Health Drinks 101: How can you buy drinks that are truly healthy?

July 9, 7:57 PMPhoenix Healthy Food ExaminerCliff Smith

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  Truly healthy drinks are hard to find

Countless consumers believe that vitamin waters and sport drinks are health drinks, when in fact many of these convenience store beverages are just the opposite.  Often, alleged health drinks contain nothing more than de-mineralized water with artificial ingredients, sweeteners and isolated vitamins that are not recognized by the body as anything remotely healthy.

Here are a few not so healthy ingredients in one bottle of a popular sports drink.  The flavor is “tropical mango”, but no mango is listed in the ingredients.  Instead these are the items in this and many other so-called “health drinks”:

• Sucrose Syrup (sugar)
• High Fructose Corn Syrup (concentrated sugar) - A total of 56 gms of sugar in this one bottle.
• Phosphoric Acid
• Glycerol ester of wood rosin
• Modified Food Starch
• Natural and Artificial Flavors
• Yellow 6, Yellow 5 and Red 40 (artificial dyes)

Another bottle of a not so healthy sports drink says "Specially Formulated for Tiger Woods" with the same ingredients, but blue dye instead of yellow.  Maybe it’s that secret blue stuff that makes Tiger play so well.

When shopping for quality health drinks, here are some important considerations to keep in mind.

1.  Is it liquefied, pasteurized or otherwise heated in the bottling process? If so then the live enzymes have been destroyed and the nutrients will not easily be absorbed by the body.
2. Does it provide chlorophyll from plants to aid cells in absorbing oxygen?
3. Does it provide natural antioxidants to destroy free radicals? Natural antioxidants are essential for healthy aging.
4. Is it made with whole food ingredients like real fruit or other alkaline foods?

Now, here are some characteristics to look for in truly healthy drinks:

• Not liquefied or bottled, but in powder form
• Processed at low temperatures
• Contain live enzymes from whole alkaline foods and chlorophyll from plants
• Complex structures of the whole food ingredients are fully intact
• Loaded with natural antioxidants to combat free radicals

Most likely, beverages purchased at convenience stores do not possess these characteristics and are not really health drinks.  The Internet is the best place to find natural health drinks with these attributes.  It’s a good idea to understand how health drinks are manufactured today to understand the differences between truly healthy drinks and those that are just hype.