(Don’t) eat like a pro

A couple of years ago, when my daughter Sandy was in fifth grade, she fell in love with Gatorade. A couple of times a week, she’d beg me for a few dollars so she could walk to the bodega a block from our apartment in Brooklyn and buy a 20-ounce bottle of the Cool Blue “flavor.” (I said no. Usually.) Her craving seemed to have erupted from nowhere, but she told me it had come from seeing other kids drink it. Which kids? “The sporty kids,” she said.

Frankly, I understood the appeal. I’m a runner, and after a sweaty Sunday trot of 10 to 14 miles, there’s little more satisfying than popping into a bodega, pulling a Gatorade from the cooler, and chugging it on the spot. After all, Gatorade, now owned by PepsiCo, has been engineered for precisely this purpose: It was invented in 1965 as a way to replace the fluids and nutrients — sodium, potassium, magnesium, sugar, and carbohydrates — that the University of Florida’s football team (the Gators, of course) sweated out during practice and games. Once the scientists and marketers added tasty flavors, the innovation took off as “the beverage of champions,” launching a whole new category of performance beverages that Fortune Business Insights predicts will grow to $36.35 billion in 2028. 

And as sports and fitness evolved over the past several decades from niche endeavors to popular pastimes, that category itself spawned a host of others, from protein powders to energy gels and beyond, all designed to enhance high-level athletic performance. These are perhaps the purest form of ultraprocessed foods, delivery devices for the highly calibrated nutrients required by serious athletes, from high-performing amateurs to professional elites. Beginning with those Florida Gators and continuing through the past decade of shrinking marathon times, these nutritional innovations have helped generations of athletes win games, break records, and stay healthy. But somewhere along the way, they began to appeal to — and were marketed to — kids like Sandy.

As a 10-year-old who liked to run around and play, Sandy was fairly active, but her actual athletic endeavors were limited to a weekly swimming lesson, attended only reluctantly. She did not need 140 calories of Gatorade, including 270 milligrams of sodium and 34 grams of added sugars.

But Sandy was like much of America — and, increasingly, the rest of the world — in its thirst for sports drinks and sports-related nutrition. From May 2023 to May 2024, Gatorade sold $7.1 billion worth of its product, according to the Chicago-based research firm Circana, and it’s difficult to imagine that it all went to serious athletes, especially considering that another $3.8 billion was spent on Gatorade’s competitors BodyArmor, Powerade, Prime, and Electrolit, all of which you can purchase at just about any corner store, gas station, or Walmart and not, say, in a shop dedicated to running, cycling, or other high-intensity sports. And that doesn’t even count Celsius, Monster Energy, Red Bull, and other not-exactly-sports energy drinks consumed in bulk by people who don’t really need them.

You will not be surprised to learn this creates real public-health consequences. A 2023 meta-analysis of 15 articles about the health effects of regular sports drink consumption concluded that non-athletes were better off drinking water: “Excessive consumption of sports drinks has been associated with overweight and obesity, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and tobacco use,” the authors wrote. And they didn’t just stop there. Also on the list were cavities (thanks, added sugars!) and intestinal discomfort among those who consumed the drinks regularly. 

The authors’ recommendations were unequivocal: “In non-athletes, especially children and adolescents, sports drinks should not be a daily beverage option and should be consumed only occasionally.” Water, meanwhile, “is usually sufficient to maintain adequate hydration. Therefore, sports drinks should not be considered healthy food in general.”

The ironies are overwhelming: Drinks and gels created to improve the performance of athletes are harming the health of non-athletes. Or maybe it’s an irony of human biology, one that we confront on a distressingly regular basis — that consuming too much of the otherwise healthful nutrients that our bodies need to thrive winds up damaging those very bodies.

Another, more pungent irony is that those of us who do engage in intensive exercise can hardly imagine consuming sports drinks or energy gels in a non-exercise scenario. Let’s start with the taste: It’s rarely good. This goes for the sports drinks, which generally don’t have flavors so much as colors — blue, greenish, whitish, red — all of which hit the palate as a kind of watery, unidentifiable fruity sweetness.

