“Chinese medicine.” “That weird Hungarian liqueur.” “Something my grandad would drink.” The taste test is not going well. Dry January is over and we’re hitting the bottle, but this is not alcohol we’re drinking. It’s theoretically the next best thing: Sentia Black, “a unique blend of functional botanicals, designed for focus and conviviality,” reads the blurb
We’ve been trying it neat, but once you mix it with tonic water it becomes much more palatable – “festive and grownup”, as one of my test subjects puts it. Taste aside, though, does it work? The conversation is certainly free-flowing, but whether it is more “focused and convivial” than it would have been without the Sentia is hard to say. None of us end up dancing on the table or spoiling for a fight, at least. Nor does anyone wake up with a hangover the next morning, so there’s that. Mind you, it is £32 a bottle.
The active ingredients in the drink have been chosen because they “stimulate the release of Gaba” – a neurotransmitter that slows down the brain – gently mimicking what alcohol can do to extreme levels. Gaba is short for gamma-aminobutyric acid and it’s being talked of in terms of not just alcohol substitution but a whole range of health applications. It is often associated with sleep, relaxation and anxiety, but it also has a role to play in epilepsy, Parkinson’s, blood pressure, seizures, memory and much more. As such, Gaba has become something of a buzzword in health and wellness circles, which inevitably means there is a lot of confusion and misinformation.
Gaba itself is a naturally occurring substance. Our bodies can make it, and it’s present in common foods, with higher concentrations in cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and kale, sweet potatoes, fermented foods such as kimchi and tempeh, and certain herbs. The sale of pure Gaba (it can be synthesised by fermenting food) is prohibited in the UK and EU due to concerns over potential for misuse, but it’s legal in the US and Japan, where you can buy myriad Gaba supplements, with dosages ranging from 10mg to 750mg, not to mention Gaba-enhanced chocolate, gummies, drinks – and it doesn’t stop there. But its uses and effects are far from straightforward.
“Gaba is the off switch of the brain,” says the neuropsychopharmacologist Prof David Nutt, of Imperial College London, who is also one of the creators of Sentia. At the most basic level, brain activity consists of billions of neurons turning on and off, he says. “The turning on is glutamate; the turning off is Gaba.” This is why Gaba has a connection with calming. “When we go into a social situation with strangers, the social parts of our brain are set to ‘slightly anxious’ because it’s better than being overconfident,” says Nutt. “What alcohol does, and what Sentia does, is enhance the Gaba there to take away that anxiety, so you can be as social as you really want to be.”
Sentia, which launched in 2021, seeks to mimic the first stage of drunkenness – the relaxed, “convivial” feeling you might get after one or two drinks – but without leading to subsequent phases: euphoria, loss of judgment, pain reduction, memory loss, dependence. You don’t get more faux-drunk the more Sentia you drink; you just remain in that “sweet spot” of sociability, it’s claimed. “We are not replicating alcohol,” says Nutt. “We don’t want people to get drunk and addicted and hungover.”
Nutt says he was led down this path by first-hand experience. “I spent most of my first 20 years as a doctor trying to treat people with alcohol withdrawal, alcohol craving, alcohol brain damage.” According to the latest statistics, alcohol-related deaths in the UK hit a record high in 2023, exceeding 10,000 for the first time. Meanwhile, we are increasingly turning off alcohol. A recent UK survey found that 43% of 18- to 34-year-olds and 32% of 35- to 54-year-olds no longer drink it at all. So there is clearly a place for drinks like Sentia.
Nutt was fired as a government adviser on drug policy in 2009, for arguing that some illegal drugs, such as ecstasy, LSD and cannabis, were less harmful than legal ones including alcohol and tobacco. He has been researching alcohol alternatives ever since, and in 2019 he co-founded GABA Labs, which makes Sentia. “There are small molecules that do mimic the effects of alcohol. We looked at those, and we found they were complex, difficult and expensive. So we started making our own molecules.” It is a challenging and expensive process, he says, but “in the last 10 years, we’ve made 50 molecules that target the Gaba system as we want.”
