Engineered Sports Foods
Convenience or Necessity?

To look at all the ads for sports drinks, energy bars, electrolyte replacers, and sports candies, you'd think these engineered products are a necessary part of a sports diet, particularly if you are doing endurance exercise such as training for a marathon or a triathlon.

Photo courtesy of specialkrb

When runners ask for advice about how to use these products, I first assess their daily sports diet to determine if they can get—or are getting—what they want from standard foods (carbs, sodium). In most cases, they can get their needs met with a wisely chosen sports diet.

While there is a time and a place for engineered sports foods (particularly among runners who train at a high intensity), many runners needlessly waste a lot of money misusing them. The purpose of this article is to help you become an informed consumer, so you can wisely spend your hard-earned money.

Pre-exercise Energy Bars
While fueling with a pre-run PowerBar and Gatorade ($2-$3) is one way to energize your workout, you could less expensively consume 300 calories of banana+yogurt+water ($1) or pretzels+raisins+water (50¢). Any of these choices are carbohydrate-rich and will offer the fuel your muscles need for a stellar workout.

The best pre-exercise snacks digest easily, settle well in your stomach, and do not talk back to you. Standard supermarket foods can do that as well as engineered foods. Experiment to determine what settles best in your body.

Energy Drinks
There's little doubt that Red Bull and other energy drinks are popular, particularly among runners who use them for alcohol mixers.

The 110 calories of sugar “helps the medicine go down” (for those who don't enjoy the taste of certain alcoholic beverages). The resulting problem is wide-awake drunks who think they can drive themselves home—but then get into accidents.

For runners, energy drinks are the source of enough sugar and caffeine to give you a quick energy boost. The problem is, one quick fix will not compensate for missed meals.

That is, if you sleep through breakfast and barely eat lunch, having a Red Bull for a pre-workout energizer will unlikely compensate for the previous inadequate food intake. If you can make the time to train, you can also make the time to fuel appropriately, rather than rely on a quick fix.

Caffeine
A known “ergogenic aid," caffeine enhances performance by making the effort seem easier. A pre-run caffeine-fix—especially if accommodated by carbs—can energize your workout. Here’s how the options compare:

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If you are sweat heavily, you might lose about 1,000 to 3,000 mg sodium in an hour of hard exercise. Here are options for replacing these sodium losses:

As you can see, there is no need for anyone to drink a sports drink with their lunch, because the soup or cheese sandwich have far more sodium than the small amount of sodium in the sports drink.

By consuming some salty food such as 8 ounces of chicken broth before exercising in the heat, you can get a hefty dose of sodium into your body before you even start to exercise. This has been shown to enhance endurance. (1)

Electrolytes
One triathlete reported using electrolyte replacers throughout the day. He then admitted he didn't even know what electrolytes are. I explained they are electrically charged particles, more commonly known as sodium, calcium, magnesium, and potassium. Standard foods abound with electrolytes, more so than engineered sports foods—

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Runners, who eat far more food—hence more vitamins—than sedentary folks, have the opportunity to consume abundant vitamins.

A big bowl of Wheaties offers 100% of the Daily Value (DV) for B-vitamins. (Most cereals, breads, pastas and other grain foods are enriched with B-vitamins unless they are “all natural”.) Eight ounces of orange juice offers 100% of the DV for Vitamin C. In contrast, 8 ounces of Energy Tropical Citrus Vitamin Water offers only 40% of the DV for Vitamin C.

Sports Candy
I groaned when one runner told me she ate Sports Beans ($1/100-calorie packet) for her afternoon snack. Like sports drinks, sports beans are designed to be taken during exercise.

Regular jellybeans would be a far less expensive snack! She unlikely even needed extra sodium, given she ran for only an hour. Raisins, dried pineapple, or grapes would make a healthier snack option.

Conclusion
Not everyone uses engineered sports foods to enhance their performance. Research on a simulated 3-day adventure race suggests otherwise (2). When the racers were given a buffet of fueling options during this event, 86% of their calories came from supermarket foods (candy, pizza, sandwiches, soft drinks, coffee, bananas, etc.) as opposed to only 14% from engineered sports foods (sports drinks, gels, energy bars, protein bars).

They reported standard foods tasted better and were more palatable. As an educated consumer, do you want to do the same?

Copyright: Nancy Clark, MS, RD, CSSD
Nancy Clark's new Sports Nutrition Guidebook (2008), Food Guide for Marathoners, and Cyclist’s Food Guide are available at her website www.nancyclarkrd.com.

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1. Sims, ST, van Vliet L, Cotter J, Rehrer N. 2007. Sodium loading aids fluid balance and reduces physiological strain of trained men exercising in the heat. Med Sci Sports Exerc 39(1):123-130.
2. Zimberg IZ, Crispim CA, Juzwiak CR at al. 2008. Nutritional intake during a simulated adventure race. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab 18(2):152-68

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