Remember the 90s? Ahh, the 90s, when I was in high school and college and we all believed that (a) bagels and cereal were diet foods and (b) drinking a Diet Coke with your pizza was a good way of cancelling out the calories.

The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE:KO) has announced that it will be releasing a new calorie-burning soft drink called "Enviga" in November, just in time to balance out your Thanksgiving dinner I suppose. That's right, I said "calorie-burning." It could be that my pizza/diet soda strategy from 1992 could finally actually work!

Enviga uses green tea extract (EGCG, which has nothing to do with an EKG, much though my mind immediately leaps there), caffeine and calcium, and the company says it is actually proven to burn calories. Investors seem cautiously optimistic and have sent the stock up a bit, about 20 cents, since the announcement.

I don't know. First of all: the packaging looks to me like those alcoholic drinks -- totally the wrong association for Coke's target market. Second, I connect calorie-burning with the fen-phen troubles of the late 90s (yep, those darned 90s again). Third, as Sarah Gim from Slashfood points out, Enviga is only "proven" to burn calories in "healthy people with a lean to normal body type" -- those that don't really need to burn any more calories. Sarah, Sarah! Don't you know that customers don't read the small print??

It remains to be seen whether Enviga will crash and burn due to confusing packaging, or it will soon be on the desks of millions of lean-to-normal female high school and college students, who are certain that they're in need of losing just five more pounds. If I know anything about their collective psychology, I'd be betting on option #2.

Coke taking 'diet soda' to a whole new meaning originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 16 Oct 2006 15:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.