brands by their corporate owners. For the details, read more
Have you guys tried Naked Juice? You'd think with a name like that, this drink would be made with just fruit juice. Even with the fine print at the bottom of the label that reads "with added ingredients" I was still more focused on the word naked, thinking this smoothie would be unadulterated. The Orange Mango Motion flavor contains a lot of added B vitamins, to give you an extra boost, but that is not all this drink contains that will charge you up.
The motion in this smoothie comes from "guarana extract" and "green tea extract." While these are natural forms of caffeine, they're still caffeine and if you drink all 15.2 fluid ounces of this juice, you'll get 86 mg of the stuff. Just for comparison, a regular cup of joe (not the suped up coffee from Starbucks) contains about 45 mg of caffeine. So this drink packs quite a punch. When they say "energy," they mean it. I just wish it were energy from the juice, not energy from caffeine.
Want to see the nutritional info? Then read more
In honor of today being 420, and this weekend being Earth Day, I thought it would be fun to create my own green cocktail. I was brainstorming ingredients and wanted something that was healthy and alcoholic. If tomato juice and orange juice are mixed with vodka to make super tasty drinks, why not mix together Naked Juice's (which, in case you haven't noticed, is all the rage now... and seriously while the best mimosas are made with fresh OJ, when you're in a pinch, Odwalla's OJ is the next best thing to freshly squeezed) Green Machine with my favorite liquor? Not for the fair-of-heart, Green Machine is a fruit juice blend of apple and kiwi that is supposed to help you detox, revive, and energize. So yesterday afternoon I transformed into Mad Scientist PartySugar and came up with an interesting mix of green machine, vodka (Level had recently sent me a bottle and I was anxious to try it), lemon juice, and Sprite. Raise your glass to celebrate mother nature and read more
