Different recipes abroad.

[Beck S]

Just come back from Rome and while I was there, I was pleased to find that a 500ml bottle of full fat Sprite over there was about 5g of Carbs/Sugar, which was fab for me as it was hot and they were a great cold drink while walking around.

Went into Tesco today when I got home to look at a bottle here to see if it was the same, only to find that a UK bottle has 5 times as much in it than on the continent. I was a bit shocked. It tasted exactly the same to me, and I'm normally pretty good at tasting sweeteners. Why do companies do this?

 

[Radders]

Just come back from Rome and while I was there, I was pleased to find that a 500ml bottle of full fat Sprite over there was about 5g of Carbs/Sugar, which was fab for me as it was hot and they were a great cold drink while walking around.

Went into Tesco today when I got home to look at a bottle here to see if it was the same, only to find that a UK bottle has 5 times as much in it than on the continent. I was a bit shocked. It tasted exactly the same to me, and I'm normally pretty good at tasting sweeteners. Why do companies do this?

Are you sure it was the full stuff you were getting in Rome? Over here you can get Sprite Zero.

 

[Beck S]

Are you sure it was the full stuff you were getting in Rome? Over here you can get Sprite Zero.

Definitely. I have a bottle of it here next to me, and it does just say Sprite, nothing about being sugar free. I've had Sprite Zero, and it doesn't taste like this.

 

[MikeTurin]

Because in Italy we don't put fat in sprite!

 

[grovesy]

Because in Italy we don't put fat in sprite!

Full fat is a nickname people use for the ordinary version of soft drinks here.

 

[MikeTurin]

@grovesy and it's a misnomer - interesting because the correct one is full sugar - and one has to think a lot about the spreading of bad eating habits by the marketing and shabby informations.

 

[Copepod]

Like everything - read the ingredients and nutirional information carefully. Most are recognisable in other languages, and for unfamiliar words, that's why you should take a phrase book / dictionary / app.

Personally, I prefer books, as they work even when batteries and signal fail.

 

[Beck S]

Because in Italy we don't put fat in sprite!

Well no, no one does. But it's just the way it's referred to as a catch all.

Like everything - read the ingredients and nutirional information carefully. Most are recognisable in other languages, and for unfamiliar words, that's why you should take a phrase book / dictionary / app.

Personally, I prefer books, as they work even when batteries and signal fail.

It was quite easy to check everything actually, carbohydrates isn't too dissimilar in Italian. Would have to make sure I'm prepared if I went anywhere with a more different language though!

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

@grovesy and it's a misnomer - interesting because the correct one is full sugar - and one has to think a lot about the spreading of bad eating habits by the marketing and shabby informations.

I find this a particularly interesting English expression. And it has a lot to do with public health policy over decades, and how that was adopted by the food industry and marketing agencies I think.

When fat was decided to the The Bad Guy in the 70s and 80s lots of products were developed that were 'low fat'. More recently 'low in saturated fat' because saturated fat was increasingly cast as The Very Bad Guy Indeed. Carbohydrate got away pretty much scot free (especially with marketing of 'healthy whole grain' foods), and to some extent sugar slipped under the radar too - famously, low fat foods often lacked flavour, so in the early days manufacturers simply added more sugar to make them palatable.

So over time 'fat' became synonymous with 'fattening'. And 'full fat' of anything slipped into language as 'the fattening version'. People would have skimmed, semi-skimmed or full fat milk. Newton Faulkner even wrote a song about it in 2007!

I'm not sure when I first heard the expression 'full fat coke' but it must have been in the late 1990s I would think. It made me smile at the time as a kind of joke, a play on words.

These days, it would be almost unusual to hear people talking about full sugar coke. The joke version has become pretty much adopted as the default!