By LAURA UNGAR, Associated Press

Several years into her sobriety, Logan Denzer decided to try nonalcoholic beer and mocktails while others around her drank real booze.

“A lot of people feel out of place” when everyone else is imbibing, said the 27-year-old from Los Angeles, who considers these beverages “an excellent solution.”

Millions of Americans agree — including others recovering from addiction, people trying to cut down on their drinking and the rising number of young adults forgoing alcohol altogether.

They’ve fueled a booming industry. Recent research shows that drinking less, or nothing at all, is a much healthier way to go. Alcohol has been linked to cancers, injuries and a host of other problems.

Bartender Shelby Campos mixes a nonalcoholic beverage – or mocktail – at the nonalcoholic Good News Bar, Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Still, health experts say nonalcoholic beverages aren’t for everyone, especially if they might trigger cravings for alcohol. These so-called NA drinks are meant to mimic alcohol in many ways, such as appearance, smell and taste.

“It’s important to recognize that these are probably not one-size-fits-all products,” said researcher Molly Bowdring of Stanford University. “You might see peers or friends or family members use them and have no problem with them, but it really comes back to your own individual experience.”

‘Zebra striping’ helps cut back on booze

Retail sales of nonalcoholic wine, beer and spirits surged to $823 million last year. That’s according to market research firm NielsenIQ, which says more than nine in 10 NA customers also buy alcohol.

“They’re wanting to not necessarily drink during the week, or they’re wanting to switch out at a particular occasion,” said Marcos Salazar of the Adult Non-Alcoholic Beverage Association. “So they may have an alcoholic beverage and then an adult nonalcoholic beverage. That’s called zebra striping … and it kind of extends the night.”

Bartender Shelby Campos mixes a nonalcoholic beverage – or mocktail – at the nonalcoholic Good News Bar, Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Retiree Ann Kopp Mitchell, who recently tasted various NA beverages at Monday Morning Bottle Shop in San Diego, does a version of this.

“If I want a glass of wine with my dinner, I don’t feel guilty. I can enjoy that glass of wine. And if I wanna have a spirit because we’re celebrating someone’s birthday, or champagne, I will do that. But I’ll only have one, and then let it go, and then maybe go to a nonalcoholic,” she said. “It’s a way of continuing with that social pattern of drinking that I enjoy.”

While a typical beer has about 5% alcohol by volume, NA drinks are only allowed to have up to 0.5%, about the same as a ripe banana. People sometimes pick them when they don’t want to be intoxicated, like before exercise or driving.

More mocktails on the menu is a positive health trend — but watch the sugar

An online survey Bowdring conducted with colleagues found that the vast majority of people who drink both beverages say NA drinks help them reduce their alcohol use.

That makes their growing popularity a positive trend overall, said Dr. Joseph Lee, CEO of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, an addiction treatment and advocacy organization.

Bartender Shelby Campos mixes a nonalcoholic beverage – or mocktail – at the nonalcoholic Good News Bar, Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

“More and more when I go to restaurants, mocktails are just offered, like they’re on the menu and it’s just part of the norm now,” said Lee, an expert in psychiatry and addiction medicine. “Those are really healthy things to see on a broader public health level.”

But there is a catch: Some drinks, like mocktails made with soda and sweet syrups, have high levels of sugar. The American Heart Association recommends limiting added sugars to no more than about six teaspoons a day for women and nine teaspoons a day for men. A 12-ounce can of soda on its own contains 10 teaspoons.

Who should be wary of NA beverages?

The picture gets murkier for people with drinking problems.

Those entering treatment for alcohol use disorder say they’ve had mixed success using NA beverages to reduce or stop their drinking, Bowdring said.

“They do contain a lot of the alcohol-related cues,” she said. “Because they are so similar to alcohol, it could be that they actually trigger craving for full strength alcohol and may lead people to revert to alcohol use.”

