Functional drinks are everywhere. But are they good for us?
It’s not exactly a secret that I’m sceptical - at best - about the wellness industry. But even I had a lot of takeaways from writing an article on drinks with added benefits.
If there’s one thing I especially hate about modern life (which I do actually love, in general), it’s the springing up of completely pointless new collections of products which are then aggressively marketed as life changing. I know it’s a hallmark of late stage capitalism; I know it’s been happening for years. But that doesn’t make me OK with whole industries of people trying to convince us to spend our money on things we don’t actually need, whether that’s antibacterial window cleaner - are you licking your windows? - or drinkable peptides. So when one of my editors at the Guardian asked me to write about functional drinks and whether they are all they claim to be, I will admit I was already predisposed not to like a lot of them. But I have been a journalist for a long time and I can recognise bias when I see it, even in myself (mostly). So I set aside my preconceptions and started talking to dietitians.
Broadly speaking, those dietitians all agreed with me.
Functional drinks, if you haven’t come across the term before, are drinks with added extras - things like vitamins, collagen, protein, fibre, probiotics, minerals (magnesium is popular), electrolytes, caffeine or L-theanine, and in some cases so-called superfood plant or fruit extracts, or adaptogenic herbs or mushrooms - things like chaga, ginseng or yerba mate.
It’s a bit of a nonsense term. All drinkable liquids are functional, in that they hydrate us - that’s their function. And, although they are a new category of drinks as far as supermarkets are concerned, you could argue that coffee, alcohol and pretty much any of the teas and tisanes that humans have consumed for millennia are functional drinks, in that they contain mood, mind or body-altering substances. I can’t really see how ‘calming’ CBD drinks are all that different to camomile or ‘sleepy’ teas, and people in hot countries have been drinking lightly salted yoghurt drinks to prevent dehydration since way before influencers started chugging cans of ashwaghanda-enhanced electrolytes.
Anyway. All this matters because my god, functional drinks are everywhere. You can now get a CBD hit with your over-chilled ham-sandwich meal deal in a supermarket, or with a fancy salad at the airport, or in your local pub. And to me…it’s mostly a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes, in a nicely designed bottle or can.