7 Up Free

The couple of days of hot weather we had at the very start of September (which were about the best we've had over here in the midwest of England) meant I'd been taking in considerably more fluids than usual, and a lot of those have been cold drinks. Being diabetic I'm not able to drink the majority of fizzy pop on the market; sugary drinks are pretty much *the worst* thing you can choose, as the sugar in them is absorbed much faster than, say, lactose. Add to that the fact that a lot of places (especially fast food outlets) can only be bothered to offer Diet Coke, which gets boring after a while and isn't really all that refreshing on a really warm day.

There is a Diet version of Sprite, but it's absurdly hard to find in many shops, so I was very pleased to see this "7 Up Free" in the supermarket the other day. I'm very fond of citrus flavours in my drink, so although it was rather expensive (£1.09 for a bottle - shouldn't it have been free with a name like this?!) I thought I'd give it a go. 7 Up has aped Coke in moving from a 500 ml to a 600 ml bottle, which is all very well in terms of being better value (until the next price increase, anyway) but means that it no longer fits properly in my little shoulder bag! It's one of the less gimmicky bottle designs around, which in my book is a plus. Being simply plastic, the bottle should be easily recyclable in most parts of the country.

As is usual with Britvic's soft drinks, there's a prominent "Made in GB" flash on the back of the label. As far as I know most similar products are made here, so I'm not sure why Britvic think this is worth shouting about. Nutrition information is not terribly relevant when it comes to diet fizz, as there's almost nothing in it! Per 250 ml serving (note that this is less than half the bottle!) you get a mighty *five* kcal and virtually no carbohydrate, protein, fat or sodium. As expected, there are two sweeteners, acesulfame K and aspartame - the latter is sometimes claimed to be harmful, but the considerable weight of scientific evidence is against that (Wikipedia's "Aspartame controversy" article is rather technical but extremely informative) and in any case plain old sugar most certainly harms an awful lot more people!

I don't know how you quantify the level of fizz in a bottle of pop, but 7 Up Free seems to have about the average level: enough that it doesn't taste as though it's gone flat, but not so much that you feel bloated and gassy after chugging down a few mouthfuls. The taste is reasonable, if nothing that's going to blow your socks off, and it does have at least a touch of the tang of real lemon and lime about it. Clearly it's no match for the likes of posher brands such as Fentiman's, but then those tend to be an awful lot more expensive. 7 Up Free is light, tangy and refreshing, and it's hard to ask for more than that from a drink like this. It won't knock you out with its brilliance, but it's a good choice for a quick cool-down.