Vegetarians in Paradise/Coca-Cola/Nourish

April 1, 2006 -- Vegparadise News Bureau

Coca-Cola Introduces New Beverage
That Promises All the Nutrition You Need

Coca-Cola announced plans to roll out a new health beverage called Nourish later this year. Developed in a laboratory after five years of painstaking research, Nourish contains an array of vitamins and minerals to satisfy the recommended daily requirements.

Each 12-ounce drink contains 1/3 of the RDA for Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Vitamin C, Thiamine, Riboflavin, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, Biotin, Panthotenic Acid, Folic Acid, Calcium, Copper, Iodine, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorous, and Zinc.

To avoid sweetening with sugar or high fructose corn syrup, company chemists have developed a secret formula that blends aspartame, splenda, sucrose, and saccharin.

The soft drink conglomerate is orchestrating an advertising blitz that will tout Nourish as a way to lose weight, lower cholesterol, and prevent heart attacks. Their three-a-day dietary campaign will recommend three big gulps a day with a thousand-calorie-a-day diet "to shed those pounds you want to lose." With an advertising campaign slogan, "You'll never need to eat real food again," the company plans to saturate the country with this newest no-calorie carbonated drink.

Nourish labels will be able to include the following FDA approved claim: "Three servings of Nourish daily have been found to be an effective means of lowering cholesterol and reducing the risks of a heart attack."

"The three drinks, each with 500 mg of calcium will provide both young and old 1500 mg a day to maintain strong bones," says Dr. Charles Bonetapper of the National Institute of Health who has vigorously promoted Nourish. "People no longer need to drink milk or eat leafy greens to get their necessary dose of calcium. Finally, someone has come up with an intelligent way of dealing with weight loss and the obesity epidemic," the doctor added. Dr. Bonetapper served as Vice President of Research and Development of Coca-Cola from 2000 to 2005.

Mr. Byron Fizz, vice president of marketing, told reporters, " We are planning to distribute samples in every school in America. Our fervent desire is to improve the health of young people and reverse the obesity epidemic."

Fizz's efforts may be challenged by many school districts that have made efforts to remove soft drinks from their campuses. The company hopes to reverse this situation by offering to resurface the playground of each school that installs five Nourish vending machines on its campus. Attached to each machine is a rack of pamphlets stressing the health benefits of Nourish and showing where it belongs on the food pyramid.

In a study conducted at the University of Northern South Dakota, Professor Iam Sofaroff of the Department of Molecular Nutrition, found Nourish an effective means of lowering cholesterol in patients without resorting to drug intervention.

Sofaroff and his team of researchers conducted a double blind study with 10 people whose average cholesterol readings were over 300 mg/dL.

Individuals in the experimental group were given three servings of Nourish daily for one week. The control group drank a common unfortified carbonated beverage. Both groups were permitted unlimited consumption of cookies, cakes, pies, and candy.

At the conclusion of the experiment, the group consuming Nourish showed a marked reduction in the cholesterol average. This group average dropped to 275 mg/dL. By contrast the control group average skyrocketed to 350 mg/dL. Sofaroff also found that the Nourish group was able to lose an average of 10 pounds while the control group gained an average of 15 pounds.

Details of the study appear in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Scientific Functional Food Technology. The study was financed by a grant from the Coca-Cola Company.

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