A recent expose from 538 explains why sports drinks are unnecessary.
538: You Don’t Need Sport Drinks to Stay Hydrated
Key points:
- Though sports drinks are highly marketed, there is little scientific evidence behind their claims
- Water is generally better for most people
- Hyponatremia can be provoked by drinking too much fluids
A few excerpts:
- “As it turns out, if you apply evidence-based methods, 40 years of sports drinks research does not seemingly add up to much,” Carl Heneghan and his colleagues at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine wrote in a 2012 analysis published in the British medical journal BMJ. ..
- There has never been a case of a runner dying of dehydration on a marathon course, but since 1993, at least five marathoners have died from hyponatremia they developed during a race. At the 2002 Boston Marathon, researchers from Harvard Medical School took blood samples from 488 marathoners after the finish. The samples showed that 13 percent of the runners had diagnosable hyponatremia…Athletes who develop hyponatremia during exercise usually get there by drinking too much because they’ve been conditioned to think they need to drink beyond thirst
My take: Drink when you are thirsty. Exceptional talent and hard work, not sports drinks, are the key if you want to “Be Like Mike.”
Related blog posts:
- Do you think fruit drinks are healthy?
- Why D5 1/2NS was the Right Choice in the 1950s! | gutsandgrowth
- What’s critical to you | gutsandgrowth
- We Still Have More to Learn” | gutsandgrowth
- Has Your Hospital Restricted Quarter-Normal Saline …
Joshua Tree at Joshua Tree National Park
