They put probiotics in my WHAT?
Hint: It's about PROTEIN
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I read the other day this thing that Jolt cola is coming back. Probably my favorite soda as a kid. Drank it once or twice through my childhood but thought about it constantly, aspiring most days to enter a corner store in which it was sold. The tagline back then was this:
The platonic ideal for any kid—any soda… It’s HONEST. Positive. Great. Recently, the name has returned—kind of cool—though now, it’s different… opposite frankly: the new Jolt is caffeinated, quite, frankly—200mg, which is 7 times a can of Coke, twice a cup of coffee—and what’s more, has been supplemented with B vitamins, L-Carnitine (supposed to turn fat into energy; sold as a fat burner), Taurine (an amino acid that helps in digestion), potassium, and has no sugar:
It has an ingredient profile closer to newer energy drinks like Celsius and even White Monsters (B vitamins) but is vaguely healthy. Vaguely. In that evolution Jolt has become a sugar-free drink. It looks like this now:
It’s no longer junk, kind of—it’s supplemented. A business decision.
Recently, too, Slice has come back. A forgotten cut-rate citrus soda: I hadn’t seen it outside a country store in decades until the other week, at the Forest Hills concessions for the Pulp show, next to RC Cola. The new Slice has evolved even more past itself than has Jolt. It is also sugar free now, and probiotic—“good gut bacteria” in a can:
An even more “healthy” reframing. New Slice’s ingredients aren’t bad—cane sugar—though there are some vagaries here. It’s dyed with beta carotene—what is that, exactly?—it has stevia (annoying), and natural flavors—no one knows what these are—but it also has some… good probiotics. It contains 7347 probiotic (shown as not bad in a study), and DE111 probiotic (also not bad)… very discrete, and even more “healthy.”
The new age
Together, these two new sodas point to something about the junk food/health food business. They both fit in as pitch-perfect examples of the new suite of health-halo’d “unhealthy” foods. You know the type. Greenwashed junk food maybe, and fast protein, and bourgeois post-bodega snacks. Different foods, different points, but all under the same umbrella: convenient, processed, maybe healthy. Maybe a protein bar made with “real oats,” or a soda with cane sugar or stevia, or whatever in the checkout counter at Erewhon. They’re considered better let’s say than Sour Patch Kids or Coca Cola, and are more expensive, but are also not exactly propolis or fresh fruit. They’re marketed well. Five Guys replacing McDonald’s, except for snacks.
The two sodas here fit in a similar cross-section of drinks like these: probiotic, sometimes, or newer kombuchas, or some orange drink evolved to stevia/monk fruit, maybe a straggler using cane sugar. Apple cider vinegar drinks… they’re market as still fun but healthy… a mannered office snack kind of thing. From a business perspective, these two decisions are a no-brainer: two forgotten sodas, reworked to resurrect their brand recognition, and to cash in.
But…. these aren’t widgets or profit mechanisms, but FOOD we put in our body. We eat this garbage. Not these two specific sodas… but all stuff like this. So it’s worth explicitly asking about the complications here. What’s a probiotic? What’s it do? Why is everything probiotic now? Is there a difference between a probiotic soda and a “real” probiotic (say in food)? What about in a pill? Is it bad to get this crap from soda? Are there other paths as convenient to a drink in a store, but simpler and more natural?
The probiotic junk health movement
Why the health halo
The reasons behind all of these convenient health halo foods are very basic: there’s a massive market around them, one full of well-to-do people who have good jobs (lots of money, not that much time to cook or for movement) and care about their health (protein and caloric requirements and restrictions). So many are upmarket versions of jock food: the Poppi display in the bodega in my nice neighborhood, and the David bar are more or less hippie (kombucha) and bodybuilding (protein bar) food but for normal people.
Why the probiotic onslaught?
A bit more on the specifics of these drinks: The probiotic stuff is happening for a couple of reasons. One, with so many more people are lifting and eating protein, like I wrote the other day:
There’s a… need for either a fiber or a probiotic so they don’t get backed up. And the reason the probiotic stuff is happening is because the fiber-based model—lots of greens, lots of roughage—didn’t really work. It got everyone bloated and created “hot girl IBS.”
PROTEIN? Why probiotics?
Backing up: What does this have to do with protein?
One biological premise of digestion is this: food gets broken down as it moves through the gut, and the higher protein the food is, VERY roughly, the denser it is and the slower it may move through the gut. The rough real-world result is that ramping up our protein—which is a new thing, as defined by the snack market—may make our digestion more taxing. Without getting too crass: if protein is new to you, you will get backed up if you don’t… change something else as you increase this. To avoid this problem, you need to counter your protein with roughage.
