Vitamin Water Helps Build Immunity To Arsenic...*

... By feeding you trace amounts of it!

So I've opened up a store in my dorm room out of my room mate's mini fridge. Every so often I go into town, to the CVS, and buy items that are on sale in bulk quantities, and then take them back to campus to sell. Aparently there's a huge market for this sort of thing. It's very entrepreneurial of me, really, except for the tiny detail that I sell at cost. I just don't have the heart to overcharge.

Last week at CVS, they had a sale on Glaceau Vitamin Water. Now I know it's supposed to be very hip and trendy back in NYC, not to mention perfect for slipping shots of vodka into at supervised birthday parties, so I figured I'd give it a shot in my store. My room mates don't drink, but I figured they might enjoy the healthy benefits.

But when I tried to push it on them, it was met with distrust and suspicious. It was just too chic to be taken at face value. So, being the dutiful salesman that I am, I checked the list of ingredients.

There's some standard ascorbic acid, for vitamin C, reverse osmosis water, which is really just a fancy way of saying someone pumped it through a filter, a handful of electrolytes, and chromium polynicotinate, which sounds a lot scarier than it actually is.
No High Fructose Corn Syrup. So far so good.

But wait? What's Crystalline Fructose? Is that similar? So I hit up my good friend Wikipedia and he gives me the lowdown.

If you didn't click the link, let me summarize it for you. Crystalline Fructose is made by letting Fructose-Enriched Corn Syrup crystallize. Is that the same as High Fructose Corn Syrup? Nooo, because it's only Fructose-Enriched... Well, putting those differences-or lack thereof-aside, let's give it the benefit of the doubt by saying maybe it's better for you?

Let me get to the next point of the entry.

It contains Arsenic. Now it doesn't matter how little arsenic there is in each bottle of Vitamin Water, I think the irony is enough to stand on it's own two legs. Vitamin Water contains vitamins... and poison! Now, if they actually make good on the title of this post, and were to market it as such, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.

*Entirely made up by me, but everything else above is true.

EDIT: There is also Lead and other heavy metals in Vitamin Water.