Bartender Shelby Campos adorns the top of a nonalcoholic beverage – or mocktail – with fruit and a flower at the nonalcoholic Good News Bar, Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

When Denzer first got sober seven years ago, she and her friends avoided drinking NA beverages.

“We were pretty opposed to it because we were like, ‘Well, this tastes like beer and we’re a year sober, and so we’re going to associate that taste with actual alcohol,’” said Denzer, who was treated at Hazelden Betty Ford. “As time went on, we became more open to it.”

But it’s not for everyone, she said, “particularly for people who are either newer in recovery or who are on shaky ground.”

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Experts agreed that NA drinks are more appropriate for those further along in recovery.

“Everyone’s journey is going to be a little bit different,” Bowdring said. “I encourage folks to just sort of be aware of how these drinks are impacting them.”

That’s the bottom line, even for those who aren’t dealing with alcoholism.

You should have “an honest appraisal, without judgment, about your own health risk in much the same way that most people can look at their family history and gauge their risk for everything from diabetes to breast cancer,” Lee said. “What it comes down to is: You really need to know yourself.”

Video journalist Javier Arciga contributed to this story from San Diego.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

In California’s Moss Landing, more than 1,000 people were forced to evacuate in January when one of the largest storage facilities for lithium-ion batteries in the world caught fire. Days later, the toxic metals nickel, cobalt and manganese were found at a nearby estuary, Elkhorn Slough, in unusually high concentrations. One county supervisor called it a “wake-up call” for battery safety in the ongoing push for sustainable energy. Local residents sued several companies involved with the batteries and their storage, claiming negligence and that the lithium-ion batteries being stored there were “prone to thermal instability.”

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Though the federal government deems lithium-ion batteries “generally safe,” law enforcement agencies periodically remind the public of their risks, such as fires and explosions. But one company opening its new headquarters in Alameda, California, says they have created the “next generation” of batteries that are safer and will revolutionize industries from portable devices to electric vehicles.

While most batteries use a liquid lithium-ion core that can leak and combust, Anthro Energy’s solid-state batteries use a patented technology to solidify the core. The result is a non-flammable, semi-solid battery with 35% more energy density than traditional batteries, and is resistant to leaking, warping and combustion, Anthro Energy claims. According to a review from the University of California, Riverside, solid-state batteries are safer than their traditional counterparts.

Anthro is the latest technology company to set up shop on Bay Farm Island in Alameda, which is gaining a reputation for fostering innovation. It’s also attracting the attention of venture capital investors seeking to get in on the ground floor of the company’s 31,000-square-foot facility that will produce half a million Anthro battery cells annually.

“What we’re doing is building advanced technology that redefines what’s possible for lithium-ion batteries,” Anthro Energy CEO David Mackanic said to an audience of employees and investors this month. “We’re building a highly-scalable platform that can respond to rapidly accelerating electrification demands across virtually every industry.”

David Mackanic, CEO of Anthro Energy, shows a lab for lithium-ion battery development to Congresswoman Latiffa Simon during a tour of the Anthro Energy headquarters in Alameda, Calif., on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)

Producing solid-state batteries at an industrial scale has been a challenge for technologists since the earliest solid-state lithium-ion batteries were invented in the 1970s, according to the 2020 book “Advances in Supercapacitor and Supercapattery (sic).” The new batteries were more expensive to produce than their liquid core counterparts, which stymied commercial adoption.

However, the growth of battery-dependent industries like portable electronics, green energy storage and electric vehicles over the past 15 years has fueled a race to create safer, more efficient batteries, Anthro’s Chief Technology Officer Joe Papp said.

In that time, California’s Bay Area has come to lead the charge on battery research and development with start-up companies like Blue Current and QuantumScape seeking to produce a commercially viable solid-state battery.

“The difference is that they are redoing the entire manufacturing process,” Papp said. “We saw that they had been struggling at this for 10-plus years and couldn’t get the manufacturing right. So we were like, ‘OK, what can we do that fits into the existing manufacturing infrastructure but still gives some of these benefits?’”

