You just finished your lengthy four mile run in the intense heat of July. Your legs are jello-like, you’re feeling fatigued, and your body aches from head to toe. Your body is trying to tell you that you need to rehydrate, so you grab yourself an ice cold, Deer Park, water bottle that derived from some random spring in the middle of a foreign tropical island or so they say. The refreshing ice cold drink momentarily makes you forget about how fatigued you are, but how good is that water actually replenishing you? Should you be following in the path of all the famously promoted athletes around the globe like Lebron James, Peyton Manning, and Serena Williams by grabbing a sports drink in order to replenish all of your lost nutrients? Or perhaps …show more content…
Sport drinks such as Gatorade and Powerade have made themselves the top selling sport drinks in the world because of their promotion of electrolytes in their drinks. These internal “go-getters” like sodium, potassium, and calcium are electrically charged minerals that regulate everything in your body from nerve and muscle function to hydration; so you can see why many athletes would want a large amount of these “go-getters” in them during their workouts and games.(#4) “A study published in 2014 showed that isotonic drinks improve the body’s ability to oxidize, or break down, carbohydrates during exercise.”(#7) Meaning that when someone who is running in a marathon drinks a water bottle before their race, their body isn’t able to break down their carbohydrates as quickly as it would if it had the increase of electrolytes that could be found in a sports drink like Gatorade. These minerals that are electrolytes(potassium, calcium, and sodium) that are found in Gatorade help water flow into cells, which then helps replenish the electrolytes that were lost through sweating. So, from this study you can see that the more sweat you lose, the more things you need to replenish--which is why those highly endorsed athletes drink these sport