On the Brightside™: the feel good soda
A zero sugar soda built around connection and presence
If you get to know me well, you will hear some version of the following sentence eventually evacuate my mouth:
"Humans are just really complicated ants.”
You will think it is tongue-in-cheek; that I am being glib or unserious.
I assure you, I am very serious about this.
And I think it is the single most important aspect of humanity as a whole.
Humans are social creatures. Despite a rise in what I now call Swanson Libertarianism - a belief in rugged individualism so thorough and firm that it can only be described in satirical terms - humans cannot live in the modern world without one another. I think most understand this is true. In the most basic sense, we build roads, we create infrastructure networks, and we share resources in order not only to support one another but to support ourselves. From the family unit to the building of nations, humans thrive on cooperation and that is a feature, not a bug, in our evolutionary development.
Ants are similar in this way, but in a capacity that is much more straightforward. Ants organize themselves in simple complex systems, in that there are certain complexities to their function, but it is a simple layer - they all work for the good of the colony without thought, without independence - each individual corporeal being just a cog in the larger machine that evolved to use simple biological features to perpetuate the DNA of the species. Ants excrete a scent that follows everywhere they go, and if they find food, now a series of ants are directed on that specific pheromonal path that brings them between the food and the colony. They built hills and networks and tunnels by instinct, not by purposeful or complex thought, but the result is alike to how humans build roads - the path of least resistance and highest utility for their society. In return, the ants are fed. Their queen reproduces. Their DNA perpetuates.
Humans are more circuitous in their path to the same core result. Arts, entertainment, money, government, religion are all as fundamental to us and how we create our anthills as pheromonal response is to the ants. Where ants use hormones, we use stories, fictions like the value of money, to build our connection and inspire one another forward. But the result is the same - meeting out basic needs to live and perpetuate our DNA. All human economic output is the result of complicated ways we connect with one another.
I send an email, I receive a response, I send money, and I receive an output I perceive as equivalent or higher value to said resources. I hire people to do more of this. Enough emails and money, and I can get a co-packer to produce a beverage product for me.
Businesses, schools, cities, nations - these are various ant hills on a different scale. And while we don’t use pheromones to note where food is, we have other, interestingly complicated ways of finding our ways to the resources we all need to live, and they all depend on being able to connect with one another.
And this idea was so important I started a second company just for it: Brighter Beverages, Inc.
A beverage to help you connect with others
The easiest way to describe the feeling of On the Brightside™ is that it helps take down the noise in your head.
This is why I created On the Brightside™, a feel good soda that stars Zembrin®, a standardized extract of succulent from South Africa that has been used for centures for calm, mental clarity, and social ease. And while I love it for all three particular uses, lately I have been thinking a lot about that last one - social ease.
One (possibly silly, I admit) term for what Zembrin could be called is that it is not an adaptogen but a connectogen. That is, it helps you connect with both things and people by turning down the distracting noise in your own head. This in turn improves the human experience - it is connecting to others that can improve your life both personally and professionally.
When I created my first beverage company, Cantrip, I thought that it would be the solution to non-alcoholic social drinking. I covered this extensively in my last article. This turned out to be incorrect for myriad reasons, so it got me thinking - can I solve that original problem with a different ingredient?
I am now confident the answer to that is yes, and it is On the Brightside™.
The easiest way to describe the feeling of On the Brightside™ is that it helps take down the noise in your head. This is an active feeling for most, not just a passive “maybe it worked.” This, in turn, helps your shoulders drop, metaphorically deepens your breath, and your connection to the world around you improve. It helps you relax without sedation, and when you are at ease, you are more confident, and so on. This not only means you can focus more clearly on what you are doing, but with whom you are speaking.
As a person who was once called by a friend “the most self-conscious person she had ever met,” this was a huge unlock for me.
On the Brightside™ tastes great, and is one of the best tasting products I’ve made - despite the fact it is completely sugar free. Powered by Onosweet® from fermented Reb M (no stevia or monkfruit required), we can create a sugar free experience with the full flavor of a soda. Even more importantly, because the only functional ingredient in the soda is only 15 milligrams of Zembrin, you keep the great taste without losing the function - to me, a huge distinction from other mood-altering beverages which unfortunately always walk the line of “enough herbs to work,” and “too much herbs to taste good.”
This is the true path to alcohol replacement - not just a non-alcoholic drink that has a feeling, but one that has the right feeling, something for which I’ve been searching for actual years.
My history with functional herbs
Since 2013, I’ve been curious about a variety of functional herbs. My first real in-depth interest began when I was trained behind the bar. Back then, we would try all sorts of interesting herbal infusions - from mugwort to maca root, kava and beyond. None of it was trendy at the time, and for the most part I was interested in the flavors they could impart more than the effect.
Zembrin is one of the first herbal extracts I have worked with that I really believe in and that I believe really delivers on what it claims. This is not just because I’ve consumed it regularly for months now, but more specifically because it has undergone clinical studies that examine its efficacy in a double blind setting. Not that it is some dramatic miracle cure-all, but that it can be useful and influential in things like executive cognitive flexibility, supporting anxiety particularly in a social setting, and that it has a very safe toxicity profile both from direct toxicity and under a standard genotoxicity panel.
For many that will sound like gobbledegook so here’s the layperson’s version:
A double blind study showed evidence that Zembrin® can reduce the amount of signaling from the “fear” part of your brain (called the amygdala) to the “let’s release stress hormones” part of your brain (called the hypothalamus) when exposed to a mild stress response like unhappy faces (Terburg 2013.)
