Admittedly, a cup of actual tea is mostly water as well. Point taken, though.

Rather, do they mean "tea" as in the stuff you drink, or as in the leaves themselves? That changes how the picture looks and what we can take from it.

I'm not sure what to make of this, either. Of course, the presence of both "water" and "tea" is a head-scratcher. I make tea by infusing dry leaves in boiling water at a (volume) ratio of something like 1 to 48, and then removing the leaves. So if "tea" is meant to represent substances extracted from the leaves, it looks to be outrageously strong. If it is meant to represent a small dose of "properly prepared tea" floating around in all the corn syrup, that would be more interesting. But the "citric acid" thing also gives me concern--I've done a bit of home wine- and mead- making, so I've use citric acid as an ingredient. Typical usage is one-half to three teaspoons per _gallon_ of liquid, with anything over a tablespoon producing a powerfully tart drink--think sour candy. I just don't believe that anything near that level of pure citric acid could be in a single bottle of Snapple. And if we're talking about a solution of citric acid in water...well, again, why would we have that along with "water?"

I spent just a couple of minutes chasing this image around the Net, and I couldn't work out who created it or what data was used to justify the visualization. I would be extremely reluctant to rely on this graphic in any way--it seems to be just one of those things that gets emailed around.

Snapple hasn't used HFCS since 2009 (see New York Time link below); this graph is pretty but it isn't sourced or accurate.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/reading-the-tea-leaves-snapple-refreshes-itself/

Has it actually been proven that high fructose corn syrup is worse for you than cane sugar? I thought the real problem with HFC is that it's in all processed food in the US, thanks to the ridiculous corn subsidies. But if cane sugar were used instead, it would mess with people's insulin just as much.

Who gives a rat's , it taste good and is less filling.

citation needed. where's the data? I did not know that "flavored/tea water" is separate from "water" in a Snapple. How the hell does that work?

Massive graph fail. In a modified pie-chart such as this the shaded areas should be in direct proportion to the quantity of each ingredient. In this case "tea", "flavors", and "citric acid" are comically over-represented.

You're linking to a site that uses "porn" in its name to connote lust for its favorite topic? Maybe a future post could be on how rape- and porn-culture have ways of colonizing even the most practiced and educated culture observers.

Chart Porn (a site that does post accurate charts & graphs, except for its "humor" category, which this was in) got this from GraphJam, which is a site purely for *joke* charts and graphs, and has nothing to do with actual research. I would be very surprised if the proportions in this graph had anything to do with any real data at all.

Ah, HFCS. Gotta love those sugar tariffs and corn subsidies!

While not too accurate the graph does remind us how much we pay for water sometimes, and that's probably a good thing (I mean thinking about what we're consuming is good, not paying way too much for water).

So why not sell little packets of the trace ingredients of most popular drinks instead of the whole drink? Let us add our own water (or to our ubiquitous water bottles) and make it taste as strong or diluted as we like (not to mention the vast savings in distribution costs and reduction in volume of empty containers to deal with). Oh, and by "trace ingredients" I mean everything except the water, lol.

Or on second thought, we can make something like this ourselves easily enough. Mix up some real cane sugar syrup, some lemon and lime juice concentrates (or tea, or whatever) and a dash of caffeine or guarana if desired and carry it all in a plastic test tube with a screw cap. Disturbingly-vivid food coloring is optional. Add the concoction to high-quality sparkling water (or vodka!) and it'd be FAR better than anything at the store for a fraction of the price...

As a lover of all sorts of tea (black, green, white, "red", fruit+tea, milk tea, hot tea, cold tea) there is NO comparing Lipton's/Snapple/Arizona with your average can of lightly-sweetened tea like you can buy from any Asian supermarket. Heavenly stuff, and it's unmistakably tea in there. If you want to go the unsweetened route you can buy cans that list the ingredients as such: WATER AND TEA. The liquid is naturally a nice amber in color, no need for caramel coloring.

As Kyra pointed out above, both Snapple and my favorite canned teas might also be made by brewing tea concentrate and then diluting (I can kind of see how that makes sense economically) but the flavor is completely different.

Snapple iced tea is a lie. It's not made completely from tea leaves. There is deffinently hemp plant leaves in this tea. If you don't know what the hemp plant is, it's the marijuana plant. Trust me, if you go onto the Snapple home page, you can spot it. Check the home page it says it all.