Kombucha’s been in the news a lot lately since many brands got pulled off the shelves due to elevated alcohol levels — a move that had Lindsay Lohan fans speculating whether the fermented drink set off her alcohol-monitoring ankle bracelet. The flurry of coverage about the fizzy beverage even had one enterprising company, Kombucha Wonder Drink, quickly send me a sample of its product with this happy message: “It’s been pasteurized from the start (since 2001) because our founder was aware of the potential for alcohol in a raw product.”

So yesterday I tried Kombucha Wonder Drink — and enjoyed the fizzy, refreshing drink. But today, I’m not sure I’ll ever drink kombucha again.

Why not? Well, the slew of kombucha related articles have me rethinking whether or not kombucha is actually good for me. Now, I never believed the far fetched claims that kombucha cured cancer or AIDS as some people claim, but I did think that the drink’s claims of antioxidant properties and healthy digestion sounded plausible. Plus I liked the not-too-sweet, slightly tart taste of Kombucha. That’s why I’ve occasionally posted about kombucha and even took a kombucha making class, brewing my own kombucha at home for a while.

But today, I read GOOD’s rundown of kombucha’s questionable health claims — which included a link to an article penned by Dr. Andrew Weil, whose opinion I value. Here’s what Dr. Weil says:

I don’t recommend kombucha tea at all. I know of no scientific studies backing up the health claims made for it. Beyond that, there’s evidence that kombucha tea may have some antibiotic activity. If so, by drinking the tea you could be unnecessarily taking antibiotics, which could encourage development of resistant strains of bacteria…. (more…)

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Rockstar drinks have the sugar equivalent of a half dozen Krispe Kremes, illustrated Eat This, Not That’s list of 20 Worst Drinks in America 2010. If browsing through that list made you turn to fruitier, healthier sounding drinks this summer, here’s a new scary list that may make you readjust your drinking habit again. Grist’s put together a collection of six drinks to avoid slipping down your gullet that’ll show you just how unhealthy many of these healthy-sounding drinks are.

The first on the list is Fuze Refresh “Peach-Mango” — which apparently contains neither peach nor mango but does contain a lot of sweeteners, plus tasty-sounding ingredients like pyridoxine hydrochloride and cyanacobalamin.

I think Fuze is a relatively new brand, but you may be saddened to find nostalgia-inducing drinks on Grist’s list — like the childhood favorite Tang and high school regret Smirnoff Ice. What’s wrong with Smirnoff Ice, you ask, hung over on this lovely summer Monday morning? We don’t know — because according to the Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, Smirnoff need not disclose its ingredients. There’s no way to tell whether or not the liquid contains any apples — in case you were drinking the stuff for a daily dose of Vitamin C.

Earlier: Cool off this summer with organic elixirs

Photo by timsamoff

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>> Kombucha withdrawals. I had a friend tell me drinking kombucha can cure hangovers. Now I find out the stuff’s just the hair of the dog! If your favorite store’s no longer selling kombucha, it’s because the FDA found popular Kombucha brands contained too much alcohol — more than the 0.5 percent allowable without a government warning.

>> Coke wants Honest Tea to get less honest. Coke has a a 40% minority investment in the fair trade, organic tea company Honest Tea — and now Coke wants the do-gooder tea people to take the “no high-fructose corn syrup” bit off product packaging, since the phrase makes the rest of Coke products look bad. From The New York Times:

A Coke spokesman, Scott Williamson, said the company would not comment publicly on its differences with Honest Tea. He did note that the smaller company’s “decisions were made on their understanding of their customers” and that Coke maintained that “sugar is sugar is sugar.”

A few business experts — including Gary Hirshberg, who sold 80 percent Stonyfield Organic yogurt to Danone a few years back — weigh in on the squabble. Earlier: Interview with Stonyfield CEO Gary Hirshberg: ‘Everybody can win.’

>> Crazy chicken. If the anti-foaming agent used in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets — and also in Silly Putty — isn’t enough to stop you from eating the factory-farmed stuff, then perhaps the fact that an arsenic-based additive called roxarsone is commonly used in animal feed will get you to poison yourself less.

Unfortunately, cage-free chickens don’t necessarily mean arsenic-free chickens. Two kids in Utah got their elevated levels of arsenic by eating eggs from backyard chickens fed arsenic-laced chicken feed. And at least one USDA Certified Organic chicken feed brand contained detectable levels of arsenic — despite the fact that arsenic’s prohibited in certified organic feed.

>> And in completely unrelated news, Greenpeace founder Jim Bohlen dies at 84. I finally I learned how Greenpeace began: With an impulsive comment that got quoted in the papers.

Photo by @joefoodie

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First thing you’ll notice when you walk into Burbank’s new favorite bar, Tony’s Darts Away: There are no bottles. This local, green-minded bar’s all about reducing waste — which means all of the 30+ craft beers are on draught.

Instead of shipping in bottles of beer from far away — that’ll simply have to be recycled again after a single use — owner Tony Yanow (below center) decided to “deconstruct what a neighborhood pub is in Southern California and go back to what it should be” and buy just from Californian brewers that supported his goal for a zero-waste bar. “Recycling glass is better, but it requires so much energy to recycle glass,” says Tony. “I advocate as little packaging as possible.”

