All you zany hipsters may want to click away before reading this story.
A selection of La Croix sparkling water (Getty Images)
Or maybe stick around till the end, for there does look to be a glimmer of hope.
A new lawsuit is accusing the makers of LaCroix of using artificial ingredients in their incredibly popular line of sparkling water.
The lawsuit centers around LaCroix's use of the phrase "all natural," and the lawsuit declares that testing has found synthetic ingredients such as "limonene," which has been found to cause "kidney toxicity and tumors," and "linolool"
LaCroix's parent company, National Beverage Corp, has denied the accusations, and firmly insists that "all the flavor essences in LaCroix are natural."
The National Institute of Health’s open database for chemical compounds (or "PubChem") has released a statement which actually disputes the lawsuit's findings. When it comes to the ingredients cited, PubChem describes limonene as a "naturally occurring chemical,” and “a major component of oil extracted from citrus peels.”
A photo of a guy wearing lemons (Getty Images)
The other, seemingly more controversial ingredient is linalool. While PubChem acknowledges that this flavoring agent is used in some insecticides, they spell out that that doesn't in any way mean that insecticides are present in linalool, or that linalool is poisonous.
Read more over at Popular Science.