They also studied plants and herbal remedies associated with calmness and relaxation in western, Chinese and Ayurvedic traditions – valerian and ashwagandha, for example. Sentia is a mix of natural ingredients, some for Gaba-enhancement, some for flavour, including blackberry juice, aronia, magnolia, linden, passionflower, liquorice, ashwagandha and more – plus what is described on the label as “GABA Labs proprietary blend” – which includes those synthetic Gaba-targeting molecules Nutt was talking about.
I’ve tried Sentia over a few evenings now. There are two other colours, red and gold, which claim to have slightly different effects. The gold one tastes like concentrated orange juice neat, but mixed with ginger beer it’s very tasty. I’ve had perfectly pleasant times, but it is still difficult to know how much the drink was a part of that. There was no “buzz”, as some Sentia drinkers have reported.
I relay my uncertainty to Nutt. Do other people respond that way? “Only journalists,” he replies jokingly. Women prefer it to men, he’s found, but he can only speculate as to why – perhaps they are less desensitised by previous alcohol-drinking, or it interacts with the female hormone system differently. He does have scientific proof for Sentia’s claims, though: studies have shown that compounds in many of the plants they use have an effect on Gaba receptors in the brain; an experiment on mice at the University of Portsmouth indicated that Sentia enhances Gaba in the gut in a mammalian system. He also shows me EEG scans carried out on Sentia drinkers by the University of Exeter, which showed that it produces changes in the brain “compatible with relaxation and sociability”.
Sentia is not the only alcohol alternative going down the Gaba route. There’s also Kin Euphorics, sold in the US, some of whose drinks are infused with actual Gaba, or Three Spirit, which uses “adaptogens and nootropics” (a similar herbal mix to Sentia but without their proprietary ingredients) to “enhance your mood, rhythm and mind”. Then there’s Impossibrew, the “impossibly relaxing non-alcoholic beer”. Along with ashwagandha, one of its key ingredients is l-theanine – an amino acid found in tea, among other natural sources, that is thought to increase Gaba levels in the brain.
Impossibrew was founded by Mark Wong, a 28-year-old former student homebrewer who had to quit drinking for health reasons. He developed a non-alcoholic alternative, working with Dr Paul Chazot, a professor of pharmacology at Durham University. Wong says that a light came on when he visited his family in Hong Kong and explored traditional Chinese herbal remedies. Working these into a beer was a challenge – “these things have a really pungent, planty taste” – but Impossibrew tastes as good as any non-alcoholic beer: fruity and hoppy with a citrus finish. And I must admit, I did feel somewhat looser and more animated after drinking it, though that could have been down to the spectacular pasta dish I’d cooked (including Gaba-rich broccoli).
Wong presented his product on Dragons’ Den a few years ago but failed to attract any investment. He’s doing fine without it: Impossibrew shifted over a million units last year, he says. “We aim to continue doubling every year.”
Controlling the brain’s “off switch” has myriad applications beyond just alcohol-like sociability. Gaba’s neurological role was identified in the 1950s, and many medications target its system to treat conditions such as epilepsy, anxiety disorders, seizures and drug withdrawal symptoms – hence medical brand names such as pregabalin and gabapentin (which are controlled class C substances in the UK). Likewise, drugs that are often prescribed for sleep problems, such as Zolpidem (Ambien) or benzodiazepines (Valium, Xanax, temazepam), work by enhancing Gaba in the brain (albeit with side-effects).
Health-store Gaba supplements claim to do something similar, but the way Gaba works on humans is complicated. It is not thought to pass through the “blood-brain barrier” in significant quantities, which means you cannot simply swallow a load of Gaba and find it makes its way to your brain. This is why products such as Sentia and Impossibrew claim to enhance the uptake of Gaba in the brain, rather than adding to it directly.
Consuming Gaba orally is not particularly effective, says Renger Witkamp, a professor in nutritional biology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “What we see, if you give someone a large amount of Gaba, is that it is quickly taken up in your blood, but that peak very rapidly disappears, in as little as half an hour. Gaba is a natural compound, so our body has all kinds of systems and enzymes that are constantly keeping it in balance.”
