A prebiotic soda is basically a soda that helps with your gut health. It is currently something that is taking rise and becoming popular with the mainstream public. Bubbly drinks are doing much more than just tasting good and giving you a nice carbonated feel. We are now elevating the experience of drinking a fizzy drink to include improving your health.
What is Prebiotic Soda?
Nowadays, we are all more conscious about what we put into our body. With the advancement of science, we are able to gain more and more knowledge about our body and how it functions. Therefore, it is pretty normal for us all to be more interested and invested in maintaining good health.
We know that there are a lot of ingredients that are added into our junk foods that are not so good for our body. Things like high fructose corn syrup, sodium nitrates, hydrogenated oils and sodium benzoate are known to be bad for you. Yet, these ingredients are quite often found in many processed foods.
The idea of the prebiotic soda is that while you are drinking a soda, you are also actively choosing to fuel your body with an alternative that is considered healthier and maybe tastier than regular soda. Your body actually contains trillions of microorganisms and is called the human microbiota. It is involved in growth, protecting your immunity, digestion and even regulating your moods. Depending on multiple factors such as the environment and our eating habits, our microbiota may change as we grow. Therefore, it is necessary to take care of our microbiota to avoid diseases developing and keep ourselves healthy.
What are Prebiotics?
Prebiotics are plant fibres that help the healthy bacteria grow in your gut. They are a type of carb that your body cannot digest, this means that it is sent to your lower digestive tract. By doing this, it will make your digestive system work better.
The prebiotics help the bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract break down your food to be digested. This will help you absorb the vital nutrients and enhance your immune system and help reduce inflammation you might get.
Benefits of Prebiotic
Although there is still a lot of research being done on the impact of prebiotic on your body, we do know a decent amount of things about what prebiotics do. They are able to help regulate your bowel movements, stimulate your body to aid in appetite and suppress it, help your bone absorb calcium and phosphorus, improve your immune system, enhance your anti-inflammatory response and increase the amount of good bacteria you have and decrease the bad ones.
There are just so many benefits to having a diet with prebiotics. Therefore you should make sure you are eating enough prebiotics. Although there is no scientific guidelines on how much prebiotics you should eat a day. It is recommended you have around 3 to 5g of prebiotic a day to benefit from it.
Poppi
Poppi is one of the first brands to make prebiotic sodas. It started off with a wife and husband creating sodas using fresh fruits and apple cider vinegar and selling it at their local farmers’ market in Dallas. Eventually they were able to get on Shark Tank to get an investment and branch out to the world.
They currently have 9 different flavours of soda that are available for purchase. Some flavours include: classic cola, root beer, doc pop, orange, watermelon, raspberry rose and ginger lime.
Poppi states that they uses apple cider vinegar to provide you with your dose of prebiotics. They use apple cider vinegar made from non-GMO apples, filtered water and a bit of sugar. This is left to ferment and provides a good amount of healthy bacterias.
For me, this is a little bit problematic. Poppi markets themselves as using apple cider vinegar as their source of prebiotics but apple cider vinegar is actually closer to being a probiotics than a prebiotics. Probiotics are a living strain of bacteria that adds to the good bacteria in your digestive system. In fact, apple cider vinegar contains little to no fibre (prebiotics are plant fibres). Eating an apple will provide you with prebiotic. This is because apples are full of pectin, a soluble fibre that has prebiotic benefits. There still is not enough scientific study done to suggest that apple cider vinegar is a prebiotic.
Instead, apple cider vinegar is considered to be probiotic food. Generally any food that has been fermented to contain healthy bacterias are considered to be probiotics. This could include yogurt, kimchi, kombucha and pickled vegetables. Although it does have probiotics, the effects of it is minimal in apple cider vinegar, therefore it is essential you consume a wide range of different foods.
In addition, another concern of mine is that the drink has 4g of carbs and all of it comes from added sugar. I will agree that this drink is probably healthier than drinking a regular coke or sprite, but it is not as magical as you think it is.
Apple cider vinegar is quite strong, and if drank straight, the acid can erode your teeth and create indigestion. Therefore, it is good that they have diluted it with filtered water. However, if you are a regular soda drinker, you might want to consider the impact it might have on your teeth with all the sugar and apple cider vinegar in your drink. Over time, it might erode your teeth enamel. It is very important you brush your teeth or rinse your mouth after you drink it.
Crazy D’s
If you want a soda that truly has prebiotics, I would recommend you trying out Crazy D’s sodas. It is a Canadian based business that I believe can actually say they are a healthy alternative to sodas. They also started up locally in local farmers’ markets in Toronto to eventually serving several retail locations in Ontario, Canada.
Instead of using artificial sweeteners or added sugars (which Poppi does), they use vegetables to balance the sweetness from the naturally occurring sugars with prebiotic fibres. They also actually feature ingredients that do contain prebiotics.
I really like how they don’t just put on one specific ingredient and call themselves healthy and prebiotics. Crazy D’s actually has several ingredients such as yacon root syrup, chicory root extract and baobab fruit powder to provide the prebiotics.
Unlike Poppi, Crazy D’s do have more ingredients in their products. But this is not necessary a bad thing. Poppi might just have around 7 ingredients, but the ingredients are mostly just flavouring, sweetener and apple cider vinegar. Whereas, Crazy D’s substitute the added sugars with naturally occurring sugars. I don’t know about you, but I would probably prefer to drink something that did not feel the need to add extra sugar into it.
Crazy D’s drinks also have fibre (around 8g of Fructooligosaccharides), this fibre is able to stimulate the growth of probiotics. The yacon root syrup, chicory root extract and acacia fibre are able to provide you with the prebiotics as they have marketed. I feel like Crazy D’s drinks are much more well researched. Who would have thought of using these ingredients in your soda? It requires much more thought, trial and error to produce a good prebiotic soda for you to drink. They didn’t just slap some apple cider vinegar, flavouring and sugar and call it a day.
Crazy D’s currently have 3 different flavours for their soda: Ginga’ Kick, Rockin’ Rolla Cherry Cola and Twisted Citrus. It is definitely worth a try and I would genuinely recommend this brand as truly a prebiotic soda.
Much like everything, you should definitely drink in moderation. Although, it is considered a healthier alternative to regular sodas, you should still limit your intake and not overindulge.
Have you tried either of these sodas? What do you guys think?