Fiber
The two roughage options are, very roughly speaking, are fiber or probiotics. They have similarish results, though achieve them in different ways. Very simply and roughly, fiber, which is found in vegetables and fruit as well as legumes, can be indigestible*, meaning it does not get broken down by the gut. And so when we eat fiber, it sweeps itself—and whatever else we’ve eaten—through our system and out. And so even though some dark nutrition people swear off it, some fiber is helpful for this reason. Vegetables are pretty good.
*Should mention the difference between soluble and insoluble fibe, the former acts like a broom, the latter paradoxically slows digestion down. Insoluble list: wheat bran, nuts, beans, cauliflower, potato; soluble: peas, beans, apples, bananas, avocados, citrus fruits, carrots. Nutrition is both simple and complex.
Probiotics
The probiotic concept is newer (to the “discourse”; the food itself is eternal) and different: probiotics, roughly, strengthen the bacteria (biotics) in our guts so that all food gets broken down, roughly, faster and better, and so that we get more minerals and nutrients out of said food (if they have it). Not just swept through. It’s food for the gut. To me (and my bias—I don’t ingest a ton of fiber outside carrots, but I eat probiotic foods p. regular) probiotics are a more elegant solution than fiber, since they don’t just push things along but strengthen the gut—changes the way the gut deals with food. To be sure, some of my argument here is a narrative fallacy—thinking that the reason behind a food makes it superior; it does not—but it’s more really just that I like probiotic foods more than, I don’t know, regular beans and cauliflower.
Junk Roughage and “Hot Girl IBS”
The second thing: the trend towards probiotics now is a response to the fast fiber age which brought many bloat and IBS. You know the age: the vegetable leafy green era that began a decadeish ago from which we’re exiting now, and which was characterized by green juices (though they don’t have fiber), quinoa, chia seeds, beans-of-the-month clubs, etc. It was a half-decent system on paper—whole foods, lots of greens—but which got abused. It evolved from a whole foods, Mark Bittman “vegetables are good” nutritional codex to “more must be better,” which, while probably true on a long timeline, led to gut problems, “hot girl IBS”* and the like in the day to day, because some fiber is good, but too much fiber is taxing.
*Explanation in small font because it’s nasty. One truth in nutrition… discourse is people tend to think/repeat that if some dose of a healthy thing is good, then a much bigger dose is even better. This is not the case (very roughly) with fiber. Too many (insoluble) fibrous foods and your digestive system is always taxed and you’ll have brutal gas/bloating/dysbiosis/soft stomach lining/too much bacteria. This green-maxing protocol was ironically combined with the introduction of gut-taxing foods that have vegetable oils (specifically: oat milk) a decade ago creates an occam’s razor explanation for “hot girl IBS”: a taxed digestive system and a weak gut lining. To be sure, this is a very complicated topic with many confounding inputs, e.g. too much nickel can create digestive issues; so can not enough magnesium that cannot be definitively described in a newsletter. But ultimately, my above explanation, while not true in all situations, is true for many.
And so the move away from fiber—to probiotics, to carnivore, to animal based, things like that—feels like an unspoken reaction to the too-high fiber age, if only from a convenience and happy stomach standpoint.
Which is where probiotic sodas come in. It’s all just a normalized addendum to deal with eating more protein.
So what’s the answer?
Well, since it’s nutrition in the real world, several paths. One, very simply, actual fiber through food in a normal ratio is great, and should probably be kept front of mind if you’re upping your protein. Some of this can be complicated because of the differences between insoluble and soluble fiber, and if you’re a person who has like, dysbiosis or some stomach problem.
My own bias/protocol is for actual probiotics and similar biotic things in actual food—that’s how I structure my diet. To me, when properly handled, it’s even better: such probiotics strengthen the gut, make everything normal, makes a person resilient. It allows you to drink non-probiotic sodas and inhale McDonald’s once in a while.
The other issue is one that’s never really written about or reported on—vitamin and nutrient deficiencies, hinted to and linked at above. Not enough magnesium in a diet; too much nickel. These are things that can interfere with digestions. And there are acute protocols, like spore probiotics which have a good history of success in a limited window, and, also, occasional high-fiber periods (like a juice cleanse, but more Lindy).
Anyways, there’s a way to nail all of these things. Some of the protocols are in less than convenient ways than a rebranded soda: normal foods, from grocery stores, from fancy stores. But it’s frankly just as easy to get normal, non-demon (stevia, app color, natural flavors) probiotics—in FOOD—at a gas station or convenience store or wherever with a tiny bit of knowledge. The info regarding all that’s below the jump.
