I'm no Scarlett Johansson, but here are MY uncensored comments on SodaStream

Sometimes I wonder why companies even bother to buy Super Bowl ads. As GoDaddy has repeatedly demonstrated, you can get almost as much publicity by getting a Super Bowl ad rejected - and it's certainly a lot cheaper.

Take SodaStream. Their ad has been rejected by Fox, not because of explicit sex acts, but because of four words - one of which is a four-letter word - that Scarlett Johansson utters at the conclusion of the commercial.

If you are a minor, please check with your parents before viewing the video below, or reading the words that appear below it.



Sorry, Coke and Pepsi.

So why am I participating in this viral promotion that is probably intentional? Because it gives me a chance to air MY views about SodaStream, and as long as I have this platform, I'm going to use a NINE letter word. And a four word phrase.

But first, let me tell you what SodaStream is. It's basically a way to make carbonated drinks at home. You take some water, a "carbonator," some syrup, and the SodaStream machine, and you have your own little mini soda machine, kind of like the ones you see in fast food restaurants. Except, of course, that the syrups don't say "Coca-Cola" or "Pepsi."

You buy all the materials from SodaStream itself, or from a retailer - we got ours at Costco. But when you look at the syrups, there's some interesting language in there.

No high-fructose corn syrup in regular flavors. No aspartame in diet flavors.

This raises the question - what DO the flavors contain?

If you look at the ingredients of the cola and the diet cola, both contain sucralose. While I can understand the desire to put an artificial sweetener in a diet cola, why can't the cola just contain sugar? For the record, cola contains both sugar AND sucralose.

LiveStrong (which was previously associated with a person who has intimate knowledge about putting bad things in your body) has said the following about sucralose:

Sucralose may be a trigger for migraines, according to a study published in the August, 2006 issue of ''Headache: Journal of Head and Face Pain.'' Physicians should keep the potential causal relationship between sucralose and migraines in mind when they are taking the health history of people who suffer migraines, recommends lead study author Rajendrakumar M. Patel of the Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, Georgia....

A study by Y.F. Sasaki published in the 2002 ''Journal of Mutation Research'' concluded that high doses of sucralose led to DNA damage in the gastrointestinal organs of mice. The dose given was 2,000 mg per kg of body weight. According to tripatlas.com, the acceptable intake for sucralose is 9 mg per kg of body weight each day. Based on his study results, Sasaki recommended more extensive study of sucralose and 38 other food additives....

A report from Australia's National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme cites two studies on rats that were given the substance at extremely high doses. These studies found a decrease in mean thymus weight. The report also noted, however, that sucralose would not be classified as hazardous under NOHSC's criteria for classifying a hazardous substance. The amount of sucralose given to the rats was 3,000 mg per kg of body weight daily for some 28 days. That would translate to 240 g sucralose, or more than 20,000 individual packets of Splenda per day, for 28 days for a 176-pound person, translates TripAtlas.com.

While some of these doses are extremely high, it would be nice to have the alternative of having SodaStream mixes with just sugar and nothing else.

As a result, I pretty much use my SodaStream to make soda water, and nothing else. Although I'm still looking for some more natural mixes.

Oh, and a little postscript - if you clicked on my GoDaddy-related link above, you'll see that my old Ontario Empoblog post talked about one Amber Nykola, who was not impressed with GoDaddy's 2005 Super Bowl commercial and who announced that she was going to transition nykola.com, and her other 35 domains, to another registrar. As she noted in a comment to my post, it takes a long time to transfer 36 domains, especially when at least one of them was set to auto-renew with GoDaddy.

Nearly a decade has passed, nykola.com is still operational (although it hasn't been updated in over four years), and the domain is registered with...GoDaddy. I wanted to search the site to see if she made any post-2005 comment on her registration, but unfortunately the search engine on her site isn't currently operational. Her Twitter profile describes her as an ex-blogger, so presumably the issue isn't that important any more.

And GoDaddy itself has moved on.