New Health Drinks or Old-Style Snake-Oil Elixirs?

By Karl Taro Greenfeld

You may have seen them at your local sandwich shop or supermarket: exotic-looking, oversize bottles and sleek cans with names like SoBe Wisdom, Fresh Samantha's Super Juice and Mystic Potions. Their labels are meant to suggest either New Age healing powers or the latest in scientific nutrition, and they carry prices to match: about $2 for 14 ounces of SoBe's latest line.

These so-called functional beverages, or "nutraceutical" drinks, represent a tiny slice of the $20 billion U.S. beverage market--but the one that's growing fastest. Sales are expected to reach $100 million this year, up from just $20 million in 1997. Most of the products are teas and juices mixed with a variety of herbal, mineral and vitamin supplements. SoBe Wisdom, for instance, contains ginkgo biloba, St. John's wort and gotu kola, which, the label says, promote "focused thought" and "sharpen the mind." Hansen's "d stress" (kava kava, St. John's wort and tyrosine) is supposed to help you "chill out naturally." Fresh Samantha's Super Juice is spiked with echinacea, believed to bolster the immune system. Says SoBe CEO John Bellows: "Coke had cocaine when it started. What we have in our product are legal highs, things that make you feel better and perform better."

The manufacturers try not to get too specific in the health claims for their beverages, for fear of provoking the FDA. Says Dr. Gabe Mirkin, associate professor at Georgetown University Medical School: "There's no way the consumer can know if any of these beverages are really doing all that they claim to do." Many of the putatively healing potions contain little more than trace elements of the prominently mentioned herbal ingredients, says Mirkin. For example, in order to take aboard the dosage of St. John's wort that clinical tests have shown to reduce stress, one would have to drink six bottles of SoBe Wisdom a day. Which SoBe wouldn't mind at all.

--By Karl Taro Greenfeld