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“Just something to think about,” he says, “but with things like this, when you eat it in its natural form, there are benefits. But when you take it out and isolate it, for whatever reason, sometimes it doesn’t work. That’s why when I used to take vitamin C, I’d take it with orange juice.”

Function and most of its competitors use antioxidants—in marketing terms, antioxidants are the best thing these drinks have going. But there’s not much evidence that antioxidant-infused drinks provide any health benefit. They do their job in test tubes, says New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle, but give antioxidants to real people in clinical trials and they show less of an effect. Maybe they only work in tandem with other food elements, or maybe we have our eye on the wrong ball—perhaps we’ve plucked the wrong compounds out of fruits and vegetables. But spicing our foods with antioxidants, Nestle later tells me, can be a waste of time. “In almost every case it’s been tested in clinical trials,” she says, “it’s been shown to have not much beneficial effect.” She says that in a few trials they’ve even had a harmful effect. “When it comes to vitamins and antioxidants, some is good; more is not better.”

Hughes takes in Robert’s comments and nods. “You’re totally right to point that out,” he says. “And yeah, certainly we’d have to have something that we know would work.” He takes the industry’s side of the argument: that beneficial compounds found naturally in foods are often processed out, or occur at such low levels that they don’t make much difference. If the science demonstrates that you can isolate a certain compound without losing efficacy, he says, then it can be consumed at high-enough concentrations to be useful.

“That falls under the category of better living through chemistry,” says Jennifer. She means it as encouragement, but clearly this isn’t the motto Hughes hopes to emblazon on the drinks. “When you have a population trending toward obesity like we do,” she continues, “maybe it’s time to medicalize food.”

“When you look at SoBe, it’s sweetened crap,” Nathanson says. “All these beverages are just sugar water. No one has been able to show that the products work. And I want to temper what I say because some of these guys are my friends and advertisers, but at the same time I’ve got to be real.”

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Labels: Anti-oxidant, beverages, functional medicine, Marion Nestle, Myth, nutrition, Sobe, Vitamin Water