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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

The scam here is that these same food companies have captured the FDA so they can claim they're following the law or doing what is "industry standard" while they're creating the laws. That's why we have all this deceptive packaging, serving sizes that make no sense, etc.

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Say what you will about European regulations, but as an American who moved to Europe, I was absolutely floored when I bought a cheap bottle of sparkling mint-flavored water from the grocery store, and the ingredients were exactly:

* sparkling mineral water * mint extract

I don’t know if a single brand exists in the US that uses actual ingredients in flavored water, I’ve always just seen the vague “natural flavor”. But here it was in the random budget store brand

This is not difficult to find at all in the US. I have tried several sparking waters that use actual ingredients - I don't recall all of them, but Spindrift is definitely one: https://drinkspindrift.com/pages/whats-inside. Have you Googled at all to try and find one of these brands?

There are no regulations necessary for this - thanks to capitalism, if people want real flavoring in their sparkling water, companies will make it. Regulation is about preventing companies from doing bad things, not about getting them to make good products.

There are plenty of beverages here in Europe that only state "flavors".

Here's one in France: https://www.badoit.fr/bulles-et-the

It does say "natural white peach flavor", but also "natural flavors". This is supposedly a tea and peach flavored drink. It spells out "peach" and "black tea infusion", but then there's also some other mystery flavor.

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