Do Sports Drinks Actually Work?

05 Aug, 2012

by David Tuller, via AlterNet.org

Sports drinks. Image source:  Flickr, Clean Wal-MartJust in time for the Summer Olympics in London, a top sci­ence jour­nal has issued a blis­ter­ing indict­ment of the sports drink indus­try. According to the series of reports from BMJ (for­merly British Medical Journal), the mak­ers of drinks like Gatorade and Powerade have spent mil­lions in research and mar­ket­ing in recent decades to per­suade sports and med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, not to men­tion the rest of us suck­ers, that a pri­mal instinct—the sen­sa­tion of thirst—is an unre­li­able guide for decid­ing when to drink. We’ve also been bat­tered with the notion that bor­ing old water is just not good enough for pre­vent­ing dehydration.

I’ve been as sus­cep­ti­ble to this scam as any­one else; I knew, or thought I knew, that if I’m thirsty after my half-hour go-round on the ellip­ti­cal trainer, it means I was under­hy­drated to begin with. So for years I’ve been try­ing to remem­ber to ignore my lack of thirst and make myself drink before work­ing out. Not any more.

The BMJ‘s pack­age of seven papers on sports per­for­mance prod­ucts packs a col­lec­tive wal­lop. The cen­ter­piece is a well-reported inves­ti­ga­tion of the long-standing finan­cial ties between the mak­ers of Gatorade (PepsiCo), Powerade (Coca-Cola, an offi­cial Olympic spon­sor), and Lucozaid (GlaxoSmithKline) with sports asso­ci­a­tions, med­ical groups, and aca­d­e­mic researchers.

It should come as no great sur­prise that the find­ings and rec­om­men­da­tions that have emerged through these affil­i­a­tions have tended to include alarm­ing warn­ings about dehy­dra­tion and elec­trolyte imbalance—warnings that con­ve­niently pro­mote the finan­cial inter­ests of the cor­po­rate sponsors. 

And who knew there was some­thing called the Gatorade Sports Science Institute? According to the BMJ inves­ti­ga­tion, “one of GSSI’s great­est suc­cesses was to under­mine the idea that the body has a per­fectly good home­o­sta­tic mech­a­nism for detect­ing and respond­ing to dehydration—thirst.” The arti­cle quotes the institute’s direc­tor as hav­ing declared, based on lit­tle reli­able evi­dence, that “the human thirst mech­a­nism is an inac­cu­rate short-term indi­ca­tor of fluid needs.”

Another study in the BMJ pack­age finds that the European Food Safety Authority, which is autho­rized to assess health claims in food labels and ads, has relied on a seri­ously flawed review process in approv­ing state­ments related to sports drinks. A third study reports that hun­dreds of per­for­mance claims made on web­sites about sports prod­ucts, includ­ing nutri­tional sup­ple­ments and train­ing equip­ment as well as drinks, are largely based on ques­tion­able data, and some­times no appar­ent data at all.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at AlterNet.org.

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