That means no bottles. Okay — There are a few bottles, but only reusable ones. The three Santa Barbara County wines — a fruity gewurztraminer, a summery genache rose, and a great-with-sausages tempranillo created by Curran — are served in cute 1/4 liter bottles (above right; $8 for about a third bottle of wine) — or a heftier liter bottle ($32 for about one and a third 750 ml bottles). Those bottles are filled from 15.5-gallon (that would be 6.5 cases of wine) stainless steel kegs (above left)!

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If you start your day with fair trade coffee — and want to end it with a fair trade cocktail, start making ice cubes in your energy efficient freezer. Fair trade vodka’s now available in the U.S — just in time to toast with on World Fair Trade Day with!

Appropriately dubbed FAIR. Vodka, the new spirit’s not only the first fair trade certified vodka — but also the first quinoa-based vodka, made with quinoa grown by more than 1,200 small producers of the Anapqui cooperative in the Bolivian Altiplano who are paid a fairer price for their work. The quinoa’s then crafted into a vodka by French distillers — whose work nabbed FAIR the “Best Tasting Vodka 2009″ nomination at the New York Spirits Awards in June.

I haven’t tried the vodka yet myself — and like most people including avowed vodka fans, have a hard time telling vodkas apart by taste. But according to the company’s press release “the unexpected fusion of Quinoa leaves a warm taste, unique to South America’s high plateau” — which makes me want to try the fair trade stuff just to see if I can pick out this warm taste.

Want a fair trade cocktail? FAIR. Vodka isn’t in L.A. yet, but can be ordered from San Francisco’s Cask for $35 a 750-ml bottle. Or drink up while traveling in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago — and share your tasting notes in the comments. For the adventurously healthy, FAIR. also makes FAIR. Goji — a fair trade certified goji liqueur.

Earlier: Wheatgrass cocktails and Happy hour with green-tinted glasses

Photos via fairtradespirits.com

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When I heard about it, I thought it was too good to be true . Salads made with produce from the Santa Monica farmers market — offered at half price during happy hour? That’s the 5 o’clock spot for me, I thought, and biked over to West 4th/Jane for healthy local nibbles.

Turns out, a pub with a loud Lakers crowd’s not the best place to order a locavore’s salad. Yes, the greens came from the farmers market. But forget the thinly sliced or julienned goodness of decent Asian pear salads. The pear in West 4th/Jane’s Asian Pear Pecan Salad was haphazardly hacked apart, chopped into slices with widely variable widths. And when I asked to get the balsamic vinaigrette on the side, I was given straight up oil — in a disposable plastic container.

Really, I can only blame myself. What kind of crazy girl goes to a Santa Monica bar — that’s trying for the NYC West Village pub vibe, no less — hoping for a delicious Asian pear salad? And then to ask for no blue cheese due to lactose intolerance, and to top it all off, pair it with a dry riesling? At a pub? Yeah — That silly woman would be me.

Which is to say that the drunken Lakers crowd downing beer and sweet potato fries looked a lot more satisfied than I did. West 4th/Jane, to its credit, tries to keep it local with seafood from Santa Monica Seafood (caution: most of SaMo Seafood’s yummies isn’t sustainable), cheese from Andrew’s Cheese Shop, bread from Rockenwagner Bakery, and produce from the farmers market for its salads.

But while the pub offers half priced local salads during happy hour, these salads are very untasty — and the chicken in two of the four salads isn’t local or sustainable, according to the server I asked for more details. And while the wine’s also half price on Tuesdays during happy hour, none of the vino’s organic.

West 4th/Jane does offer at least one organic beer though. So if you what you really want is pub fare — an organic ale with fries, say — give this pub a try. But if what you really want’s locally-grown greens in a delicious salad paired with a good Californian wine, meet me at Greenleaf or Tender Greens instead.

West 4th/Jane. 1432 4th St., Santa Monica. 310.395.6765.

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>> Smart girls turned well educated women drink more — and report more drinking problems, finds a new study. Did I mention I always did well on standardized tests as a kid and now have a PhD? The Telegraph UK quotes from the study:

The better-educated appear to be the ones who engage the most in problematic patterns of alcohol consumption….

Reasons for the positive association of education and drinking behaviours may include: a more intensive social life that encourages alcohol intake; a greater engagement into traditionally male spheres of life, a greater social acceptability of alcohol use and abuse; more exposure to alcohol use during formative years; and greater postponement of childbearing and its responsibilities among the better educated.

Find the full article at ScienceDirect. (via Freakonomics)

Earlier:
>> The smarter a woman is, the more she’ll drink? Also, more women are drinking — and women drinkers are drinking more.
>> Alcohol abstainers tend to have higher rates of depression

>> Are you smart? Or are you just good at seeming smart? A professor of philosophy delves into the difference between smartness and seeming smart:

Seeming smart is probably to a large extent about activating people’s associations with intelligence…. And what do people associate with intelligence? Some things that are good: Poise, confidence (but not defensiveness), giving a moderate amount of detail but not too much, providing some frame and jargon, etc. But also, unfortunately, I suspect: whiteness, maleness, a certain physical bearing, a certain dialect (one American type, one British type), certain patterns of prosody — all of which favor, I suspect, upper- to upper-middle class white men.

