Gatorade always wins?
NOT!
JUST ADDING SUGAR TO WATER IS AS GOOD OR BETTER THAN ENERGY DRINKS
Wherever you are in the world, it's virtually impossible to avoid the avalanche from a well-designed media campaign urging... no... compelling you to buy and consume as much of various types of energy drinks as possible. It hits you almost subliminally, and certainly explosively, from radio ads, TV spectaculars with extreme sports and monster machines, product placement in movies and TV shows, Internet sites, social networks, billboards, subways, trains, cars, and of course SEX. They titillate you into joining the crowd sweating to the oldies, with one media reinforcing the other. You can't avoid them like you can't avoid Global Warming. Everybody in Lycra skin suits, panting and sweating with those high-tech machines, are guzzling them down like nobody's business.
And that's what it's about: Big Business... and Big Money out of your pocket. And the unstated message from it all is that you will perish... you will not be among the winner's circle, you will fail... unless you consume it.
And yes, of course your body must replace those electrolytes, and of course your muscles and liver will need to replace burned-up carbohydrates. And here's where it gets interesting. The liver, and, well, also your gut. How do you best consume, digest and then store carbohydrates in the liver so your body operates at as lean clean peaceful machine?
Many have assumed that the more expensive supplements and drinks with the monosacharides glucose or fructose (or combinations of the two) worked most efficiently in the body under strenuous physical exertion. But science has discovered that this is not the case. It turns out that "Although an increasing number of sports-performance drinks designed to provide energy during exercise now use sucrose, or mixtures of glucose and fructose, many still rely on glucose alone. The researchers warn that such glucose-only drinks could produce gut discomfort and suggest sucrose-based alternatives, or sugar in water, can help make exercise easier."
In a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary study published on Dec. 15, 2015 by the American Journal of Physiology - Endocrinology & Metabolism, something interesting about basic metabolism during prolonged endurance-type exercise was tested and confirmed. The study -- headed by Dr. Javier t. Gonzales of the University of Bath and faculty at Northumria University's Dept of Health and Life Sciences (UK) -- has added to the body of evidence that the disaccharide, sucrose (plain old table sugar), actually works best.
And to deepen this understanding, we go to a recent Science Alert article which simplifies and summarizes a large body of scientific evidence.
JUST ADDING SUGAR TO WATER IS AS GOOD OR BETTER THAN ENERGY DRINKS, STUDY FINDS
(click the image above for full article)
"Researchers at the University of Bath tested the effects of both sucrose- and glucose-based drinks on long-distance cyclists to compare how good they were at preventing the decline of carbohydrate stores in the body's liver glycogen levels.
"The carbohydrate stores in our liver are vitally important when it comes to endurance exercise as they help us to maintain a stable blood sugar level," said lead researcher Javier Gonzalez. "However, whilst we have a relatively good understanding of the changes in our muscle carbohydrate stores with exercise and nutrition, we know very little about optimising liver carbohydrate stores during and after exercise."
Both sucrose – which in its refined form is the sugar many of us keep in our cupboards – and glucose are carbohydrates that are known as 'simple sugars'. They're quickly absorbed by the body to produce energy.
However, from a molecular perspective, they're quite different. Glucose is a monosaccharide, as is another sugar, fructose. When glucose and fructose combine, they make sucrose, which is classified as a disaccharide.
While many sports and energy drinks use sucrose, some use mixtures of glucose and fructose, and some purely use glucose. To your tongue, these all taste the same (ie. sweet and rather excellent), but when they're broken down by the body, their differences become pronounced.
The molecular structure of these sugars affects the rate at which we can absorb them in the gut, with sucrose being faster. This means that glucose-only sports drinks can actually produce gut discomfort, leading the researchers to recommend simply stirring some sugar into water as a preferable method of making exercise easier to bear.
While all sugars will help restore your energy levels, it's the rate at which they do so that becomes all-important when you're engaged in demanding exercise – especially if performance-based results are important.
"We [found] that the exercise felt easier, and the gut comfort of the cyclists was better, when they ingested sucrose compared to glucose," said Gonzalez. "This suggests that, when your goal is to maximise carbohydrate availability, sucrose is probably a better source of carbohydrate to ingest than glucose."
***
So let's look at the economics
Do you really want to pay between $500 to $1500 a year for a couple of energy drinks a day, 5X a week, or does $41 make more sense?
In quickly calculating the cheapest prices for a wide variety of energy drinks per fluid ounce from Wal-Mart by buying bulk, it's just over 6 cents. So if you're like many people who will sweat it out and consume 2 energy drinks of 16 fl. oz each day you work out, the cost would average to about $2. If you have a routine where you exercise and consume energy drinks 5 times a week, that comes to $10. Multiply that by 52 and you get $520. And that's for the cheaper, less marketed products.
But most people who visit a sports center or go on running/cycling tours with friends and family buy this stuff at its highest retail cost, where the cost-differential between exspensive brands at a corner store or the fitness center can be three times the cheap bulk cost at Wal-Mart. These calculations were derived by spot-checking several sources and controlling it at Slideshare and is also a generally known phenomenom of the industry. So if you consume two energy drinks 5 times a week from a sports center or a Seven-11, your cost would be over $1500 per year.
Science and most of the world uses the metric system, and the US is not yet on board with that rational simplicity. But 500 ml is close enough to a 16 oz bottle of energy drink. Diluting the recommended 8 grams of sugar (sucrose) per 100 ml of water comes to 45 grams of sugar per 16 ounces, times two, equals 90 grams of sugar, which is roughly 3 ounces per day. Duplicating the above calculation to find the yearly consumption, we get 780 ounces of sugar. Sugar is sold by the pound in the US, which is 16 ounces. Hence, we get a value of apx. 49 pounds per year. That sounds like a lot, but is not inconsistent with the analysis from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which indicates that Americans per capita consume 156 pounds of added sugar per year.
Wal-Mart sells a 4 pound bag of sugar for $3.50, which is roughly 90 cents per pound. That brings the total per-annum cost of the sugar to apx. $40.
Now we have to calculate the cost of the water. One thing to keep in mind is that according to Business Insider, bottled water can cost almost 2000 times more than tap water when consumed in 16 oz containers.
So let's calculate the tap water price for crying out loud, since many bottled water tests indicate that tap water wins. And this includes New York City
NYC sells tap water at $9.87 per 100 liquid cubic feet. Let's call that $10. 100 lqd cubic feet equals about 750 gallons, which makes the per-gallon cost 0.13 cents. In controlling that figure, Reuters bears that up. The average price of a gallon of tap water in America lies between 0.1 to 0.6 cents per gallon. Using the baseline of consuming two 16 oz drinks per day, times 5 per week, times 52 per year, we get a value of 8320 oz of water consumed per year, which is 65 gallons. That's about 85 cents per year.
Add $40 for the sugar to 85 cents for the water... well, let's call it $41; there's wear and tear and cleaning costs for the water bottle.
Do you really want to pay between $500 to $1500 a year for that energy drink, or does $41 make more sense?
And if you are additionally seeking a safe hit of caffeine, just make a cup at home before going out. It'll only cost you 8 cents if you use a well-known freeze dried. The high-caffeine energy drinks out there aren't delicately brewed with gourmet beans. Also, energy drinks with caffeine can be dangerous
In a future article related to this, we will explore the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the bottled water industry.
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