Your Sweetness is a Weakness.
Sencha Shot from Ito-En is my one of my most favorite drinks. It is expensive (usually $2 for a small can), but it definitely fits my current palette to a tee.
I am always on the look out for a good refreshing non-sweet drink, usually iced tea. I would like to think that it wouldn’t be a hard task since there are so many drinks out there. When you are diagnosed as a diabetic like me, though, you unfortunately find out that is not the case.
Life was so much easier when I didn’t have to read the label on what I buy, but now as someone who has to be more conscious about what goes into her body, I am disappointed to find that there is a huge lack of unsweetened drinks in the marketplace. The disappointment runs deeper when I go to places like Whole Foods and Down to Earth and find most of their “healthy” drinks are chock full of sugar. Granted, the source of sugar is probably more natural than artificial, but nonetheless, it is still sugar that I have to stay away from. Also, there are ‘diet drinks’ that have zero sugar and therefore zero calories, but they are made with artificial sweeteners which I find gross. These things are out on the market because of some insatiable craving we have for the sweet, and that even when we are advised to cut back on sugar, we have to synthesize artificial sweeteners that may (or may not) be harmful to us in the long run. (Yes, that’s ANOTHER debate.)
The fact that I am diabetic actually is quite irrelevant; what I ponder is this: what can one drink when they just don’t want to drink something highly sweet? All I can really find is water and a few varieties of unsweetened teas, which are so small in number compared to the sweetened teas that are out there. And I know it’s not hard to manufacture unsweetened teas if they can easily manufacture and distribute sweetened teas.
I have downed so much green tea this past year, it is not even funny. As much as I LOVE it, I do wish for a little variety. What I have been doing to get that variety of flavor is buying and brewing my own tea (Yay Lupicia!), but I am just so disappointed that I can’t just go to my friendly neighborhood store and find something refreshing and not entirely bland. Am I rowing by myself in this boat, or no?