Do you drink sports drinks or energy drinks? As well as being favorite beverages for sportspeople, they are particularly popular refreshments for young people. But do you really know what you are drinking and whether these drinks are doing what they claim to do?
Sports drinks and energy drinks have different jobs. Sports drinks aim to help athletes hydrate effectively before, during, or after exercise. Energy drinks mainly aim to provide an energy boost. Some are fizzy, some are flat, some are ready-to-drink, some are mixed from powder, and some contain fruity flavoring. Both sports drinks and energy drinks contain mostly water and usually a lot of sugar plus ingredients like minerals and vitamins. They also include ingredients that are supposed to give you health benefits, like extra hydration or energy, but do they really work? Let’s look at these drinks more closely.
What are sports drinks?
We need to have a good balance of salts and sugar in our body for our cells, organs, and systems to work properly . So sports drinks include minerals and salts (electrolytes), such as sodium, potassium, and chloride, and sugar, like glucose, to help us maintain that balance.
There are three main types of sports drink, hypotonic drinks, isotonic drinks, and hypertonic drinks, and they claim to have different functions. Hypotonic drinks provide a lower concentration of salts and sugar than the human body, isotonic drinks contain the same concentration of salts and sugar as the body, and hypertonic drinks contain a higher concentration of salts and sugar than the body. Both hypotonic and isotonic drinks are designed to replace lost fluids rapidly during exercise, and isotonic drinks also contain extra sugar for an energy boost. Hypertonic drinks are best drunk after exercise and are designed to increase an athlete’s sugar intake to provide maximum energy (particularly for endurance events, where high energy is needed) and are more slowly absorbed than other energy drinks. There are very few hypertonic drinks on the market. Most sports drinks are isotonic.
Do sports drinks really work?
Sports drinks, which appeared in the 1970s, were particularly used by marathon runners and endurance athletes in the United States to rehydrate. As the drinks became more well-known and widely used, they became available to the general public. Sports drinks claim to assist athletic performance, but to see if they really do, we need to look at the scientific evidence.
One research study of tennis players found that they felt less tired when using sports drinks and they also felt like they were using less effort during play. However, this small study was carried out in collaboration with a sports nutrition company, so the results are not the most trustworthy. In fact, a lot of research into how well sports drinks work has been carried out, or sponsored by, companies with a big interest in the drinks, such as those who make the drinks. This means we can’t always be sure that we can trust the research findings.
Another study actually found no benefits of sports drinks in balancing electrolytes or enhancing the athletic performance of ultramarathon runners. Despite many years of research, there hasn’t been much convincing scientific evidence to prove that sports drinks actually work. The studies often only involve small numbers of people who don’t usually represent the people who regularly drink sports drinks . This means we don’t have the right data on how they affect the people in the general population who do drink them often.
So it doesn’t look like sports dri n ks offe r particu lar be nefits in helping athletes improve their performance, but could they be causing harm? Some people are worried that sports drinks may make drinkers put on weight because of consuming the extra calories in these beverages without using enough energy through exercise to burn the calories . You see, sports drinks are designed for individuals who are performing high-intensity exercise over an extended period of time, one hour or more, but they are frequently drunk by people who do no such exercise. For example, a survey in 2012 found that as many as one in four adults in the UK may be consuming sports drinks while just sitting at their desks, and the popularity of these drinks has grown rapidly since then. So, while you may think you’re healthily hydrating, sipping sports drinks while walking round the park or after doing a few leisurely laps in the swimming pool is likely only to lead to weight gain as you’re not doing enough physical activity to burn the calories the drinks give you. There is also concern from dental specialists that sugary sports drinks might harm consumers’teeth.
Sports drinks are particularly attractive to young people, and many teenagers believe them to be healthy because of their link with sport. A 2014 survey found that of UK teenagers who drink sports drinks, only 16 percent drank them to specifically rehydrate after intense exercise. Most did not drink them to help with their sports performance . Another study, in 2016, found that almost 90 percent of Welsh twelve to fourteen year olds drank sports drinks. So that’s a lot of young people in the UK alone drinking extra calories they don’t need, and it is the same in lots of other countries. Because of this, quite a lot of scientific research is investigating links between sports drinks and weight gain. For example, one study of over seven and a half thousand children and adolescents in the United States between 2004 and 2011 found that there was a link between how often they drank sports drinks and how much weight they gained.
Many health organizations around the world, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Canadian Pediatric Society, and the UK’s National Health Service, agree that water is best for rehydrating for most young people, and only those athletes performing rigorous and prolonged physical activity may benefit from drinks with additional sugar and electrolytes.
What are energy drinks?
The first real energy drink was produced in the 1960s in Japan by Taisho Pharmaceuticals . Another popular brand, Red Bull, was created in the 1980s, and since the early 2000s, there has been an explosion of energy drinks all around the world.
