Welcome to Happier Hour: Where Non-Alcoholic Drinks are a New Normal
Swapping Just One Glass of Alcohol for a Well-Chosen Alternative is a Health Boost
Let’s do just one (or two, even three or four alcohol swaps - go you!) for a happier hour. Just think, Friday drinks could become Functional Friday easing us into Suped-Up Saturday and Serene Sunday. Suddenly we’re realising, Oh, this is how the weekend is supposed to feel! No regrets, no hangxiety, no alcohol induced pizza face planting, ‘just’ revved up energy when we need it, elevated moods, chill afternoons, focus and gut health giving us a great feeling in our tums. You can’t say fairer than that!
Quick WillPowder swaps to help switch out ‘just one’ alcoholic drink:
At WillPowders, we’re hosting a ‘bev-olution’ of non-alcoholic summer drink choices - a whole festival of alternatives that glow-up (rather than blow up).
- Fancy a mood boost and a happy gut? Swap wine o’ clock for Kombucha O’ Clock
- Motivational kick start with a side of quick focus? Swap that ‘livener’ for a Brain Powder
- Firing on all cylinders with electrolytes? Swap your sugar-loaded vodka and ‘wings’ for an ElectroTide
- Need to relax without losing your inhibitions? Drop a capsule or two of Calm in your brew (collagen could help here, too - take a peek at the research!). Cheers to waking up without having to peek through our fingers!
- Need to manage the before and after? Top and tail with Rise and Shine Indulgence Recovery
- Need to repair, not deplete? Swirl some bovine collagen through. Moo-ha!
‘We’re just having the one - like, how long does alcohol stay in your system?’
Answer: The ethanol in an alcoholic drink - about an hour a unit. But the lasting effects of alcohol on the body? Let’s see …
The wiser question might be how long do the health effects of even just one glass of alcohol on a regular basis take to show up? Because, if the last time you checked NHS wording around alcohol was the early 2000s (just what the heck have we been doing with our time instead?! Raising kids, building careers, spinning plates …), you may have missed the whispered word change from ‘safe’ to ‘low risk’. Subtle, we know! And, the truth is, the risk is never zero.
Lots of us have been brought up to think alcohol puts us at our relaxed, sociable and funny best and that ‘just the one’ is harm free. Have we been sold a lie? Just the one! Famous last words, right? There we were, still thinking ‘just the one’ alcoholic drink would ‘just’:
- Relax us, help us wind down and ‘just’ generally make us sleep better
- Be negligible to our health - it’s ‘just’ a drop of alcohol
- Be good for our heart (‘just’ how, exactly, you aren’t sure, but still …)
Just hang on a moment … have we been led down the garden path? Yes - those supposed ‘benefits’ of alcohol don’t stand up to any research. The heart health claim was disproven a long time ago - have a piece of dark chocolate instead. Let’s get with the times.
WillPowders has got you! Time to debunk alcohol and Big Food’s sugary alternatives
The ‘just one glass’ myth. How much alcohol is too much?
Let’s be straight - we’re not here to insist you’re teetotal - you do you. We’re here to get you high on life, with our range of sugar free functional drinks, to make sure you’re here for a good time and a long time! But, the idea that one glass won’t hurt? The risk is NOT zero and there are no benefits. There - we said it. Ethanol alcohol - starts to sound sinister when you give it its proper name, right - is a toxin.
We’re here to take a look at Big Drinks. Sorry, not sorry! We’ve done it with Big Food and Big Pharma. What if the effects of the regular consumption of even small amounts of alcohol is similar to the havoc wreaked by chemicals and veg oil? We all instinctively know it, anyway … compromised gut health, sleep disruption, weight gain.
But, what’s the alternative - something alcohol-free in an elegant bottle that may be a fancy glass jacket for sugar and artificial sweeteners? Sounds like a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire - remember the damage sugar wreaks on the gut and our insulin? What is the chemical count from anything dispensed by the barman’s weird drinks wand? Will my sleep suffer? Will I be ‘Fun Bobby’ without alcohol? (Unlikely - you’re more likely to become your best self. Hurrah!).
Let’s bust the myths
It’s NOT a ‘digestif‘. Alcohol and gut health DO NOT go hand in hand
The idea that alcohol aids digestion is folklore. Remember in lockdown when we used alcohol to sterilise our hands? Now it’s throwing off your gut microbiome. When it comes to gut bacteria, fewer of the goodies mean more room for the baddies. That spells increased risk of gut inflammation, gut permeability and oxidative stress. The good news is that gut microbiomes are recoverable when you cut down the drinking and fuel your body with more of the good stuff. Hurrah!
How to restore gut health after alcohol? Vive la ‘bev’olution with a kombucha!
Staggering down to your hotel breakfast, hangover in tow and swigging your regular sugar or artificial sweetener riddled probiotic drink adds insult to injury for your gut bacteria - it’s just more havoc for them. WillPowders Kombucha helps you keep sophistication and mood high, while good gut bacteria is replenished with its symbiotic mix. Lift your mood, maintain your mystique and bring the fizz: hell, tip your kombucha powder into a champagne flute. Sophistication before 10 a.m? WillPowders Kombucha Range serves and protects.
What is kombucha?
It’s a fermented drink brewed from tea leaves and a live culture called a SCOBY. WillPowders kombucha hails from Taiwan’s Alishan Mountains where the air is rarified and the mountains are shrouded in mist - dreamy tea growing conditions. Bursting with billions of banging bacteria, so you’re pouring goodness into your glass, adding water, enjoying and supporting the gut health you’ve worked so hard for. Our kombucha features LPC37 - a psychobiotic bacteria scientifically linked to improved gut health and elevated mood. Now that’s the gut-brain axis in good order! Davinia tells us the mood boost can be instant. Lift us up!
