The Fallacy of Sports Drinks, from Certified Specialist in Performance Nutrition Nina Anderson
The following is an excerpt from interview from SPN Nina Anderson:
Is all that sugar in sports drinks necessary?
So there’s a big fallacy that says you have to have some sort of a sugar in a gel or a sports drink in order to keep you going. These include fructose, dextrose, glucose, high fructose corn syrup, which we know is not good for you. All of these kinds of sweeteners are added to put glucose back in your muscles to boost your energy level. 
What happens in reality is you may get – for 10 or 15 minutes, you may get a really good burst of energy. A wow! The sugar levels just pump you up and you’re running really good.
"The Glycemic Roller Coaster"
Then all of a sudden, you find out that you’re starting to get tired because there’s a thing called a glycemic roller coaster and the sugar goes up and then of course 10-15 minutes later, it comes crashing down.
What the body is saying is we need more sugar. So now you add more sugar to get you back up again and then the body comes back down again. If you don’t replace the sugar, you’re going to see your performance levels really deteriorate. It’s almost like being addicted and it’s a very, very dangerous thing for the body to be on this "glycemic roller coaster".
You can’t maintain it especially if you want to just have sugar all the time. That’s why people keep gel packs or some sort of a sugar drink with them because it’s like they need to replace the fuel but it’s a false replacement.
Sports drinks also have a lot of preservatives
Sports drinks contain a host of preservatives and artificial flavors. They have colored dyes. They have artificial sweeteners. And as we said, they also have sugar. All these things are detriments to the body. So even though you may think you’re getting something healthy, if you read the ingredients, you have things like – they want to replace the glycogen stores.
The EnduroPacks concentrated spray has 13 minerals necessary to rehydrate the body, without the sugar and preservatives. EnduroPacks formula contains sodium and potassium plus other essential minerals that most sports drinks are missing. It helps keep your pH up and it’s also going to make sure that those extra trace elements that are in there are going to keep the brain firing and protect the muscles from damage.
The article is from an interview and podcast with Nina Anderson, an International Sports Science Association certified Specialist in Performance Nutrition (SPN) and a nationally acclaimed researcher, author, television, and radio personality. She has been an active researcher in the nutrition field for over 20 years and has co-authored 18 books, including Low Carb and Beyond, Nutritional Leverage for Great Golf and Analyzing Sports Drinks. Nina is also the president of Safe Goods Publishing and LJB Piper and has a BA from Monmouth University.
Listen to more of this interview on sports drinks and electrolyte replacement here:
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