Energy drinks provide an energy boost mainly from the caffeine in them and other added stimulants (ingredients that speed up activity in the central nervous system) . The amount of caffeine in energy drinks varies, but there’s about the same amount of caffeine in a 250 ml sized can as an average mug of coffee. Other stimulants and sugar are added on top of this. These drinks are often sold in cans double that size, however, so the caffeine, along with other constituents, are drunk in twice the amount.
Guarana is another stimulant that is often found in energy drinks. It comes from the guarana plant and is traditionally consumed by indigenous communities of the Amazon region . It has a high caffeine content, which is why it is used in energy drinks. The seeds of the guarana plant are the size of coffee beans, but they contain around twice the amount of caffeine. Other caffeine-rich plant extracts used in energy drinks include tea, ginseng, and yerba mate.
The high amount of sugar in many energy drinks also provides a lot of energy to the drinker . Many of these drinks also contain herbs, minerals, and vitamins and ingredients like taurine and gluc uronolactone. Taurine is an amino acid that your body can manufacture itself that plays roles in cardiovascular, muscular, and nervous system functions and is said to give energy to the drinker. Gluc uronolactone, found naturally in the body, is included in energy drinks to supposedly fight fatigue and promote a sense of well-being .
Are energy drinks healthy?
Research into energy drinks has shown mixed results. Some studies have found a short term, temporary improvement in mental and physical stamina in adults and adolescents. Some have also found that study participants felt more alert and recovered quicker from fatigue . Although some young people may drink energy drinks because they believe that the drinks help with their concentration for studying, research has found that too much caffeine can actually limit your intellectual performance . During research tests, while students taking energy drinks felt that they were more alert and stimulated, they performed less well than their peers who did not consume the energy drinks.
Most studies show that energy drinks may lead to some harmful health effects. This is particularly due to the caffeine and sugar in them, but researchers warn that not enough is yet known about the effect of the other ingredients on health. For example, there has only been a small amount of research into taurine and glucuronolactone, so we don’t know much about their effects. So far, there is no good evidence that taurine has any beneficial effect for a healthy person. Other research has found that energy drinks may harm people with heart conditions. The level of harm cannot be explained by the caffeine alone. When, in 2017, scientists looked at the data from a lot of studies together, they found that, overall, there were more negative effects of energy drinks than positive ones.
Drinking energy drinks can cause some side effects. These include headaches, raised blood pressure, higher heart rate, higher stress levels, irritability, sleep problems, and stomach aches. Some data is also emerging to show there may be links between drinking energy drinks and heart, kidney, and dental problems. Just like sports drinks, the sugar content of energy drinks is also a big issue, with reports that energy drinks may contain 60 percent more calories and 65 percent more sugar than other soft drinks.
Energy drinks are very popular. For example, in the United States, men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four consume the most energy drinks, and almost a third of teenagers drink them regularly. It is reported that UK teenagers consume the most energy drinks in comparison with teenagers from sixteen other European countries. Because they are drunk so frequently by young people, there have been concerns about what effects energy drinks may be having on them, but there has been little research in this population group . Young people may be more vulnerable than adults to the effects of energy drinks, especially to the effects of the high caffeine content as their bodies are still developing and they weigh less so the ingredients have more effect. The high sugar content may also be a problem and may affect their taste over time, leading them to prefer very sweet foods and drinks.
Hyperactivity in consumers has been found too, and there have been a significant number of injuries and even deaths blamed on drinking too many energy drinks. A particular problem is that many people combine energy drinks with alcohol, and this may make them feel less intoxicated than they actually are, prompting more risk – taking behaviors. A number of studies among college students who take energy drinks and alcohol together found they had a higher risk of being assaulted or assaulting someone, being injured, and requiring hospital treatment. Young people combining high-risk behaviors with health issues like heart problems, eating disorders, or anxiety may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of energy drinks.
As there is a lot of concern about the harmful effects of energy drinks on our health, there have been warnings about them from a number of health organizations, including the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and the Norwegian Food Safety Authority. Several countries including the UK, Sweden, Lithuania, and Latvia, have banned their sales to children, and other countries, like Nepal, have banned some brands altogether . Some countries, such as Hungary, have also placed a high tax on energy drinks to make them less popular.
Sports drinks and energy drinks are available almost everywhere and their marketing is very appealing to young people. They may be advertised as being healthy and full of benefits, but the science doesn’t yet prove this to be true and some people may be harmed by drinks like these . But because people are now more aware of possible harm, action is being taken to improve matters . To help people avoid the potential harm of too much sugar in the diet, there are now more low-sugar versions available of both sports drinks and energy drinks. Many countries are putting restrictions on sales of energy drinks, which may lead to positive changes in these drinks too.
Now that you know more about sports drinks and energy drinks, will you drink them?