And it goes double for the energy gels, those (usually) 100-calorie packets of carbs, electrolytes, caffeine, and other nutrients beloved of endurance athletes, who guzzle them every 30 to 45 minutes during races and long training excursions. In 2017, when I was the digital director at Runner’s World, I organized a taste test and ranking of all 27 flavors of GU, one of the more popular brands of gel. We tried them all, from Tastefully Nude (“Like day-old marshmallows,” said Betty Wong Ortiz, at the time the editor-in-chief, “sweet without any real taste”) and Salted Watermelon to Lemon Sublime and (my favorite) Jet Blackberry. And while I did briefly entertain the idea of using Campfire S’mores — the “naturally flavored” No. 1 pick with 450 milligrams of amino acids, 60 milligrams of sodium, and zero caffeine — to make actual s’mores, few of us seriously considered consuming gels outside of a run. 

And that’s just the taste: Gels, whether caffeinated or not, are often associated with gastrointestinal distress in runners. That is, they make us poop, in ways and in places that are unpleasant to ponder. 

So, naturally, companies have sprung up to alleviate that through science. The most noted is Maurten, based in Sweden, which for years has provided the “fueling solution” for Eliud Kipchoge, whom many consider the greatest distance runner of all time. Maurten’s innovation was something called a hydrogel, which Outside Magazine columnist Alex Hutchinson wrote is used to surround a carbohydrate, allowing it “to exit from your stomach into your small intestine more quickly, reducing the chances of GI upset and speeding its absorption into the bloodstream where it can be used as fuel for your muscles.” Apparently, according to one study of the hydrogel, this truly works. Which is wonderful news for distance runners and cyclists, not to mention for Iris Ventures, a growth equity fund that in 2024 invested €20 million (around $21 million) in Maurten. 

But, you may be asking, how does Maurten taste? Much like Tastefully Nude GU: lightly, unplaceably sweet. (GU no longer makes this flavor.)

Meanwhile, the gel company Spring Energy went the other direction. Turned off by the ultraprocessed, sugar-based gels that dominated the marketplace, Spring, in 2021, introduced a high-carb energy gel made from applesauce, basmati rice, and sweet potatoes. Each 54-gram packet claimed to provide 180 calories, only a smidge more energy-dense than GU’s Campfire S’Mores but made at least from actual food. The company named it Awesome Sauce.

Then, in late 2023, the citizen scientists came for it. On Reddit and elsewhere, runners, retailers, and coaches performed analyses that showed Awesome Sauce had perhaps one-third of its vaunted carbohydrates, making it a far less impactful nutrition source than its competitors. In May 2024, Spring Energy pulled it from the market. (Not long after, Spring Energy brought back a slightly reformulated version.)

A lot of runners just aren’t paying attention to this stuff. “Newer runners especially,” said my former Runner’s World colleague Heather Mayer Irvine, then the food and nutrition editor and also the author of The Runner’s World Vegetarian Cookbook, “overestimate how much they need in terms of calories, and in terms of, you know, sports drinks, sugar — they’re mostly all sugar. And, yeah, when you’re out there doing like an 18-mile run in the middle of summer, you’re going to need calories and electrolytes. 

Her general rule of thumb? If the run is 60 minutes or more, you’ll want fuel along the way. Otherwise, skip the gels and drink water when you get home.

Of all the scientific advancements and studies on this topic in recent years, one stands out as my favorite: this one that shows that merely rinsing your mouth with a sports drink can improve athletic performance. You don’t need to swallow; you don’t need to worry about gastrointestinal distress; you just need to swish and spit. You do need to use an actual carbohydrate-based drink; placebos didn’t have the same result.

So why aren’t we racers all swishing and spitting? I think it boils down to economics. The companies selling billions of dollars’ worth of sports drinks, or taking tens of millions in venture capital, likely can’t earn the same revenue off a few tablespoons of liquid you spit back onto the asphalt. (Despite the current TikTok vogue for gleeking, expectoration doesn’t make for good advertising.) And perhaps just as likely, the sports drink industrial complex needs legions of non-athletes to consume the products it has designed for elites in order to make those products affordable for serious amateurs like me. Remove too many people like my daughter Sandy from the equation, and the system cannot sustain itself.

Sandy, however, has moved on from Gatorade. Now in seventh grade, she hasn’t asked me for it in months, and I haven’t found half-empty bottles of Cool Blue lingering in the back of the fridge. When I asked her why Gatorade had fallen out of favor, she shrugged and told me: “There’s tastier drinks, I guess. Like Snapple.