And of course, when people think you’re smart, you’re more likely to rise to meet those expectations…. (via murketing)

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If you like to wake up with yerba mate and wind down with organic beer, you can now combine your two daily desires in one cool drink: MateVeza Yerba Mate Ale.

That’s what green-minded revelers did last night at Cupcakes and Cocktails for a Cause, a fundraiser for environmental nonprofit Global Green USA at Byu-ti salon in Santa Monica. Instead of cocktails, many went for the MateVeza Organic India Pale Ale — and socialized excitedly in a caffeinated buzz.

I’m not much of a beer drinker myself, and found the finish rather too bitter. However, more experienced beer drinkers — like Tracy Hepler (above) of environmental website Your Daily Thread, one of the organizers of the fundraiser — raved about the caffeinated brew. For more detailed tasting notes, read the reviews at SFist and About.com Beer.

If you’re caffeine-sensitive, drink responsibly. Each 12-ounce bottle has as much caffeine as a half cup of coffee — and I didn’t sleep well last night! I’ll find out from Tracy how well she slept.

Ready to mix stimulants with depressants? Find MateVeza at some Whole Foods stores, local co-ops, and other specialty shops using MateVeza’s online store locator.

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If you still haven’t made a green resolution for Earth Month, here’s a fun one to try: Become an eco-friendly wine expert. All you have to do is stop by Pourtal wine bar in Santa Monica this month to take tasting tours of sustainable wines from around the world.

The already eco-friendly wine bar‘s taking things a green step farther this April with two green Tasting Tours — Eco-friendly Whites, Eco-friendly Reds — each with eight wines from around the world. The eco-practices of these wineries are as varied as the wines themselves. Some are organic, biodynamic, LEED and/or Salmon Safe certified — while others have decided to farm sustainably without seeking certification.

All are fun to try though. I stopped by yesterday to try the white tour with the help of detailed tasting notes (PDFs here; printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper in the bar) and Pourtal’s sommelier, Rachel Bryan (below), who’s around most days to guide you through tastings and advise you on wine pairings with Pourtal’s farmers’ market-driven menu.

My favorite was the Donkey and Goat “Isabel’s Cuvée” Rosé — pleasantly fruity without being cheaply oversweetened as typical rosés tend to be. I also loved the Philippe Bornard “Les Chassagne” Savignin, a unique biodynamic wine from Jura, France that’s nutty and complex.

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Some religious people believe one Jesus miraculously made bread, fish, and wine plentiful for the hungry and thirsty, but long after biblical times, these staples are multiplying in size (and price) — sans Christ or crucifixion. The latest news on the tasty triumverate:

>> Fish. Supermarkets can’t miraculous make fish fillets multiply — but they can apply a weighty coat of ice glaze to seafood — and make you pay for the frozen water. Intended to keep the seafood fresh, this ice glaze can at times make up 40% of the product’s weight! Turning water into faux fish is, as you may have suspected, illegal — which is why more than 21,000 packages of seafood were removed from sale during a four-week, 17-state investigation, according to the L.A. Times.

>> Bread. We’ve got no photograph of the New Testament’s Last Supper, but we’ve got a lot of creative artists’ renderings of the meal. Two scholars studied 52 of them drawn over the last millenium to come to this conclusion: “Consistent with expectations, the size of food depicted in these paintings increased with time.”

In fact, “the ratio of the size of bread has increased by 23.1%.” Those numbers were carefully crunched by a pair of siblings — one an economist, the other a religion scholar — and were published in the last issue of the International Journal of Obesity. (via LA Times) It’s unclear, however, whether the Jesuses in these renderings also saw corresponding weight gains.

>> Wine. The Last Supper study doesn’t cover wine because the spirit’s missing in many of the paintings — an oddity, since the artists felt free to add in anything from eel to pork as the main dish while the Bible mentions only bread and wine. But if a new initiative to increase the alcohol tax makes it on the California ballot this November, the tax on wine will multiply — more than a hundredfold in some cases. Zach Behrens at LAist crunches the numbers:

Tax on a six-pack of beer would increase from 6-cents to $6.08. And say goodbye to two-buck chuck–a tax on a 750 ml bottle of wine would go from 4-cents to $5.11. And the tax on a 750 ml bottle of distilled spirits would increase from from 65-cents to $17.57.

While the initiative’s estimated to bring in an extra $7 to $9 billion in much needed state revenues, I’m not sure such a severe hike will be met kindly with California voters. According to a Gallup poll, the recession didn’t convince drinkers to drink less — though some drinkers may be opting for cheaper drinks.perhaps like wines carrying the organic label, which apparently don’t command the price premium enjoyed by the organic label-less wine bottles.

Photo by williamhartz

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