A Quick Bite

  Often, I am asked what brand of sports drinks, gels, energy bars, or protein bars is the best.   Regardless of the type of food product, I always answer that the best brand is the one that tastes the best to them and that settles the best in your GI tract.

Engineered sport products are more about convenience than necessity. Sports foods and fluids are not sources of “magic ingredients”, are not better digested than standard fuels, are not likely to enhance performance, are not necessary BUT they are a booming business in the food and sports industry.   In fact, the number of sports drink products is expected to grow by 33% worldwide in 2012. What more could we “need” from a beverage??

Experiment during training to see if these products are worth the money or if you would do just as well with real “sport foods”such as chocolate milk, bananas, pretzels, broth, flat soda, etc. Often, real foods taste a lot better and leave more money in your wallet!

 At the Tour de France in 2011, beetroot juice made its large scale debut as a potential legal performance enhancing supplement.  Initial studies
do suggest that beetroot, also know as the garden beet, may improve performance by delaying the time it takes to fatigue. Should you be
drinking it?

In 2010, researchers at Peninsula Medical School in the United Kingdom found that cycling performance improved by 16% when cyclist consumed a
glass of beet juice a day.  Similar results have been found in other studies, such as one at St. Louis University in which researchers found
that eating a little less than a cup of baked beets an hour before running improved speed slightly.

The mechanism behind this potential benefit may lie in the high nitrate content of the beet.  Nitrate widens blood vessels in the body, allowing
blood to flow more easily.  It is suggested that eating nitrate before exercising may reduce the VO2 max (amount of oxygen needed) and
increase muscle efficiency.  Further studies are now being conducted to see if beetroot juice could be useful beyond athletics, such as in the
treatment of high blood pressure.

At this time, it is best to use caution pending more studies.  All of the studies conducted thus far have included only a small number of
subjects.  Furthermore, doses used in these studies provided almost twice as much nitrate as deemed the acceptable daily level of nitrate by
the World Health Organization.