Sparkling Ice is a popular zero-sugar beverage brand. The company sells a wide variety of fruit flavored drinks that are available both online and in many retail locations.
The brand positions itself as a healthier alternative to popular consumer beverages like soda, by highlighting the lack of sugar in their products and describing their offering as a “rainbow of colors” which is “sourced from nature.”
In this article we’ll analyze the ingredients in Sparkling Ice and Sparkling Ice Caffeine based on published medical studies to determine whether we believe these products are actually good for you or not.
Sparkling Ice Ingredient Review
The above ingredient list is from Sparkling Ice Black Cherry, but all of the flavors contain very similar ingredients so our comments will hold for all flavors of this product.
We do consider it a good sign that the first ingredient is sparkling water, and that some of the flavoring comes from real fruit; in this case cherry juice concentrate. Sparkling Ice also uses fruit and vegetable juice as a natural colorant, which is a healthy choice and much superior from a nutritional standpoint to artificial food dye.
If this product only contained the above-listed ingredients, we would recommend it. However it contains a number of questionable additive ingredients that we recommend consumers avoid.
Sparkling Ice contains the preservative potassium benzoate, which has been shown in a clinical trial to be clastogenic (DNA-damaging), mutagenic (potential for genetic mutation) and cytotoxic (toxic to living cells) to human cells in a test tube study.
These results don’t necessarily mean that this ingredient is toxic to humans at the dose used as a preservative, but we certainly don’t consider this a healthy ingredient, and we recommend avoiding ingesting preservatives entirely.
Sparkling Ice also contains the artificial sweetener sucralose, which was found in a clinical trial published in the Nutrition Journal to cause insulin dysregulation in young, healthy adults. We consider this to be a concerning data point, given that young, healthy adults are arguably the best suited to process artificial sweeteners. We recommend avoiding artificial sweeteners altogether.
Citric acid is a preservative and flavor enhancer that we recommend avoiding. As we documented in our Smart Sweets reviews article, there is medical evidence suggesting that a small subset of patients experience whole-body inflammatory reactions to citric acid. We don’t consider this ingredient as unhealthy as the two previously listed, but we still recommend avoiding it as a safety precaution.
Sparkling Ice also contains natural flavors, which is a broad category term that could refer to any number of chemical compounds. Some will be safe and some may be harmful, but without knowing the specific flavoring agents used, we don’t know how consumers or researchers like us can assess safety. For this reason we recommend avoiding all products containing “natural flavors” described as such.
This drink also contains a blend of vitamins such as Vitamin A and Vitamin B3. As we’ve stated in many Illuminate Health reviews, we recommend avoiding products with random blends of vitamins because we’ve never come across any medical research suggesting that these blends improve human health. Since so many foods and beverages have these additives, we believe that some American consumers that eat a diet high in processed foods may be at risk of artificially elevated levels of certain vitamins due to this manufacturing practice.
Overall we do not consider Sparkling Ice to be healthy, given the significant number of additives that we would consider questionable. We would consider this product healthier than soda, because it’s so much lower in sugar, and because it contains no artificial dye. But that’s a low bar, and we believe that drinking regular water would be much healthier than drinking Sparkling Ice.
Sparkling Ice Caffeine Review
The ingredients in Sparkling Ice Caffeine are similar to the ingredients in regular Sparkling Ice.
Sparkling Ice Caffeine contains all of the same additive ingredients that we referenced in the previous section and recommend avoiding: potassium benzoate, sucralose, citric acid, natural flavors, and a vitamin blend.
The only real difference in this formulation is the addition of caffeine.
Sparkling Ice Caffeine contains 70 milligrams (mg) of caffeine, which we consider to be a safe dose for most consumers. It’s significantly less than the caffeine dose in one single cup of coffee (~ 95 mg).
Consumers with anxiety or high blood pressure may want to avoid caffeine, even at this dose, as it can cause negative effects to both health conditions in some patients.
Our overall take on this product is very similar to our take on Sparkling Ice. We don’t recommend it nor do we find it healthy. We would consider it a healthier alternative to some commercial caffeinated drinks, like a Starbucks latté with added sugar and caramel, but that doesn’t make it healthy overall in our opinion.
Sparkling Ice Spiked Review
Unlike the previous two products, Sparkling Ice does not appear to publish ingredients lists for their Sparkling Ice Spiked (alcoholic) products on their website. We urge the brand to publish ingredients lists on their product page, because this is important for consumer safety.
We got the above ingredients list from Instacart.
Ironically perhaps, we would actually consider this to be a healthier formulation (if consumed in moderation) than the brand’s other products. It contains natural flavors, citric acid and sucralose but is free of preservatives and synthetic vitamin blends.
We do not recommend Sparkling Ice Spiked from a health perspective due to the additive ingredients.
Our Healthy Beverage Recommendation
We recommend Vital Proteins Collagen Water as a healthy beverage for consumers who want something that tastes better than water but is free of questionable additives.
These products are flavored with whole foods ingredients. As an example, Vital Proteins Blackberry Hibiscus Collagen Water is flavored with blackberry juice, lemon juice, hibiscus extract and orange oil. These are all nutritious botanical ingredients.
This drink also contains 10 grams (g) of protein in the form of collagen. Not only will this protein dose provide energy without the crash of caffeine, but collagen at a dosage of 10 g is proven in medical research to have beneficial effects for skin. It reduces wrinkles and improves skin elasticity because it’s the core structural protein in skin.
We’re not suggesting that most consumers need a skin-boosting effect from their health drinks, but it’s a nice secondary benefit. We actually recommend collagen at exactly this dosage of 10 g in many of our skincare reviews because of this proven benefit.
Vital Proteins Collagen Water is free of any toxic or questionable additive ingredients. It has no preservatives, no artificial sweeteners, no vitamin blends and no citric acid.
