FiveThirtyEight doesn’t think so….
In a long piece the point is made that humans have survived strenuous exercise from day one without sports drinks…
Your body , as with all animals tells your brain when you need to drink to hydrate….
It doesn’t say which liquid…
It actually will accept plain ole water, as we have lived on from the jump ,and what every other species does also…
And it doesn’t have to cost much of anything….
In the early 1990s, Gatorade ran a television commercial featuring Michael Jordan called “Be Like Mike.” It featured slam dunks by Jordan interspersed with footage of kids shooting hoops and, of course, Jordan and other happy people drinking Gatorade.
Stuart Phillips remembers that ad campaign well. As an aspiring athlete, he, too, wanted to be like Mike. “Michael Jordan drank Gatorade, so I drank Gatorade,” Phillips says. Despite guzzling the sports drink, Phillips never did make it to the pros, but instead grew up to become the director of the Centre for Nutrition, Exercise, and Health Research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The Jordan ad taught him a lesson about the power of marketing, though: “If you can get an endorsement from an athlete that everybody recognizes, then who needs science?”
Scientific facts don’t sell products; stories do. Jordan was already a basketball superstar by the time Gatorade came calling, and the public was eager to experience something of his greatness. Enter Gatorade — Michael Jordan drank it, and young Stuart Phillips could too. To drink Gatorade wasn’t just to mimic a sports hero, it was to imagine a causal relationship — Jordan drank Gatorade and then made all those slam dunks, so the one must have had something to do with the other.
Psychologists call such thinking the “illusion of causality,” and it’s so powerful that it has spawned an entire genre of advertising — the celebrity endorsement. No one would care that a pro athlete uses a particular product if it didn’t somehow appear that the item played some role in that star’s success. The Irish have a saying, “An umbrella accompanies the rain but rarely causes it.” The same could be said of product endorsements and athletic greatness. Still, our minds are quick to connect the dots in the wrong direction….
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From a biological perspective, it’s hard to imagine that the human body is so delicate that it can’t function properly without scientists (or football stars) swooping in with calculators to tell us how to keep it running properly. “You have to trust your body,” Knepper says. Humans have evolved to survive exercising without chugging water or sports drink on some rigid schedule. “You get clues about what you need if you listen to your own body,” he says. “You don’t have to know chemistry to survive.”…
image…runnerworld.com