Does that mean that Gaba pills and supplements are a waste of time? Anecdotally, many people attest to their efficacy, but in 2020 a systematic review of 14 studies found “limited evidence for stress and very limited evidence for sleep benefits of oral Gaba intake”. Gaba certainly plays a role in sleep, but the supplements are a bit of a lottery, says Prof John Groeger of Nottingham Trent University, co-author of the review, who has studied sleep for over 20 years: “You really don’t know how much you’re taking. Even when you buy a supplement that says it has 1,000 milligrams in it, there is no recommended dose.”
This is not the whole story, though, says Nutt. Gaba can still have an effect by another route: “The gut has a lot of Gaba receptors, and Gaba affects gut function. And if you change gut function, then the nerves from the gut to the brain are changed, and therefore the brain is changed.” In addition, “There is growing evidence that the microbiome uses Gaba to grow and to communicate between the various bugs, so Gaba itself could be active at several levels.” On the subject of Gaba supplements, Nutt says: “They may work.”
One place in particular has been swearing by Gaba for decades: Japan. “Gaba is like vitamin C here,” says Prof Hiroshi Ezura of the plant innovation research centre at the University of Tsukuba. “Many Japanese people know what Gaba is and many Japanese food companies enrich their products with it.” Since 2005, the confectioner Glico has made a range of Gaba “mental balance chocolate”, for example, which claims to aid relaxation for workers. It is credited with having popularised chocolate consumption by men, which was previously considered a “feminine” confectionery in Japan. The brewery Suntory’s Gaba-enhanced, alcohol-free beer All Free, meanwhile, claims to improve memory.
Ezura’s field is tomatoes. His team has developed a Gaba-rich variety using genome-editing technology. Their Sicilian Rouge cherry tomatoes contain five times more Gaba than conventional ones, Ezura says, and they claim to not only relieve stress and aid sleep, but also maintain skin elasticity and lower your blood pressure. They could not make these claims without hard evidence, approved by the Japanese ministry of health, labour and welfare, he says. They have also worked for him personally: “Normally my blood pressure is 135 or 140, but by eating the tomatoes every day, it’s down to 120.”
The tomatoes came on to the Japanese market (where regulations for Gaba and GM foods are less strict) in 2021 and are available in more than 100 shops, mainly in the Tokyo area. They are now expanding their range of tomato varieties and making processed products, such as tomato puree, says Ezura. There are plans to begin growing them in the Philippines, and they have been approved by the FDA in the US.
Gaba undoubtedly has actual and potential benefits, and more research is needed, but not everybody is drinking the Kool-Aid – or Sentia and tonic. Prof Witkamp, for one. Even with some of the “scientifically proven” claims around Gaba, he’s wary of “what we call cherrypicking”, he says: “You get a lot of loose bits and pieces, you connect them and they sound nice, but has it been proven?” To really confirm the relaxation effects of drinks like Sentia, he says, you would need a properly designed, placebo-controlled experiment. Instead, “there are a lot of subjective feelings about ‘becoming relaxed’”, he says.
Nutt acknowledges: “We tend to get positive feedback, but then there’s probably not a lot of point in people telling us they didn’t get much of an effect.” Similarly, with Impossibrew’s claim that “71% of our customers felt more relaxed after drinking Impossibrew”, Wong concedes that the data is from self-selecting customers who were willing to fill out the company’s questionnaire. Besides, measuring something qualitative such as “relaxation” is inherently difficult. “I’ve subjected myself to a whole range of different drugs over my 50 years,” says Nutt, “so I know what it’s like to be zonked, but when you’re looking for those subtle changes, it’s trickier.”
But a subtle change is the goal: “It’s very unlikely that people are going to sit down by themselves and just drink Sentia to get out of their head; we think it works predominantly in social situations, because that’s what we want – for people to engage socially … but sometimes we’re not that good at being social.” So sharing a Gaba-enhancing cocktail could be just the fun social lubricant we need, without the hangover – even if the conversation is mostly just, “Are you feeling anything yet?”
