A Gut Check on Good-For-You Sodas

Are they worth the hype?

Americans love nothing better than a redemption story. And nowhere in the grocery store was one more needed than the soda aisle. Coca-Cola, once an indisputable American icon, has been recast as an arch dietary villain, packed with sugar, zero nutrients, and linked to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

So it was only a matter of time before some slick entrepreneurs decided to give Americans what they want. Over the last few years, a new generation of sodas have flooded the market, boasting low sugar, bougie flavors –– and bonus! –– pre- or probiotics to “boost gut health.” There’s Olipop, with nostalgic flavors like cola and orange, Poppi, famous for its 60-second Superbowl ad (and vending machine drama), Sun Sip (tagline: Soda with Benefits), Culture Pop, KeVita, and more. Each brand aims to Make Soda Great Again — though that comes at a cost, of course. Prices range from $2 to $3 per can compared to about 60 cents for an old-school soda.

I am generally skeptical of “functional foods,” which usually are food industry attempts to make money off nutritional problems that could be better solved by eating more fruits and vegetables. But there are now so many of these sodas that I could no longer ignore them as a cynical marketing ploy. So I dove into the research to find out: Are these sodas actually good for us?

Let’s break it down.

First, the good news: Every one of the new crop of sodas is relatively low sugar. Some use stevia or monkfruit for sweetness; others use fruit juice or small amounts of cane sugar. Of the five brands I reviewed, all had between 20 and 50 calories per 12-ounce can. Most had under 5 grams of sugar. A can of Coke, by comparison, has 39 grams of sugar (10 teaspoons) per can. (Culture Pop was an outlier with 8 grams, though for what it’s worth, it’s not added sugar but from the organic fruit juice in the blend.)

When it comes to claims of improving gut health, though, things get more complicated.