A new complement of healthy, refreshing beverages are rising midway between the jazzy sugars, caffeine, carbonation, taurine, and salts of different soft drinks and the boring blandness of plain water. These include the standard fruit juices, and new iced teas, nectars, and functional drinks. These new “functional drinks” are one of the fastest growing segments of the beverage market.
Non-carbonated drinks that are not juices are referred to as “still drinks”. Still, I would assume, because there are no bubbles clamoring to rise to the top. Still drinks include beverages that contain less than 25% juice and functional drinks. Functional drink manufacturers advocate that they are useful for specific purposes like alleviating premenstrual tension, providing a source of viscous fibre, or reducing stress. Futurists predict that these chemically adjusted functional beverages will soon promote themselves as catalysts to attitudinal change!
In the meantime, functional also often means fortified, like vitamin water or the fortified soft drinks, like Fuze or Hansen’s Functionals. If you take a look a the nutrition facts on one of these drinks, you’d be expecting to eat a feast with so much of your daily requirements met in a 16 ounce bottle! It’s unbelievable what they can sprinkle into a drink and get the numbers up on the nutritional fact table. This new targeting of products to enhance a drink’s nutritional facts table is making real the old saying of “what get measured gets done”.
But is it really getting done? Does fortification improve nutritional content? What’s wrong with just drinking your vitamin pill? The Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently came out with the following caution – “Excessive use of highly fortified foods to meet nutrient targets may result in shortages of some essential nutrients.”
It’s the argument over the whole food versus the single ingredient. Just as pharmaceutical companies have been scratching their heads wondering why their multi-million dollar cloned active ingredient distilled from the leaf of a rare plant in the Brazilian jungle doesn’t work as well as it does in full leaf tea, researchers in the food industry are realizing that B6 or B12 alone doesn’t relieve stress or nourish the body. And how would a vitamin found in whole grains find itself into a drink anyway? It’s just not natural.
That’s why the USDA is reminding consumers that it is important to eat (or drink) “a variety of foods that provide naturally occurring nutrients, rather than formulated foods which have been artificially fortified.” It is important to eat the whole food- not just an ingredient, or a vitamin, or a mineral. They go on, “Whole foods are necessary to obtain adequate levels of the full range of essential nutrients. This includes flavenoids, carotenoids, and other phytonutrients that occur in whole foods.” (These little “-oid” words don’t exist in the Gatesian microsoft-speak dictionary– so maybe they’ve already been relegated for extinction. We hope not.)
At BoldRush, we are committed to using whole foods in our bars, and whole fruits and vegetables in our drinks. And we know our wild Yukon cranberries are just packed with anti-oxidants, even though we can’t say it. We believe there is a market for people who prefer naturally nourishing to artificially fortified.
Less is more. Fortified and functional can be an oxymoron.
And the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
