This post is dedicated to my mother, a lover of diet soda, and to Erik Marcus, a non-lover of soda.

I forgot to mention an interesting finding in my post Calcium and Stress Fractures in Adolescent Girls – soda was not associated with bone fractures:

“When the analyses were further adjusted for soda intake, the results were virtually unchanged (data not shown).”

But I’m not making an entire post to point this out and, thus, encourage the drinking of soda by adolescent girls. Rather, I have discovered a diet soda which I think is relatively harmless: Zevia.

I have been known to drink a soda occasionally, and while I don’t want so much sugar, I have found diet soda to be very distasteful and I don’t want all the crap the big manufacturers put into it such as aspartame and sugar alcohols.

Enter Zevia. Zevia is an “all natural soda” with no calories. It is sweetened with stevia extract and erythritol (a sugar alcohol that supposedly does not cause gastrointestinal distress like other sugar alcohols).

When I had my first Zevia, a few years ago, I really disliked it. And I wasn’t alone. So when I heard that Oakland Veg Week had gotten Zevia donated to their events, I thought “Oh, no!”

Yet, when I got to one of the events, I couldn’t help but be pulled in by the siren song of the Zevia and I tried one again. Lo and behold, I didn’t think it was that bad. In fact, I now think it is pretty darn good and have even bought a six-pack since then. I particularly like their ginger root beer. Zevia isn’t quite as satisfying as a sugar-filled root beer or cola, but it’s pretty close.

Why am I posting this? Because I know a lot of people who drink a decent amount of diet soda and I think this would probably be a better choice.

Whole Foods carries Zevia in Oakland.