Vitamin Water 10 now with 25 calories

Popular water replacement Vitamin Water got healthier recently with the introduction of Vitamin Water 10, a new low calorie drink which pitches itself as a great source to get your vitamins with fewer calories. The only problem with this claim is that a bottle of Vitamin Water 10 comes packed with 25 calories, not 10 calories.

That's right.

Despite being sued for misleading consumers once this year Glaceau is branding its 25-calorie drink as Vitamin Water 10, opting to come clean on the nutrition label by breaking a bottle into 2.5 servings. Thankfully you won't have to do the math to figure out what the vitamin content is since; it's plainly listed in both per serving and per bottle increments. The drink's whitepaper (pdf) -- yes it has a whitepaper -- even refers to calories by serving but vitamins by bottle further muddling the true caloric content.

The new Vitamin Water 10 bottles even sports a handy list of things you can do to work off the calories contained within, per serving of course. To make it a little more consumer friendly we decided to carry the listed calorie burning activities out to cover the entire bottle, in case you can't just drink 8 ounces.

To burn the calories in a bottle of Vitamin Water 10 you'll need to:

• Brush your teeth 5 times
• Take a 25 minute nap
• 25 minutes of online "dating" (is this a euphemism?)
• 25 minutes of window shopping
  

While not outlandish, these activities require a bit more time than the label would have you believe.

It turns out that breaking a sports drink's calorie content down into 8 ounce servings is actually a common occurrence with Gatorade guilty of using the same serving hi-jinks on its G2 and Propel drinks. The only thing separating these two competitors is the fact that Gatorade hasn't decided to market its 32 oz. 100 calorie drink as Gatorade 25.

The fact that Glaceau is branding the drink as a 10 calorie drink when it really has 25 calories is puzzling for two reasons. First, 25 calories isn't that much; especially when you compare it to the original Vitamin water which had 130 calories and 33 grams of sugar! Second, what consumer is out there drinking their sports drinks in 8 ounce servings? If this practice was really that popular the market would be flooded with special branded 8 ounce bottles of performance enhancing fluids. A reasonable person would expect a 20 ounce bottle of a sports drink to contain 1, not 2 and a half servings.