Most people aren't getting drunk every time they drink.
Try wine and grape juice side by side. Baring truly awful wine, the wine will taste better (I suppose you could have awful grape juice too, but, you get the idea).
Sure, but it's a taste people have spent a couple thousand years working on, and it's remained popular through huge changes in culture and diet. People clearly like it.
> Try wine and grape juice side by side. Baring truly awful wine, the wine will taste better
The unfermented juice of wine grapes has many similarities to the wine it would produce if fermented. "Grape juice" is usually pretty one note, just sweet.
I wouldn't be so sure... I'm certain my own would increase. (Assuming 'get you drunk' means something like 'contain ethanol' i.e. no 'buzz' or whatever but also no adverse effect on liver, the next day, ...).
If you want a cold drink that isn't sweet, your choices are pretty much alcohol, alcohol-free alternative, water.
>If you want a cold drink that isn't sweet, your choices are pretty much alcohol, alcohol-free alternative, water.
Uh, no.
There's also seltzer, flavored seltzer, flavored water, iced tea, iced coffee, herbal infusions (like hibiscus, rooibos, honeybush, etc), broth, milk and plant based milk alternatives, and fermented drinks like kombucha + kefir. That's just off the top of my head.
Hibiscus even has the benefit of helping regulate blood pressure.
I almost never drink sweet drinks or plain water and rarely drink alcohol. My fluid consumption is almost entirely: hot tea, iced tea, kombucha, and hibiscus infusion. Sometimes seltzer. Sometimes coffee.
I guess simply 'milk' I also missed, which is a bit sweet of course but I wasn't intending to lump it in with fruit juices and added-sugar drinks.
I did almost mention jaljeera, but thought that might be a bit niche. It is also often sweetened though. I've never known not-sweet lassi though? Salted lassi is still sweet underneath, like salted caramel, ime. We could count it with the sweet-ish milk drinks, anyway.
Lassi is a traditional drink where I’m from and contains only salt traditionally. Sweetened lassi is a relatively recent restaurant-led innovation. When I was a kid “lassi” meant salted; you had to specify “sweet lassi” for the sweetened version.
To be fair, the concept of iced tea as an objective desire is considered the provenance of blasphemous original sin by a not insignificant percentage of natives where the parent hails from.
That seems unlikely. Non alcoholic drinks are already an enormous market, and people would have less reason to limit consumption with the health downside removed.
Try wine and grape juice side by side. Baring truly awful wine, the wine will taste better (I suppose you could have awful grape juice too, but, you get the idea).