Tame that Tune (Tunes Cherry Sugar Free Throat Lozenges)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Tunes Cherry Sugar Free Throat Lozenges
Date:	01/11/09 (75 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very effective at soothing tickly coughs, sugar free

Disadvantages: Not really strong enough to clear up bunged-up tubes

"A second-class return to Nottingham, please." Even all these years on, the words of the 1980s TV advert for Tunes remain with me. In those days, they came in conventional tubes and were available in cherry, blackcurrant and honey flavours. The honey variety has long since been consigned to the great medicine cabinet in the sky, being replaced by strawberry, but the cherry version is still around, which is all to the good as otherwise this would not be a very long or informative review!

These days, Tunes come in little cardboard packets in a sort of shrunken cigarette-packet shape. I doubt that that's the image the makers (Mars, no less) really want to bring to people's minds, but I'm afraid it's the first thing I thought of when I first saw them! These are colour-coded, and the cherry - actually labelled "cherry menthol" - version is in quite a nice dark red colour, with a picture of one sweet and a couple of cherries on the front, together with a white arrow and some green wavy lines, these presumably intended to show how its vapours can clear your nose.

Tunes are not classed as medicine - the pack's official description is "cherry flavour menthol sweets with real fruit juice and sweeteners" - so they can be bought anywhere. A 37 gram pack costs 49p in Tesco at the time of writing, so they're not going to break the bank. As you would expect from a boiled sweet, they're almost entirely carbohydrate: no less than 96%, though as befits a "sugar free" product only 0.2% of this is actually from sugars. This is good for your teeth, though it has a downside: "excessive consumption may produce laxative effects"! The safe level is not actually defined, but in general I'd be wary of consuming more than one pack a day. 100g provides 240 kcal of energy, so a single pack will have about 89 kcal; nothing to worry about there.

There is no internal wrapping at all - the sweets are simply stuffed into the cardboard packet - which can occasionally cause them to stick to the cardboard or to each other, especially when you get down to the last couple. Each piece is an oval boiled sweet, with dimensions about 2 cm by 1cm by 1cm, coloured in the same deep red as the packet and with an attractive translucent look. They're not particularly sticky (unless you get them wet!) and are easy to handle and pop into your mouth. Don't try to crunch them up, though, unless you have very strong teeth, as they're very hard and when they do break they often have quite sharp edges!

The taste of each Tune (if that's the correct singular) isn't bad at all. I find some sugar-free sweets to have a rather unpleasant taste, perhaps due to the artificial sweeteners used - isomalt and sucralose in this case - but here the dominant flavours are cherry (hurrah) and menthol. The menthol taste is quite strong, though, and does give these things quite a "medicinal" taste; when you first try it, it doesn't seem to mix with the fruit that well, and even now I'm not sure it's an entirely successful mixture: the blackcurrant variety seems to do better on this score. The cherry taste itself isn't bad, though, and the benefit of Mars' inclusion of real juice is apparent.

Of course, the main point of Tunes is to help clear blocked noses, but oddly enough I find them much more successful in another area. I tend to suffer from chronic coughs - nothing too serious, as several professional examinations have proved, but annoying - and I have yet to find anything that can keep them away better than a pack of Tunes. They last a long time, which helps: a single sweet can last 20 minutes with care, so you can make a packet last for hours. They also release their juice slowly, which helps keep my throat lubricated and holds off those annoying tickles.

What they *don't* do particularly well is unblock my tubes! If that's all you want, then - depending on how you feel about sugar - almost any packet of fruit-flavour suckable lozenges will do the job at least as well. That said, Tunes are inexpensive enough that you might as well get them anyway as long as you can deal with all that menthol. Just don't expect any miracles. Some reservations, then - but if I were judging them purely on their ability to deal with my own cough, they'd be looking at a five-star rating!

Summary: Great for coughs; less good for colds!