Episode 1735 - Salty science

Alan Fredendall // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Fitness Athlete division leader Alan Fredendall discusses the science and practical application behind hydration & recovery drinks.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

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ALAN FREDENDALL Good morning, PT on ICE Daily Show. Happy Friday morning, I hope your day is off to a great start. My name is Alan, I have the pleasure of serving as our Chief Operating Officer here at ICE and the Division Leader here in our Fitness Athlete Division. It is Fitness Athlete Friday, it is the best darn day of the week. Today we're gonna be talking about salty science. No, we're not gonna be talking about how upset Drake fans are by how badly they're getting beaten by Kendrick Lamar's diss drops. We are talking about the new era of salt-based hydration and what that means and how that compares to previous eras of things you might be more familiar with. Gatorade, Powerade, those sorts of things. So today we're going to talk about the origin of hydration in recovery drinks. We're going to talk about the pros and cons of what we might call the first generation of those recovery drinks. And then we will move in and talk about the new era of sodium-based drinks that may or may not have any sugar included in them.

THE HISTORY OF RECOVERY DRINKS So recovery drinks really started as we know it a long time ago back in the 1960s, actually 1962 at the University of Florida. Researchers created a recovery drink for the Florida Gators. You now know that is Gatorade, A-D-E. Back then it was spelled Gator dash A-I-D like a band-aid, Gatorade. And this formula was rather simple. It was water, sodium, and some lemon juice. And when we look at the macronutrient breakdown of the original formula of Gatorade, if you're old enough, you may, even if you were a kid in the 80s or maybe even 90s, you remember it used to come in that glass bottle and it really had nothing in it. It had 50 calories total, it had 14 grams of carbohydrates, it had some sodium, and that was essentially it. And that was a 20 ounce bottle, 20 ounce serving. So a little bit of sugar, a little bit of sodium, and that was it. A lot of credit went to Gatorade in the 60s and 70s when the Florida Gators went on to win and many other collegiate and professional teams went on to win sporting events, they maybe sarcastically credited Gatorade with their success, and at that point Gatorade took off into orbit. That is very different from the Gatorade of today. The current formula of Gatorade is significantly different. It has a lot more calories, as you may be aware, that is primarily sugar. So for the same serving, a 20 ounce serving, a 20 ounce now plastic bottle that you might find in the store or the gas station, 160 calories, so over three times as much. caloric density, way more carbohydrates, three times the carbs, 42 grams of sugar, which is a lot. More sodium now, giving credit, 10 times more sodium, 300 milligrams of sodium, but also a lot more potassium, 90 milligrams of potassium. What's changed from the 60s to today? Pepsi bought Gatorade, Pepsi sells Gatorade, You may know Pepsi owning a lot of the snack brands and soda drinks that we are very familiar with. So it's not really surprising when you find out that Gatorade is now owned by Pepsi that it's just kind of pumped full of sugar and it's essentially turned into a soda drink.

THE CRITICISM OF SUGAR-BASED RECOVERY So that being said, what is the main criticism of Gatorade? as it relates to its functionality as a recovery drink or not. The first thing to consider is just looking at it from a molecular level, it's sugar water. The primary ingredient is sugar. It's a bunch of calories. Yes, it has a little bit of sodium. Yes, it has a little bit of potassium. But it is primarily sugar water. Now, we may think, okay, we know we sweat, we know we burn calories when we work out, surely we can put that sugar to good use. But it's really important to know that the majority of people drinking these drinks are perhaps not exercising at all. They might be sitting at a computer desk and or they may not be exercising to the level that they are losing that much sweat and that much glycogen from their system. Certainly somebody running, cycling, doing a long endurance activity, 90 minutes, 120 minutes, longer, running a marathon, ultramarathon, triathlon, Ironman, that sort of thing, that person does need to consume glycogen to keep their aerobic energy system running. But those folks just recreationally active, going to CrossFit for an hour, going to run a couple miles, working out in an air-conditioned gym where they may not be sweating at all, don't really need that amount of caloric replenishment and sugar during their workout to keep their workout intensity high. Go way back to episode 1552 of the PTA Nice Daily Show if you want to learn a little bit more about fueling during exercise, we talk about how the human body has about 400 grams of glycogen stored inside of it, inside of our muscles, and about another 100 grams in our liver. So we have the ability to go 90 to 120 minutes before we dig deep enough into those reserves that we need to consider drinking glycogen, drinking glucose to sustain our energy system. And again, the argument and the largest criticism, especially in the past 10 to 15 years or so of Gatorade and similar drinks Is it simply too much sugar? Some really good papers here. Zimmerman colleagues way back from 2012, sports drinks, not just sodas, drive up weights in teens, looking at 11,000 kids aged nine to 15 and finding that kids gained two pounds for every two years in which they drank a can of soda per day. So if they drink a can of soda per day for two years, they would have gained two pounds per year. If they drank two cans, they would have gained four pounds, three cans, six pounds, and so on. And so we say, yeah, Alan, we know that. We know soda is bad. But what is really, really, really interesting about this study is they also looked at sports drinks. They looked at things like Gatorade and Powerade. And this is kind of shocking that they found the same level of consumption, one bottle of a sports drink, two bottles of a sports drink, et cetera, following that same scheme for every one bottle consumed per day. kids gained three and a half pounds per year, two bottles per day, seven pounds, three bottles per day, so on and so forth, 10 and a half, 14, all the way up. And so, recognizing that these drinks actually contain as much or more sugar per ounce of basically table sugar than a can of soda, a can of Coca-Cola or Pepsi or something like that. I love the conclusion from this paper, sports drinks fly under the radar, The danger is that they're sold as part of a healthy and active lifestyle, and it's just part of something you do being active. Most kids are not getting the two hours of high-intensity exercise needed every day to justify refueling with a sports drink. And so, finding that because they have so much more sugar per serving, and that it is so much more acceptable to drink a Gatorade versus to drink a Mountain Dew or something like that. Shout out to Brian Melrose, the Mountain Dew King. that these kind of fly under the radar, and there might be kids that drink these every day in their lunch. They might drink one for lunch and one after school, after playing outside, and it's not surprising that we're racking our brains to figure out why we have a childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic when it's