Sorry, but ‘clean drinking’ booze is not a healthy alternative.
‘CLEAN DRINKING’ BOOZE IS NOT THE HEALTHY OPTION WE’RE LED TO BELIEVE IT IS
Si nce t he mainstream introduction of clean eating in the first half of the 2010s, many have fallen prey to the siren call of pricey cold-pressed juice and raw vegan salads. The steep cost is a small price to pay for a diet that promises to erase all the fried dumplings and croissants that we have funnelled into our bodies over the years. As a society we have guzzled green juices and acai bowls piled high with small villages of goji berries and chia seeds in hopes of returning to, or perhaps finally discovering, some purer, better version of ourselves.
But since clean eating’s influx, the dietary ideal has transitioned from an exciting novelty into an unbothered fact of life. You know a food trend has officially died and gone to hell when Wendy’s, Burger King and McDonald’s all start offering their own varieties of clean-eating superfood salads, juices and smoothies.
This plateau has left health enthusiasts in search of a new avenue for dietary redemption. Enter, clean drinking: an ingenious marketing strategy that promotes alcohol as the latest super diet by replacing the processed sugars and preservatives found in conventional booze with organic spirits, sulfite- free wines, kombucha beer and cold-pressed juice.
As the trend takes hold, bars across North America have begun slinging clean drinks to health thirsty patrons. In Toronto, vegan restaurant Planta serves its signature Beauty and the Beet, a rum and coconut cocktail mixed with cold-pressed beet, pineapple and lime juice. The Juicery Co. in Vancouver boasts a recipe for a “Kale- Jito,” a rum-based drink made with organic black kale juice, spirulina and alkaline water. In New York, By CHLOE. uses Stoli Vanilla as a base for its carrot cake cocktail made with cold- pressed carrot juice, walnuts and cinnamon.
“8 Cocktails You Can Drink All Night and Not Get Fat,” boasts a Prevention. com headline before detailing the alleged health benefits of champagne and cocktails made from coconut water and berry flavoured vodka. In their clean drinking recipe book Clean Cocktails: Righteous Recipes for the Modern Mixologist, slated to be published this December, self-titled “clean mixologists” Beth Ritter Nydick and Tara Roscioli detail “healthy” cocktail recipes made without artificial colours, refined sugars or sweetener additives.
In addition to healthy cocktails, the market for preservative free wines — dubbed “natural wine” — and nutritionally inclined beers, is also expanding. There is, however, currently no legal definition for natural wine, allowing anyone to slap the term across any wine bottle they see fit. Nevertheless, the beverage is thought to afford drinkers the ability to imbibe without worrying about added sulfite consumption. Kombucha craft beer, a low-carb probiotic drink made from fermented tea and hops, has become yet another popular alternative for those looking for added nutritional value while eliminating the extra preservatives and calories found in conventional booze.
After years of a collective, societal fixation on clean eating, the rise of clean drinking seems almost inevitable. But unlike juices, smoothies and salads where overly embellished cleansing claims are largely harmless, marketing alcohol as a health food is not nearly so innocent. No matter how much green juice or kombucha gets mixed into a beer or cocktail, or how much sulfur is not added to wine during fermentation, the health risks associated with alcohol — a recent study published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research found that alcohol can cause DNA damage that leads to cancer — remain.
Clean drinking thrives on the rationale that people are going to drink anyway, so they may as well drink something slightly healthier than the conventional alternative. Yet unlike food, which is largely healthier when it’s made from unprocessed ingredients, “clean” alcohol does not guarantee a drink that is even slightly healthier than a can of Smirnoff Ice.
The absence of ingredient lists and caloric information on alcoholic drinks means that there is often no way of telling whether a green juice cocktail is lower in added sugar than a gin and tonic, or if an expensive glass of “natural” wine has fewer preservatives than a cheap bottle of Merlot. While navigating a liquor store void of nutritional information, it has become all too easy to forget that all alcohol is high in carbohydrates because alcohol is ethanol, a substance better known by its stage name: sugar.
For those who choose to indulge anyway, there are some benefits to glean from expanding our booze repertoires with the innovative ingredients that clean drinking affords. As we learn to mix earthy beet juice into rum, or to appreciate the pungent soil variances of properly made natural wine, the rise of clean drinking can expand our palates and rearrange long- standing definitions of what constitutes a “good” drink. But regardless of these provocative new flavours, to drink is to accept that there is some risk involved. Masking these hazards with a message of alleged health should be seen in the same light as justifying cigarettes as a means of staying thin. It’s ridiculous.
Thriving under a cloak of nutritional anonymity and misguided public hope, clean drinking is the promise everyone wants to believe in — which means it’s obviously too good to be true. The escalating popularity of “clean” carrot cake cocktails illustrates how desperate we are to find foods that literally allow us to have our cake and drink it too. Yet trying to understand food and drink by separating it into the clunky categories of “clean” and “dirty” robs us of important nuances that make nutrition valuable.
Those looking to reap benefits f r om i mbibing s hould abandon kombucha beer and instead focus on where their booze comes from. No excessive amount of alcohol will boost personal health or contribute to a slim waistline, but supporting local beer, wine and spirit makers boosts local economies, creates jobs and contributes fewer CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. As an added bonus, origin labels are among the only info required on alcohol packaging. We may not know the specifics of what’s in our glass of wine, but we can know where that glass is coming from, and who stands to benefit most from it along the way.