Hundreds of gallons of sports drinks will be poured down the throats of 7,000 runners pounding the streets of the city in the Baltimore Marathon this Saturday. Will those drinks do as promised, help make those 26 miles, 385 yards go by easily and painlessly?
Well, yes and no.
To understand the ambiguity, go back to the beginnings of what is now a $2.6 billion-a-year business. In the mid-1960s, Dr. Robert Cade, a researcher at the University of Florida, looked into an interesting question: Why don't football players have to relieve themselves during games?
He determined that it wasn't because it was so hard to unlace the football pants of that era, or because the coach's stare is too intimidating, but rather because players, at least in Florida, sweat so much during games they have no excess fluids.
So Cade devised a drink that would replace what the players were losing - a lot of water, a bit of salt and some other essential electrolytes - gave it a bit of sugar and lime flavor, put it in milk cartons and named it after the Florida mascot.
Gatorade was born. When the coach of Louisiana State University credited the drink with Florida's victory over his team, the legend was created.
Since then, Gatorade has become an American institution. Let others spray champagne to celebrate victories; in the National Football League, they dump Gatorade over the coach.
Now there is a legion of such drinks - Powerade, Energade, All Sport, Cytomax, Endurox, Exceed. There's even a local entry in this field, CeraSport, a Jessup-based company founded by medical researchers who are veterans of rehydration projects in the Third World. They claim that the "rice-based long chain carbohydrates" in their drink are better than the glucose-based sugars found in the others.
Some of these drinks aim for widespread appeal, others for just the serious athlete market with promises that various exotic ingredients will increase endurance and ease muscle burn.
Many of the scientific studies that form the basis for these claims are of dubious use. Few go down to the molecular level to really see what the drinks are doing in the muscles; most depend on the perceptions of the subjects.
Rarely do they meet the double blind standard demanded by first-class science, in which neither subject nor researcher knows who is getting what. And many are funded by the Gatorade Sports Science Institute. Enough said.
