June 2003

"A flavor so unfamiliar, it's desirable."

“THE NEXT BIG WORKOUT COCKTAIL” by Joanne Chen 

The Sipping News

How does a simple piece of produce become the next fitness craze?  Joanne Chen hunts down the next big workout cocktail.

There was a time I would reward myself, aglow from the rigors of a Jane Fonda workout, with a healthy cocktail consisting of bananas, vanilla ice cream and heaps of Peter Pan peanut butter.  But when it hit me that my fitness drink of choice was in fact 300 calories more than I had just burned, I switched to a seemingly healthier option, the no-calorie diet Coke.  As yoga, kickboxing and Spinning came, went and came back again, I sipped Yogi tea, downed shots of wheat grass, collected recipes for whey protein, and ultimately became fixated on blueberries blended with ice, a trick I learned from David Kirsh at his tony boutique gym in New York, where he trains clients like Heidi Klum.   

I was feeling a bit bored with my fitness regimen, still scraping the blue stains from my sink, when a well-connected colleague informed me that blueberries were over and it’s all about pomegranates now.  I promptly called Lynda Resnick, the Beverly Hills billionairess behind the pomegranate crusade.  “People love the fruit,” she says.  “You only have to have eight ounces a day for two weeks to see the effects.  My God, even Cleopatra knew about it!”  It all started when Resnick happened upon some pomegranates on her pistachio farm; enchanted, she planted 6,000 more acres of them.  She and her husband, Steward, then packed the fruit into a bottle as a pure juice, called POM Wonderful, and soon enough, the magic potion was tucked into goody bags at the Vanity Fair Golden Globes party, with word getting around that the ferociously well-toned Charlie’s Angels cast were fueling up on the stuff between cuts. 

“I believe the medicine chest of the twenty-first century is in the produce department!” Resnick proclaims.  And indeed, scientists have been obsessing over fruit more than ever, mostly because of its newfound disease-prevention powers.  Thanks to funding from Resnick, labs have discovered pomegranates to be good for the heart. 

But science isn’t enough to give a drink a cachet.  It has to possess an air of exclusivity, like the limited-edition running shoe.  Pomegranate juice makes the cut because the fruit is a mess to eat; the delicate, berry-like açaí, which is cultivated only in the Amazon forest, just might follow suit.   

. . .  [Açaí] is blended with guaraná, a Brazilian plant that’s said to boost energy, and packaged as a slush.  A Belgian scientist also found that the fruit itself is rich in essential fatty acid, calcium, and of course, vitamins.  When I asked American doctors about it, they had no idea what I was talking about, but that hasn’t prevented it from finding a fan base that includes the likes of Gisele Bundchen, Sting and Andre Agassi.  Already it’s a staple at Ian Schrager’s Sky Bar, and a favorite among the tan and trim in Miami, where it’s found in the Purple Label smoothie, sold (where else?) at the Ralph Lauren shop. 

Back in New York, at the juice bar in Equinox, where they serve [açaí] in their energy shake, I dig in and taste something that’s neither tart nor sweet.  A flavor so unfamiliar, it’s desirable. . .  [a]nd soon, I am off with some samples and a recipe – just what was needed, perhaps, to rescue me from my workout rut.