A separate study looked for the minimum point at which an “Adverse Event”(aka acute toxicity) was observed, which was very high - from 1400-2000 times the amount of Zembrin® necessary for therapeutic dose (Murbach 2014)
Another double-blind study demonstrated that Zembrin “ameliorated the anticipatory increase in subjective feelings of anxiety associated with the anticipated onset of a stressor and ameliorated increases in [heart rate] during a stressor,” (Reay 2020.) This effectively means it helped reduce anxiety in this particular setting and study - which is promising evidence, not to be confused with perfect proof.
None of these are conclusive studies that determine Zembrin is a definitive anxiolytic, and it should not be used as a replacement for anything your doctor tells you that you need. These are not FDA reviewed clinical trials. All are linked at the end of this article if you’d like to read them yourself. However, these studies are far and away more than most functional ingredients will offer in terms of actual evidence.
What the takeaway should be is this: Zembrin can fit into your life, help you relax, and likely help you be more social. It can provide a feeling that helps you cut through the noise and connect better with the moment - whether that’s being out at a party or in the office working on your magnum opus.
A more focused approach to functional beverage
In reviewing the literature for the most popular functional ingredient in the markets I noticed something peculiar about the current set: they all contain multiple “functional” ingredients. I wanted to take an approach I think more clearly communicates to consumers what they’re consuming and why.
On the Brightside™ features only one functional herbal extract, in contrast to the often half-a-dozen-or-more featured in other beverages. No, it does not contain rhodiola rosea, maca root, ashwagandha, or Lion’s Mane, or L-theanine, or caffeine, or Vitamins B6, B12, and on and on and on. It eschews the stack, for one very specific reason:
We know this plant extract works, and we can’t be sure of that when combined with other things.
Fundamentally, this is why the FDA doesn’t know how to deal with plant medicine in the first place. It is terrible at assessing models with multiple variables, and that is simply because more than one degree of freedom breaks how the scientific method determines truth. If something contains two ingredients, it needs to be studied with both ingredients for efficacy - I, and every other beverage formulator, cannot simply assume that stacking Lion’s Mane and Maca Root together will allow both of them to work. It is entirely possible that they will counteract or interact with each other in unpredictable ways.
Many functional beverages on the market ignore this reality, and take a spaghetti-at-the-wall approach: “if I put enough herbs in here, something has to work.” This is masked by the presumption of the “stack,” that all herbs work together without interacting - something I simply will not believe is true unless I see it studied as such, and you shouldn’t either.
The result of this “stack” building? A beverage where the manufacturer doesn’t even know which, if any, herbs are working, and one that you can’t drink without a grimace.
Real connection means in person connection
There is a theme I am finding in my work. Specificity matters. Just like not all beverages that provide a feeling provide the right feeling, not all social connection is real connection.
There is an irony to social media of which more people than ever before have become generally aware: despite being more connected to other people than at any point in human history, the very systems by which we have created those connections are tearing us apart. They are designed to maximize our attention, repeatedly stoke outrage, and keep us glued to our phones, hypocritically driving us to anxiety and then selling us products promising to take it away.
It takes virtually no effort to find studies showing evidence of this. Really, one does not need studies to even know it. Simply stop using your phone for 24 hours, 48 hours, a week, and you can feel the difference. Less compulsion, less anxiety. More presence, more clarity.
We are trying to recreate that feeling in a can - and even further, we are trying to support that feeling outside of the can. We are trying to figure out ways of partnering with more venues and organizations dedicated to helping us all break our phone addiction - maybe a bar with a phones free night, or spaces dedicated to screen-free connection. Yes, I recognize the irony of writing this on the internet, and the further irony that in order for this new brand to succeed, we will need to do well on TikTok and Instagram.
But I believe in this movement. An emphasis on physical media, a letting go of the phones, an increase in spaces that are more deliberate about how its patrons connect with technology and others - these are the things we want out of the On the Brightside™ brand. These are the partners we’re looking for.
I am no Luddite. But I am an amateur Buddhist practitioner, and I believe moderation is a key component of living a healthy lifestyle. Phones can be a useful and positive force in our lives, when they are used intentionally to connect with others and to share positive outlooks. But the relationship society has developed with our phones - in part because of alleged design to serve an advertising model that relies on maximizing our attention on the rectangles in our hands - is fundamentally broken.
On the Brightside™ is designed to help with that. Connect with others, put your phone down, and go outside. That lowering of stress you realize that occurs when you go camping and disconnect for a few days - that’s what I wanted to put in a can.
I think we got there.
Cheers
Adam Terry
CEO, On the Brightside™
Citations:
Terburg D, Syal S, Rosenberger LA, et al. Acute effects of Sceletium tortuosum (Zembrin), a dual 5-HT reuptake and PDE4 inhibitor, in the human amygdala and its connection to the hypothalamus. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2013;38(13):2708-2716. doi:10.1038/npp.2013.183
Murbach TS, Hirka G, Szakonyiné IP, Gericke N, Endres JR. A toxicological safety assessment of a standardized extract of Sceletium tortuosum (Zembrin®) in rats. Food Chem Toxicol. 2014;74:190-199. doi:10.1016/j.fct.2014.09.017
Reay J, Wetherell MA, Morton E, Lillis J, Badmaev V. Sceletium tortuosum (Zembrin®) ameliorates experimentally induced anxiety in healthy volunteers. Hum Psychopharmacol. 2020;35(6):1-7. doi:10.1002/hup.2753