The British Medical Journal published a scathing investigation yesterday into the influence of the sports drink industry over academia, in the interest of marketing the science of hydration. The lengthy piece by Deborah Cohen documents how, over the past several decades, mandates regarding the necessity of hydrating during exercise entered the public consciousness to the point that they're now thought of as common sense. Here are some highlights:
-The key players: Pepsico, which produces Gatorade, the Coca-Cola company, which owns Powerade (the official sports drink of the Olympics), and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which makes the British sports drink Lucozade.
-Before the hype: The first New York marathon, in 1970, inspired a new interest in running. At the time, however, little scientific attention was played to the role of hydration in runners' performance. Throughout the 1970s, in fact, "marathon runners were discouraged from drinking fluids for fear that it would slow them down."
-Undermining the body's signals: Cohen claims that one of the greatest accomplishments of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, established in 1985, was to convince the public that thirst is an unreliable indicator of dehydration. There is ample evidence of ways in which the experts who propagated this information were funded or "supported" by sports drinks companies, and while this in itself isn't necessarily wrong, she argues that researchers who have conflicts of interest are not objective enough to be writing guidelines, as is the case here. There is no good evidence to support the ideas, for example, that "Without realizing, you may not be drinking enough to restore your fluid balance after working out" (Powerade), or that urine color is a reliable indicator of the body's hydration levels.
Continued...
