What to drink when the temperatures are soring? Today I am looking into healthy beverages to drink on a hot summer day.
Hello everybody,
Don’t you just love those beautiful summer months where you can spend all day outside, go to the beach – if you are close to the beach, or the swimming pool….. I certainly do. But with high temperatures comes the thirst, at least I tend to be very thirsty.
Now, my go to healthy beverage not just in summer, but all year round is plain old water. Coming from Austria, more specific from the alpine region, we have delicious mountain water. So I am a little spoiled in that regard. When I moved to the US the water there was no comparison to Tyrolean water. But I learned to adjust, because I wanted a healthy beverage to drink. And how many other healthy beverages are there?
Yes, you can drink tea, which can be made into ice tea in summer, and black unsweetened coffee, which can also be made into American ice coffee (ice cubes and coffee), but then it starts to get difficult. Store bought juices and smoothies have a ton of ingredients that should not be in there – foremost sugar. Sodas, well, we know by now that sodas are not a healthy beverage in any case. So that leaves us with anything home made.
Let’s start with juices. Yes, I had a juicer and I used to make apple juice, carrot juice and a combination of all different kinds of fruits and vegetables. Did they taste good? No doubt about that. Where they a healthy beverage? Sure. Was it a lot of work? Absolutely – but the most work was not making the juice, it was cleaning te machine every time. And it needed to be taken apart in order to thoroughly clean. So for a healthy choice, yes. But it does not warrant the work. At least not for me. And another problem, I drink lots of water throughout the day, you cannot really drink that much juice. Water has no calories, juice does. So it is not really an option for keeping hydrated.
Now, are smoothies a healthy beverage. Sure, if you make it at home. There you can add whichever fruits you like to your smoothie and you can skip extra sugar and any kind of preservatives and colors and other unhealthy ingredients. But as with juices, you cannot drink smoothies all day long.
Now let us look at coffee and tea. Both can be hot or cold. If you drink black unsweetened coffee you are not consuming x-amount of calories. So just make sure you are skipping the sugar and heavy cream. Tea on the other hand has many options to be used in summer. You can drink black, green, white tea or fruit tea, it can be hot tea with and without milk, or cold with ice cubes, lemon and mint. Sometimes I put some strawberries in a pitcher and add some tea and ice cubes, let it stand for a couple of hours and then serve in a glass, adding some of the strawberries to it.
So there are some options out there, and I am not including alcoholic beverages – that is for another day – but my healthy beverage of choice is water.
What is your choice of healthy beverages for hot summer days, let me know in the comments section below.
Have a great summer day!
