Would adding alcohol to a smoothie negate live culture yogurt benefits?

Factual Questions
1

I try to consume plain, live culture yogurt with some berries every day for health reasons.

Recently it occurred to me that a fun variation on soldiering through my healthy fruit and yogurt bowl each morning would be an evening smoothie spruced up with some vodka.

But - vodka would kill the live cultures, right? And I would no longer get any health benefits from them?

I no longer recall why I cared about live cultures, to be honest, though I did do some hopefully responsible Googling before arriving at my dietary goals. My daily concoction is based on a desire to stave off retinal degeneration, osteoporosis, and cystitis - all of which I’ve been diagnosed with in varying degrees. I think the live cultures were related to urinary tract health; I should have kept track but I didn’t.

Anyway - would adding alcohol to a smoothie kill live cultures so they were no longer beneficial?

2

The effect would be quantitative, it’s certainly not going to just sterilize the smoothie in a short space of time. It would be a pretty easy experiment to do for an undergrad or even a high school student with access to basic lab facilities to test the effect of varying concentrations. Although I guess you wouldn’t know if what was growing was the stuff that is supposed to be good for you.

But drinking live yoghurt is supposed to enhance deficiencies in gut bacteria, right? So if you are determined to have a tipple somehow, and the alternative is drinking shots of vodka separately, isn’t that likely to be worse? I would think it’s better to drink the vodka diluted into a smoothie, possibily resulting in a reduced titer of live yoghurt bacteria, rather than slaughter your own gut bacteria by taking the vodka separately!

3

Oh, I ALWAYS dilute the vodka! If I make any kind of martini (classic or trendy), which I often do, it’s always about half water.

This is not out of any virtuous desire to stay sober; I’d gladly be somewhere between tipsy and happy-drunk most evenings, IF there were no consequences. But experience has taught me that serious drinking has consequences I despise - a spinning room or a next-morning hangover are extremely unpleasant.

4

It’s an interesting question. I learned the hard way not to drink on an empty stomach or else have my gut stripped of all my healthy bacteria.

Since I have no intention of quitting alcohol. I switched from beer to red wine bc I hear red wine actually helps with said bacteria.

So maybe a wine smoothie? Or maybe the vodka would just negate the yogurt having a net zero effect instead of a net negative effect?

5

My gf drinks smoothies for the “health benefits” adding things like chia seeds. She also adds rum to her smoothies. I’m not going to mention this concern to her.

I like vodka. I like orange juice. But I like a screwdriver less than either. I’ve ordered a deconstructed screwdriver (a double chilled vodka with an orange juice chaser) and it is great.

6

You’d think that your stomach acid would kill most of the live things in the yogurt within a few minutes after you drink the smoothie anyways. Any cells tough enough to survive that acid bath ought to be able to handle sitting in a diluted alcohol bath for a few minutes in addition.

Remember too that you’re not only diluting the vodka, but adding other things to the drink so the alcohol won’t be that concentrated. And you’re dropping then rapidly raising the temperature. I doubt the vodka alone will affect much.

7

Yep. There’s something to that:

Probiotics are living organisms and have beneficial effects when they colonize the body, assuming they can stay alive long enough to do so. Probiotic treatments are packed with bacteria, but once swallowed, their numbers are dramatically diminished by the stomach’s acidity, lowering the chances of therapeutic effect.

So I say … let the (non-Russian, if you please) vodka pour !

8

My gf asked why I was still (hehe) drinking Nikolai Vodka instead of switching to a Pennsylvania Vodka. Didn’t I want to hurt Russia?

I explained that Nikolai is distilled and bottled in Frankfort, Kentucky and I can buy four bottles for the price of one bottle of PA Boyd & Blair Potato Vodka.

9

I’m not sure I would worry much. The effectiveness of probiotics is not established except in some specific instances. If you (general “you”) fall into one of those instances where a probiotic is needed for an existing malady then probably best to not mix with alcohol. Beyond that, I think most of what the live culture does is affect the taste and not needed to do anything beneficial if you are already healthy.

A closer look at the science underlying microbe-based treatments, however, shows that most of the health claims for probiotics are pure hype. The majority of studies to date have failed to reveal any benefits in individuals who are already healthy. The bacteria seem to help only those people suffering from a few specific intestinal disorders. “There is no evidence to suggest that people with normal gastrointestinal tracts can benefit from taking probiotics,” says Matthew Ciorba, a gastroenterologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “If you’re not in any distress, I would not recommend them.” Emma Allen-Vercoe, a microbiologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, agrees. For the most part, she says, “the claims that are made are enormously inflated.”