Is There Such a Thing as a Healthy Cocktail?
Would you try a kombucharita or a matcha gimlet?
By Alyssa Giacobbe
Food fads are, frankly, hard to keep up with: bone broth is the new miso; maca, the new acai; cauliflower, the new kale; matcha, the new everything. Now, a wave of clean-eating foodies is trying to make that seemingly last bastion of shameless self-indulgence—boozing—good for you, too, with a trend toward cocktails featuring ingredients more typically found in your neighborhood natural grocer than on your Saturday night out. 83 Degrees in Carlsbad, California, lists among its cocktails a kombucha mule, a kombucharita, and a kombucha breeze. The just-opened Café Clover in New York City serves up a gimlet made with matcha. The new Belcampo in San Francisco, meanwhile, has a bone broth-heavy cocktail menu that includes bone broth mixed with sherry and a meaty take on the brunch staple: the “Boney Mary.”
But just because tequila is the preferred spirit of the Paleo set doesn’t mean that your kombucharita will actually qualify as good for you. “Trendy drinks like those made with aloe vera juice, kombucha, and bone broth may be novel, but they are not more nutritious or diet-friendly than a classic vodka soda with a splash of your favorite juice,” says Manhattan nutritionist Tanya Zuckerbrot, MS, RD. “You could swap chicken soup for bone broth, but adding it to cocktails won’t make drinking alcohol any healthier.”
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That’s because alcohol is inflammatory, no matter how you mix it, and a natural enemy of healthy gut bacteria. “And for some people, it’s really inflammatory,”says holistic nutritionist Esther Blum, MS, RD, author of Eat, Drink, and Be Gorgeous. “Throwing in an antioxidant isn’t going to reverse that. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig. Or like drinking diet coke versus eating chocolate cake. There’s no winner.” If there’s any reason to embrace “healthy cocktails,” says Blum, is because they’re fun and delicious. “I love putting vodka in my kombucha,” she says. “But I do it from a flavor perspective rather than for nutritional impact.” And while Zuckerbrot points out that cocktails mixed with healthful ingredients “may seem like an upgrade from the standard vodka soda or glass of wine, keep in mind that they may add unwanted calories, too,” she says. “Plain soda water is a clean zero calorie mixer that simply can’t be beat.”
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That said, using mixers made with fresh ingredients will always be a better option than using bottled mixers (though Blum points out that the higher the sugar content of a drink—and that includes sugar from fresh fruit—the more severe the hangover). “Using fresh ingredients prevents drinks from being cloying, over-processed, and overwrought,” says Maria del Mar, author of the forthcoming Summer Cocktails, for which she created original cocktails using fresh herbs and veggies, like a martini made with shiso-shishito pepper gin, and retooled classic drinks to eliminate the use of overly processed ingredients. A piña colada, for example, is made with frozen pineapple, unsweetened coconut milk, and fresh ginger. “There’s more awareness about what people eat now—it only makes sense that sensibility has moved to drinks,” she says. “But for me, picking a healthier mixer is mainly about giving a drink a brighter flavor.”
Blum says that the boozer’s best bet is to work on building healthy gut flora—during sober hours—so that your body can better tolerate your alcohol intake, rather than expecting your mixer to do the work for you. Daily green juice can help do this. So can kombucha, kimchi, and other probiotic-rich foods. Of course, the best way to have fewer day-after effects, says Blum, isn’t to ask for Echinacea or coconut water or cactus juice with your gin. Instead, the prescription is just as you probably feared: “Drink less.”
Photo: ahaddini_maretty / Getty Images
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