How are sport drinks supposed to hydrate you more than drinking water?
In: Biology
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The marketing around them is intentionally misleading. They do not hydrate you more, they hydrate you better, per their definition of better. Sports drinks may contain a more strict set of minerals, more sugar sugar and performance enhancers like caffeine then regular mineral water. And that may arguably be better then regular mineral water as you get in the faucet.
You know how you retain more water if you eat very salty food for a day or two? Water follows salt. Let me explain:
Suppose you’ve been running a marathon in hot weather and lost a lot of sweat (water & salt). When you drink a sports drink (water & salt), and it gets to your kidneys, the kidneys try to retain that salt you just lost— and water follows the salt. They’ll try to retain plain water too, but the effect is greater if salt is present, because there’s the water transport plus the salt-and-water-follows transport.
(*using salt as shorthand for electrolytes sodium, potassium, chloride. Don’t @ me about botching renal physiology, I too am 5.)
They don’t. What sports drinks are supposed to do is replace minerals/salts/electrolytes (different words for the same stuff) that you may have lost during intense physical exercise. They also have sugar to replace the calories you burn during the same activity. Unless you are an elite athlete in the middle of an actual competition, you do not need a sports drink (even then, the evidence is pretty sparse that they help). A normal diet has more than enough minerals for even the most work-out obsessed individual. Even if you exclusively drink distilled water, there will be more than enough salt in your diet to keep you going.
There is a recent episode of the podcast Decoder Ring that goes into hydration as a marketing tool for sport drinks and bottle water. Worth a listen.
It doesn’t hydrate you. Sports drinks are for people who’ve depleted their salt. Salt helps your body absorb water. Without salt, the body has a tough time taking water and you just piss it out. That’s why you’re supposed to drink one bottle of Gatorade and two bottles of water. I work construction in the heat and humidity. People who say only athletes need to drink a Gatorade should do some big jobs doing asphalt or concrete in 95° weather with 90% humidity, not get a break for an entire day, then say you shouldn’t drink it. It’s necessary for many people as it might be their best bet to getting a little extra salt and sugar.
One of the primary things lost through perspiration other that water is electrolytes (salts). Sports drinks all provided electrolytes to rebalance salts in your body.
They don’t. Infact it is worse at hydrating you. That said they do have salts in them so if you are running all day they are good (minus the sugar obviously) because you loose salts when you sweat and it will help replenish that. Unless you are working out hard for hours on end just go with water.
American companies will do anything to make profits even if the products they sell are harmful to the consumer.
The original Gatorade, (the real stuff athletes drink on the sidelines, not the sugared up stuff from the corner store,) supposed came about from collecting and analyzing the sweat of NFL players. Gatorade just took the chemical analysis and reproduced it at volume. Under the theory that you just put everything back in that you’re losing. Mass produced sweat with added food coloring…
Milk is another example. Nature is pretty good at repurposing existing stuff. The same holds true with milk. It’s just sweat glands that are able to add extra fats and whatnot to boost the nutritional content of the stuff. That’s where you got the craze a few years back of chocolate milk being the best energy drink of all. Basically cow Gatorade that naturally contained fat and the chocolate added even more sugar…
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