In an effort to catch Pepsi, Arizona, and Snapple in the "ready-to-drink tea market," Coke is raising the bar for diet drinks with its new tea product: Enviga, which will go on sale later this year and has negative calories, say the kooky Coke-heads.
How in the world could such a feat be possible? Well, Enviga contains a powerful, exotic, miraculous chemical called "caffeine," which is consumed by 90% of the adults in the little-known New World tribe called "North America," along with much of the rest of the world. Caffeine is a stimulant of the central nervous system, and therefore drives the body to burn more calories than it ordinarily would, causing loss of excess baggage. (Enviga also contains the green tea-derived antioxidant/stimulant EGCG, enhancing the weight-loss effect.) The Coke line is that 3 cans of Enviga make healthy, young adults burn 60-100 calories, while each can contains just five calories. A Discover.com analysis finds that this means each can contains somewhere between -20 and -28 calories.
I wonder if we'll soon see more novel negative-calorie products, like "coffee," "cigarettes," or "crystal meth." Never thought this prediction of Wired's from the August, 2006 issue would come to pass so quickly—at least on the marketing side, if not the science.
