By:  Cheryl Tully Stoll

From 2006 Archives

We’ve all seen the attractive hard, tanned, sweaty bodies consuming sports drinks in television ads.

The image these ads try to project is that the consumption of these beverages can help everyone look buff. The reality, however, is that most of those wonderfully sculpted physiques are the result of years of hard exercise and healthy eating — like many other things, it’s not as easy as advertisers would have us believe.

As a matter of fact, these drinks aren’t necessarily as good for us as plain old water. A letter sent in April by a plethora of leading health professionals and organizations to The Institute of Medicine, outlined some warnings regarding the use of sports drinks in schools. These warnings are probably applicable to all of us, school-age or not.

The 44 professionals who signed this letter and the 37 well-known health organizations that endorsed the document stated that “since most students do not participate in 60-minute high-intensity workouts during school hours, we encourage your committee to recommend that sports drinks not be sold or served in schools during the school day.”

Unfortunately, the agreement between the Clinton Foundation and the soft drink industry that is supposed to remove sodas from school vending machines does not include the removal of sports drinks from high schools. Since sports drinks are the fastest growing category of beverages and the largest source of new profits for the soft drink industry, I can’t help but wonder if this omission is just a mere coincidence.

Looking closely at many of these drinks, the ingredients aren’t much healthier than those in soft drinks and in some cases even less so. They are for the most part lower in calories than regular sodas, but they still contain a significant number of calories in the form of sugar, and in many cases, much more sodium than found in the beverages proposed for removal. Additionally, the acids contained in these drinks have been proven by studies in multiple countries to erode tooth enamel.

When vending machine slots open up in schools as sodas are removed, administrators must be careful that the beverages they replace them with represent appropriate and better health choices, not just popular drinks. The consumption of excess sugar has been shown to lead to overweight and obese children with a higher chance of developing Type 2 Diabetes.

Type 2 Diabetes developed in childhood can break down the human body as badly as Type 1. This damage can include blindness, kidney failure and cardiovascular diseases. Unfortunately, one out of every three children born since the year 2000 are now projected to develop Type 2 Diabetes due to lifestyle, and we need to stem this tide.

Sports drinks were initially developed for high-endurance athletes who participated in consecutive hours of hard exercise and needed to replenish fluids and electrolytes. For these athletes, sports drinks can be helpful, but for the rest of the population they tend to be overkill or just a bad idea. Sure, we think we look cool swigging these drinks like the folks on television, but as teenage cigarette smoking has proven, cool isn’t necessarily healthy.

And before anyone overreacts and says that smokers and overweight and obese individuals are at different levels of risk, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March 2004 projected that poor diet and physical inactivity may soon overtake smoking as the leading cause of death in this country. Two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, and we need to do everything we can do to prevent our children from continuing to add to this appalling statistic.

Sports drinks can’t be blamed for this trend, but like other sugar-laden foods and beverages, they certainly can be fairly viewed as a contributory factor.

Additionally, sodium is a known contributor to high blood pressure, which physicians are now seeing in younger and younger children. The long-term health consequences for these kids are very serious and can be tragic.

So, while advertising from the beverage industry would have us believe one thing, the medical community is rapidly learning otherwise. When people are trying to make a healthy choice, it’s only fair that the choice really be healthy. It’s rather unfair to lead someone to believe that consuming a particular product will help them in their quest for fitness when in fact that product could be negating the calories they just burned during a hard workout. No wonder so many dieters get discouraged.

Since Gatorade is the most well-known brand in this category, I looked at a bottle of their original formula in the 32-ounce size that the athletes in television advertisements are drinking. According to their Web site, the smallest size is a 12-ounce bottle; the 32-ounce bottle, however, says a single serving size is 8 ounces. There’s nothing like food and beverage manufacturers being straightforward on serving sizes. With some products it takes a degree in differential calculus to figure out what a small package actually contains nutritionally.

The caloric intake of the smallest bottle of Gatorade’s original formula was 75 calories. Doing the same calculations on the 32-ounce bottle that the studs and babes are swigging on television, I came up with 200 calories. What this means in plain English is that if you were to consume one bottle a day, each day for a year, you would gain nearly eight pounds from the 12-ounce version and almost 21 pounds from the sexy television version.

Somehow, after learning that, the products didn’t seem that sexy after all.

Copyright Ó 2006, 2008 by Cheryl Tully Stoll