Anthro’s approach has helped them secure $43 million in federal awards from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Department of Energy, in addition to $5 million from the California Energy Commission. At the grand opening this month, Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-12) said the “young spirit” of Anthro and its co-founders shows remarkable potential.

“Anthro is going to power Alameda,” Simon said. “We want to be able to breathe clean air and empower the next generation of folks who understand that innovation doesn’t have to be an attack on our environment.”

Congresswoman Lateefah Simon takes a closer look at an electrotype used for lithium-ion battery development during a tour of the Anthro Energy headquarters in Alameda, Calif., on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)

Four years ago, Mackanic and Papp took weeks to create 10 grams of the Proteus electrolyte in the corner of a small lab. Now, Anthro’s new manufacturing facility will allow the company to produce it at 1,000 times the previous capacity, enabling the production of up to 500,000 battery cells per year, Mackanic said.

The grand opening was proof that the next generation of battery technology can also be manufactured at scale on U.S. soil, Mackanic said.

Mackanic sees the application of Anthro’s batteries across myriad industries, meeting the critical needs of modern technology.

“Batteries are changing the way we collect data, we communicate with each other, the way we move around, and the way we power our electrical grid. Building better batteries to accelerate this transition is one of the defining challenges in our time,” Mackanic said. “Quantitatively, this facility represents the full scale-up and production capacity for Anthro, producing enough advanced electrons and advanced battery cells to power millions of devices with this next-generation technology.”

By Christine Benz of Morningstar for Associated Press

I was chatting with a friend the other day about his retirement — possibly an early one. At age 60, he has worked hard and invested well — and he’s burned out.

He’s received wonderful guidance from his financial advisor, with whom he’d discussed the viability of his investment portfolio. But as he and I talked, it was clear that the key inputs were more nuanced than his portfolio value and asset allocation. There were lifestyle decisions, too.

Will you continue to work in some fashion?

Working longer wasn’t my friend’s first choice. But continuing to earn an income would help him worry less about his portfolio’s ability to last.

Even if he downshifted into a lower-paying or part-time position and couldn’t save as much, he’d still be forestalling portfolio withdrawals. So, when he did fully retire, he could spend without worry.

It would also help him delay Social Security. If he continued to work in a position with healthcare benefits, he could avoid paying health insurance out of pocket until Medicare coverage kicks in. And as much as his job has been exhausting him, he’s had a wonderful career and his professional life seems intertwined with his identity.

Ultimately, my friend decided to pursue a reduced schedule. At 30 hours a week, he could still maintain his healthcare coverage.

For someone else, a clean break could make sense, especially if continuing to work has implications for physical or mental health.

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What lifestyle changes will you make?

We also talked through whether my friend’s spending would change when he retired.

He owns a condo in an expensive part of the US and has considered moving back to the Midwest when he retires. This would free up funds that he could plow into his portfolio but would also take him away from his social network and the center of his industry.

Staying put seems like the right call for now, especially as continuing to work is in the mix.

How flexible can you be with your spending?

This is a major dimension in our retirement income research.

If a retiree can tighten spending when the portfolio takes on losses, that improves the portfolio’s ability to last. The reason is simple: Lower portfolio spending during and after losses leaves more to recover with the market.

Our research also shows that flexible spending strategies increase total lifetime spending relative to strategies that maintain static inflation-adjusted spending, like the 4% guideline.

My friend is willing to adjust his spending as he goes. He’s not a big spender, and years of work travel mean that he’s not interested in expensive globe-trotting, unlike many new retirees.

When Social Security comes online for him at age 70, he’ll be able to adjust spending. It’s also worth noting that retiree spending tends to trend down over time, though some retirees have high healthcare-related costs toward the ends of their lives.

How do you feel about lifetime spending versus leaving a bequest?

Do you want to maximize spending (and/or giving) during your lifetime, or do you aim to leave a bequest?

