Bai

One reason Bai drinks are resonating with modern consumers? Unlike soda, they’re not stuffed with an exorbitant amount of sugar or calories. In fact, a 16-ounce bottle contains just 10 calories and 2 grams of sugar. But just because a drink is low in calories and sugar doesn’t automatically make it healthy. So do Bai drinks really deserve to become a part of your beverage habits?

A huge number of drinks fall under the Bai banner. In addition to the line of original “Bai Antioxidant Infusion” drinks, the company also produces a “Bubbles” line of products that include sparkling water, a “Black” line of products that mimic popular soda flavors, a “Cocofusions” line of products that feature coconut water concentrate, and a “Supertea” line of products that feature real brewed teas. Though all of these products have similar nutritional profiles, we’ll largely focus on the original Bai Antioxidant Infusion drinks since they’re the most prevalent.

Bai Antioxidant Infusion drinks come in 16-ounce bottles. Though these bottles technically contain two servings of the drink, who in their right mind is drinking half a bottle of Bai and saving the rest for later? It’s just not realistic. So without further adieu, here are the nutrition facts for a 16-ounce bottle of Bai Brasilia Blueberry:

10 calories, 10mg of sodium, 12 grams carbohydrate, 2 grams sugar, 0 grams protein, 20% DV of Vitamin C

The drink is not a significant source of calories from fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, dietary fiber, vitamin A, calcium or iron. A 16-ounce serving also contains 100mg of “polyphenols and chlorogenic acid” from coffee fruit extract and white tea extract in addition to 35mg of caffeine. Other Bai Antioxidant Infusion varieties possess very similar nutrition facts.

Twenty percent of your daily vitamin C is a plus, as vitamin C is essential for growth and repair of tissues throughout the body. It’s also an antioxidant, meaning it battles the internal damage caused by free radicals, which may play a role in heart disease, cancer and conditions like arthritis.

Antioxidants white tea extract and coffee fruit extract in Bai

But what’s going on with that 100mg of polyphenols and chlorogenic acid from coffee fruit and white tea extracts? Much of Bai’s marketing centers around its use of coffee fruit (the company refers to it as “coffeefruit” in their marketing materials). Coffee fruit is the fruit or berry that surrounds the coffee bean. From Bai’s website: “The coffeefruit’s red pulp has free-radical fighting antioxidants. Antioxidants help maintain your body’s natural protections against potentially damaging process such as oxidation. In other words, antioxidants are like your body’s bodyguard. So as you can probably imagine, we love the coffeefruit. We are constantly innovating processes to convert this once discarded coffee byproduct into an even better super ingredient. In fact, we think of it as our super-secret superfruit.”

Bai is Sweet without Sugar

So how is Bai able to achieve such a sweet flavor with so little sugar? The answer lies in their “Proprietary Sweetener Blend.” This blend—which is used to sweeten nearly every Bai product—contains just two ingredients: erythritol and stevia leaf extract. Every drink in the Bai Antioxidant Infusion line contains between 10-20 grams of erythritol per 16-ounce bottle. Erythritol is an all-natural sugar alcohol that looks and tastes like sugar yet contains just 0.24 calories per gram (sugar, on the other hand, contains 4 calories per gram). The second sweetener is stevia leaf extract. Stevia is a plant native to Paraguay that’s long been used as a low-calorie sweetener. It contains no calories and is roughly 250 to 300 times the sweetness of sugar. Due to this intense taste, stevia makes up less than 1 percent of Bai’s Proprietary Sweetener Blend.

Overall, Bai Antioxidant Infusion drinks offer a massive upgrade over traditional soda and similar high-sugar beverages. The sweeteners they use in place of sugar are generally considered safe, but care should be taken not to over consume them. Both white tea extract and coffee fruit extract have shown great promise in terms of health benefits and there appears to be little downside in consuming them. Bai Antioxidant Infusions shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for water or whole fruits and vegetables, but if you’re looking to ween yourself off high-caloric sweetened beverages, you could do a whole lot worse.