A List of My Top 5 Favorite No Carb or Low Carb Drinks

In these health conscious times many of us are looking for ways to cut back on calories and carbohydrates in our diet. A good way to start cutting back is in what we drink. Most non-diet juice drinks and soft drinks are packed with sugar and carbohydrates. This can add up to a lot of the carbohydrates that we consume at a meal. If you are looking at a diet plan that allows you approximately 50 carbohydrates per meal, then an 8-oz. non-diet drink will take up most of those carbohydrates and leave you little to no carbohydrate allowance for your food.

I never really thought about the number of carbohydrates in my family's diet until my daughter was diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes when she was 9 years old. At that time, we had to learn a whole new way of eating. We were now forced to pay attention to the number of carbohydrates consumed at a meal. When I started keeping a record of the number of carbs that we consumed in a day, that was when I noticed that a lot of our carbs were coming from what we were drinking. I immediately began reading the nutrition labels on every juice drink and soda that we bought. I replaced all of our high carbohydrate drinks with drinks that had little to no carbohydrates per serving.

The following is a list of the reduced carbohydrate drinks that my family now enjoys:

1) Like most families, soft drinks are pretty popular around our house, but non-diet soft drinks are loaded with carbohydrates. Our favorite soft drinks are Coca Cola and Mt Dew. According to the label on the bottle a non-diet 16.9 oz. bottle of Coke has approximately 55 grams of carbohydrates and a 6 oz. bottle of Mt. Dew has 31 grams of carbs per bottle. If you drink a whole bottle of Coke with your meal that is your entire carb allowance for that meal, so forget about eating any food that has carbs. If you do as we did you can switch to the diet variety of these drinks and have a whole bottle which contains 0 grams of carbs and use your carb allowance for the food you eat.

2) Ice tea is also a favorite at our house. We enjoy several different varieties. We like home brewed tea that we sweeten with our favorite sugar substitute. This makes a nice cool, refreshing drink with 0 carbs. We also like the Diet Snapple brand of bottled peach flavored tea. There is 0 grams of carbs in a 16 oz. bottle. In addition, they make the "on the go" packets of Diet Snapple tea that you can add to 16 oz. of water. These packets do have 1 gram of carbs per 8 oz., so one packet that makes a 16 oz drink will have 2 grams of carbs per packet. Be sure that if you decide to try the bottled peach tea , that you get the diet. A non-diet peach tea, according to the nutrition label, has approximately 46 grams of carbohydrates per bottle.

3) Fruit juices are another favorite at our house and the one that we enjoy the most is Vfusion Pomegranate Blueberry drink made by the makers of V-8. This fruit drink is actually made from the concentrated juices of fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, this is one of the drinks that we have to drink sparingly. Even the lite variety still has 13 grams of carbs in 8 oz. We use this drink as a way to treat ourselves every now and then. There are also several other flavors available in the Vfusion drinks but be sure to get the lite variety because the non-lite variety has 25 grams of carbs per 8 oz.

4) Another fruit drink that we like and can have on a regular basis is Cranberry Pomegranate by Ocean Spray. This drink is also made from juice concentrate. The diet variety has 2 grams of carbs per 8 oz. but beware the non-diet variety has 30 grams in 8 oz. They also make this in the "on the go" packets. It is sugar-free and has 0 grams of carbs. I love these handy little packets for road trips and at work. The only drawback to these packets is, if you do not like "tart" drinks, you will need to add your favorite sugar substitute for a sweeter drink.

5) Of course, last but not least, the best no carbohydrate drink is plain water. It taste good with everything, is usually very easy to find and adds absolutely 0 carbs to your daily carb intake. If you can't tolerate the taste of plain water, you can always add plenty of ice, a nice wedge of lemon and your favorite sugar substitute. It is a wonderful refresher on a hot summer day.