Take slices of fresh lemon (even more satisfyingly, freeze some in advance) and pop them in with your Warm Kombucha - a kombucha gut health marriage made in heaven. Bottom line - you can’t say the same for a glass of Chablis! And your gut microbiome is thanking you for it.
But alcohol helps me sleep! Nope - it disrupts REM sleep and increases cortisol
Alcohol does sedate, yes. Does it do it in a sustainable way long term? No. It enhances your GABA - that’s your brain’s off switch - but alcohol does affect the sleep it induces for the worse. It’s going to suppress REM sleep - which affects mood and memory - cause you to wake up more in the night, raise cortisol and increase light sleep and early waking. Forgive us if we’re wrong, but that doesn’t sound like a sleep wishlist to us!
It’s also going to herald the dreaded ‘dehydration of alcohol’ along the way. It switches off your anti-diuretic hormone - that’s the one that stops you losing too much water - so your body just keeps rinsing hydration out of you. Noooooo! You’re likely to wake up too hot - on top of any perimenopause heat you’re generating - as your thermo-regulation system can’t operate properly. You’ll be desperately seeking water like a mermaid in the Sahara rather than sleeping.
Drift gently off to sleep with collagen and Calm
No hangover. No interrupting your sacred REM sleep and dreams - aka mood and memory, remember. No dehydration heat surges. Ditching the ‘sedative’ qualities of alcohol for Calm and Collagen (maybe even stirred through a chamomile tea along the way, as our collagen’s tasteless - pop in a scoop, you won’t even know it’s there) sounds like a waking and sleeping life reclamation to us! And you don’t have to be cosy in your slippers when you employ these functional drink additives - that last hour of the party when everyone else is having one for the road (never drink and drive, people) - you can start your chill-out-come-down by stirring in an award-winning Bovine Collagen Sachet and/or decanting a Calm capsule in with your non alcoholic cocktail - citrus and collagen, no less!
Glycine, with which collagen is rich, helps promote sleep and helps regulate temperature to make sleep more likely. Hurrah! L-Theanine has also been reported to help with improved sleep quality.
Swap alcohol dehydration for hydration with electrolytes
Alcohol’s diuretics mean alcohol dehydration - which affects sleep. But a WillPowders ElectroTide hydrates because they contain electrolytes that mean your drink will out-perform water alone. Swapping out an alcoholic drink for water is a great idea - go for it. Swapping out a Pinot for an ElectroTide is the new hydration balance! Horsetail tea and Dandelion extract, two gentle diuretics, will help get rid of toxins - don’t forget, your liver, when it's processing alcohol, has switched from metabolising fat to breaking down ethanol - but the electrolytes will make sure you don’t turn into a desiccated husk of your former self. Splendid.
Q: How long does a hangover last? A: How long’s an eternity in hell?
Hangover and Hangxiety? It’s like you inadvertently made a deal with the Devil and he’s come to collect!
Hangovers are your body's way of crying out for a lane switch! If you haven’t joined the WillPowders ‘bev’olution in time the night before, try WillPowders for your return ticket back to heaven, or, at least Earth!
- Bring back the gut love with kombucha to reinstall your microbiome and activate your gut. Like a little apology for the good bacteria genocide the night before.
- Rehydrate and flush out the toxins with ElectroTide to reinstate your natural fluid balance. It’s all going swimmingly!
- If hangxiety has made you paranoid and hypervigilant, get a soothing hold on your nervous system with Calm and its L-theanine love. Get us into those relaxed brainwaves.
- A cup of tea or coffee and collagen will also help the hangxiety. No need to hold the sky up on your own any longer!
- Go big and put your Collagen and ElectroTide in with a Brain Powder - need’s must when the Devil drives, right? We’ve formulated them so that you can build a nootropic stack of your own.
Big Food’s ‘soft drink’ alternatives - when soft goes hard on your body
We know you’ve understood the assignment regarding sugar and artificial sweeteners. (If you haven’t, it’s simple - ditch them). Unfortunately, Big Food hasn’t. Or, it has but it doesn’t care about your insulin levels or chemical load when there’s a buck to be had at your expense. While there might be some seemingly stylish soft drinks on the market, all beaded with gorgeous cool condensation on their tinted chilled glass bottles and seductive tins, you’d better put your glasses on for the small print. It does seem that even some wellness drinks don’t put two and two together when it comes to insulin resistance or health concerns around lab-made sweeteners. Luckily, we do.
Pack your sachets and your capsules and be the most interesting person at the ball!
We’re a sugar and artificial sweetener free zone - always have been, always will be! But we get that life sometimes puts you in an awkward situation. That wedding at that weird venue might not have a full bounty of delightful beverages.
Here’s what to pack for that occasion:
- Insulin Support Precursor - ours has the crème de la crème of bioavailability as we use dihydro-berberine. If you do end up with a 17 teaspoons of sugar canned drink, at least you can try some mitigation.
- Rise and Shine Indulgence Recovery - when the food and drinks package isn’t quite the way we’d like it (just call us Goldilocks), try some wrap around liver protection.
Don’t forget that alcohol makes no one more interesting - five minutes with a gaggle of drunken people at the table tells us that. Be the one who sashays in and sashays out with the sachets. Get the conversation going around a health span glow up instead. You won’t be googling how to cure a hangover just how to rule the world instead.
Salute to that!
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