Is the health food du jour really all it's cracked up to be?

We all know fizzy drinks aren’t health tonics, but they affect the body in more ways than you may realise. Katherine Chatfield investigates their impact on your insides

The answer is surprisingly, not much at all.

Simple ingredients make a delicious drink

How to make an Old Fashioned right in four simple steps, with detailed explanations. And how NOT to make an Old Fashioned.

Almost every venue in north Brooklyn now stocks an exotic-looking bottled beverage with a mysterious gaucho on its label. Peter Meehan, editor of food magazine Lucky Peach, tweeted a picture of it ten days before pop star Sky Ferreira Instagrammed the label, calling it “THE BEST THING TO COME TO THE USA SINCE THE BEATLES.” A recent issue of Bon Appétit gave it a short blurb, quoting a translation of the label’s cheeky copy: “One gets used to it.”

Crystal Pepsi appears headed for a comeback, that much is clear. But details on when and how the 1990s-era cola will return remain murky. The clear cola was first introduced in 1992 but lasted only a few years. Despite its short lifespan, the drink apparently gained a loyal following of consumers who have lobbied PepsiCo to bring it back.

PepsiCo says it's dropping aspartame from Diet Pepsi in response to customer worries and replacing it with sucralose, another artificial sweetener commonly known as Splenda. The decision to swap sweeteners comes as Americans keep turning away from popular diet sodas. Rival Coca-Cola said this week that sales volume for Diet Coke, which also uses aspartame, fell 5 percent in North America in the first three months of the year.

Imagine you are overworked, sleep-deprived and keen to begin your weekend with a well-aimed salvo of intoxicating elixirs. Where will you execute this time-honored plan, American drinker of 2015? If you live in a reasonably large metropolis, your watering-hole options might include: the artisanal cocktail emporium where the staff display a fondness for arm garters and moustache wax...

In an insane marriage that could only come from two XTREME #brands like Doritos and Mountain Dew, Quartz has learned that Pepsi has thrown caution to the wind and created a Doritos-flavored...

Like many terrifying rumors, it started on Reddit. Redditor joes_nipples posted an image Thursday of a Doritos-flavored Mountain Dew tasting table, aptly called Dewritos with the caption, “It actually tasted like Doritos.”

Not only it gives me great pleasure to watch this bartender preparing a Rum Martínez but it whets my thirst to no end. And to top it all, it is made with my favorite rum: Zacapa Centenario 23. I just want this magic potion right now.

What if nutrition labels told people exactly what calories meant, in practical terms? A bottle of Coke could dole out specific exercise requirements. The calories herein, it might say, are the equivalent of a 50-minute jog. The decision to drink the Coke then becomes, would you rather spend the evening on a treadmill, or just not drink the soda?

The American Beverage Industry has spent $7.7 million— the second-highest amount ever spent to defeat a San Francisco ballot proposition — on its effort to try to prevent the city from becoming the first in the country to tax sodas and other sugary drinks.

The three largest soda companies — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group — have pledged to cut the number of sugary drink calories that Americans consume by one-fifth in about a decade, through a combination of marketing, distribution and packaging.

I recently attended a special tasting dinner at Le Bernardin to try a newly released single-malt 50-year-old Glenlivet Scotch ($25,000 a bottle, a stocking stuffer for aficionados). What follows are some descriptive phrases in the lexicon of lushes I heard my fellow dinner-goers use to describe the stuff:

The multinational company is testing consumer reaction to its formula: a creamy latte inspired by Irish stout.

Artificial sweeteners may exacerbate, rather than prevent, metabolic disorders such as Type 2 diabetes, a study suggests. Calorie-free artificial sweeteners are often chosen by dieters in part because they are thought not to raise blood sugar levels.

Coca-Cola Co. (KO)’s newest social-media campaign reaches back to a time when even MySpace didn’t exist. Surge, a citrus-flavored Mountain Dew knockoff that was discontinued by Coke about 12 years ago, has reappeared in limited supply today. The only place to get it: Amazon.com.

The pumpkin spice latte got plucked from the dust heap of market research to become a full-fledged fall obsession.