That was the idea behind the “spending/ending ratio” in our retirement spending research. We wanted to help retirees see whether retirement spending strategies helped front-load lifetime spending or facilitated portfolio leftovers for bequests. Strategies like the guardrails strategy tend to encourage lifetime spending, whereas more rigid ones tend to leave more leftovers.

My friend is single and doesn’t have children, so a bequest isn’t a priority. That underscores the value of taking steps to enlarge lifetime income rather than using a more rigid strategy that could cause him to underspend.

This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance.

Christine Benz is the director of personal finance and retirement planning at Morningstar.

It is the richest of times, all apologies to Dickens, and it is the most unequal of times. The difference in wealth and income between the top 1% and the rest of America tends to get more attention, but one of the more striking wealth gaps is generational: Older Americans are far richer than young Americans.

The good news is that most Americans, of all ages, have never had more wealth. But estimates in new research from Edward Wolff, the economist at New York University who has long studied wealth in America, show a large and growing gap in net worth between Americans over age 75 and those under 35. No wonder everyone hates the Boomers.

Several economic trends have contributed to this divergence. One is the increase in stock ownership: In 1989, only 32% of Americans (of all ages) owned stock; by 2022, 58% did. This is in large part because 401(k)-type plans became more common and, according to the paper, displaced more liquid and less remunerative forms of saving such as checking accounts.

Boomers were the first generation to be offered 401(k)s at work when they were young, and they have contributed to their wealth in retirement. Because 401(k)s are cheaper for employers to offer than defined-benefit plans, more people have them, and more have retirement benefits, period. According to the paper, stocks as a share of Americans’ retirement portfolios more than doubled between 1983 and 2022, mostly because the market did so well — the S&P 500 has risen nearly 20-fold since 1989. It has been a good time to own stocks.

The other big change is the increase in home ownership. Between 1983 and 2022, it went up by 5.2 percentage points, to 67.4%. The paper estimates home ownership rates were flat for those under the age of 35, but older Americans became more likely to own their home. The homeownership rate of Americans aged 65 or older increased more than 7 percentage points.

Meanwhile, as with equities, the value of real estate has increased since the 1980s. This is due in part to limited housing relative to a growing population, as well as to better, bigger homes with more amenities. Then again, mortgage debt also increased for all age groups, especially for young people attempting to buy their first home. This greater debt is contributing to the growing inequality between age groups.

Inequality is often called the major economic issue of our era. But when the inequality is between the young and old, or within a family, it may be less of a problem. For one, the olds did not necessarily get rich at the expense of the youngs. For another, this inequality may simply reflect an ownership society in which more people save for their retirement and own their homes. Such a world would be more unequal because older people have had more years to accumulate wealth and enjoy the benefits of compound returns.

To put it another way: The young people of today may yet have their time. There is certainly no guarantee that the next 40 years will be as prosperous as the last, but there are reasons to think they will. Some of the young may also inherit some of their elders’ money, too.

There is, I acknowledge, a seductive zero-sum view of this wealth gap. It goes something like this: First, older people benefited from buying houses when they were cheaper (though mortgage rates were higher). But there is a finite supply of housing, and prices went up, pricing out younger buyers.

Meanwhile, a lot of this wealth accumulation occurred as the government took on more debt to pay benefits or lower taxes, and that can’t continue as Social Security and Medicare costs mount. Younger Americans will have to pay all this debt, or it will weigh down the economy — either way, their dotage will be worse than the Boomers’.

Of course, the wealth gap does raise the question of why the elderly are the beneficiaries of so much government largesse. It is also worth noting that young people today may be worse off relative to older Americans than ever before.

Nevertheless, today’s young people are better off, in absolute terms, than the young people of the past — notably the Boomers when they were young. Median and average net worth have increased over time for all age groups, especially in the last five years. These may be small comforts if your grandmother is pricing you out of your neighborhood. But it’s always important, in both economic and familial matters, to keep a sense of perspective.

Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

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