Functional Facts

With a wide variety of options available today, do the zen-like claims of functional drinks hold any water?

WORDS John deBary

For as long as I have been thinking about drinks professionally, I have been fascinated by non-alcoholic drinks that strive to offer a similar sensory experience without relying on the physical properties and psychoactive effects of alcohol. Alcohol is a great base for flavors, plus it has a rapid and powerful effect on the human body and mind.

In the past five years, the craft non-alcoholic drinks market has exploded, and I should know: I launched my own, short-lived brand, Proteau, that was on sale from 2019–2022.

Within this market is a fascinating subset of beverages that claim to offer many of the desired effects of alcohol—elevated mood, increased social connection—without relying on a carcinogenic substance that many regard as harmful. Each brand has their own particular approach to this task, but overall they use a combination of botanical ingredients that are thought to help regulate how the body responds to things like stress and anxiety. Peruse any non-alcoholic bottle shop and you’ll see products with claims ranging from relatively modest “help you unwind” to outlandish “unlock heart-opening joy.”

I love altering my consciousness in numerous ways and I am a relatively open-minded and non-judgmental person, but I have always been deeply skeptical of these claims. Does a drink with a dose of turmeric really help you unwind? I’ve long thought that brands that claimed that their drinks not only promoted health but also offered many of the same benefits of alcohol like relaxation and greater social connection were selling a fantasy, but I have always been eager to verify that assertion.

If I had my druthers, I would conduct a huge, randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of as many of these drinks as I could. Realizing that this would probably be a full-time job for a team of people, I thought I’d start small, and run an as-scientific-as-possible experiment on myself.

I enlisted the help of my trusty husband to blind-pour me four different drinks, three of which claimed functional benefits, while the other was a control group. Each day at precisely 9:00 am, I chugged the drink with my nose plugged (to make each drinking experience as similar as possible). Then, for the next 90 minutes, I sat in relative quiet, answering emails and generally doing easy desk work, and tracked my mood in a spreadsheet. I even tracked my mood during a day when I didn’t drink anything to try and account for any natural shift in mood as my morning progressed.

The factors that I tracked were overall mood, anxiety, mental sharpness, physical tension, outgoingness and excitement. I did a baseline reading at 9:00 am right before my drink, another thirty minutes after and a final check in after ninety minutes. These were all subjective assessments of my own mood, and I went into the experience with a skeptical—but open—mind about the outcome. How great would it be to have credible alternatives to alcohol that offered some of the upsides of consumption with little to no downsides?

My husband tracked which drink he gave me on which day:

Day 1: Figlia Fiore Frizzante. This spritz claims no functional benefit and was included as a “placebo” to control for the mood-altering effects of simply drinking a nice beverage.

Day 2: Curious Elixir #4. This contains ginseng, holy basil and turmeric “to help you unwind” according to the brand’s website.

Day 3: De Soi Golden Hour. Contains lemon balm and L-theanine to “enhance focus and promote relaxation.”

Day 4: Kin Bloom. Infused with “adaptogens, nootropics and botanics” such as Schisandra, Damiana and L-theanine to “awaken passion, conjure a calmer mind and unlock heart-opening joy.”

Day 5: No drink whatsoever.

It should come as no shock that the results were wildly inconclusive. On all five mornings, my mood did shift slightly, but there was no significant difference in the charts where I drank nothing (or the placebo), and the ones where I drank drinks that promised to elevate my mood and relax me. An outlier were two days I gained a relatively large amount of outgoingness—those days I drank the Figlia Fiore Frizzante and De Soi Golden Hour.

Aside from that, my mood was largely flat or slightly improved all days, regardless of what I drank. That said, I felt fantastic for about 45 minutes after drinking the Kin Bloom, a feeling I can only describe as “great.” I had a lot of energy and mental focus and a genuine desire to communicate with other people—as an introvert, this is notable.

Honestly, I was really hoping these drinks would have a more noticeable effect. I say this as someone who consumes adaptogens on a daily basis, which is how they’re intended to be consumed. I drink a “cocktail” of ashwagandha, maca root and rhodiola every morning and I feel like it actually does improve my quality of life, keeping my anxiety levels relatively low (I have an anxiety disorder) and my energy levels even.

There is at least one placebo-­controlled study out of Germany that observed a measurable impact on burnout symptoms among people who consumed 400mg of rhodiola over the course of 12 weeks. Not to mention the centuries of traditional plant-based medicine. Many of our most widely used and effective drugs such as aspirin, cannabis, psilocybin, morphine and caffeine are all derived from plants or mushrooms—it is not outrageous to think that plant- or fungus-derived compounds could have acute effects on our mental and physical states.

There’s no doubt in my mind that drinks like these can make people’s lives better. A little treat in the form of a tasty beverage is one of life’s joys. And the placebo effect is very real. I hope that one day, one of these brands will decide to divert their marketing budget towards a large-scale clinical study to actually verify some of the extraordinary claims made on their packaging, but something tells me they may be afraid of what they’ll find out.