March 13 (Reuters) - Five U.S. Air Force refueling planes were struck and damaged on the ground at Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing two U.S. officials.
Decided to have an isotonic or sports drink to hydrate after sweating? Experts say that such drinks aren't usually necessary for workouts lasting less than two hours. — AP Social media is filled with influencers rating electrolyte supplements, or even telling followers how to make their own.
But experts say many of the claims about the health benefits of these drinks need to be taken with a grain of salt.In the context of hydration, they balance fluid levels inside and outside of cells, said Cleveland Clinic dietitian Julia Zumpano in the United States.Drinking too much plain water when sweating very heavily can dilute the salt in your body even further, throwing things out of balance.They often contain other electrolytes like potassium and magnesium.In general, the kidneys in a healthy person do an excellent job of keeping our electrolytes in balance. Extras simply come out in your urine, said Vanderbilt University nephrologist Assistant Professor Dr Hunter Huston in the US, who also consults for a British-based company that provides electrolyte replacement plans for endurance athletes. Taking “an electrolyte-enriched drink, just for health purposes, probably isn’t doing much”, he said. Today, “rapid hydration” and “advanced hydration” drinks are taking off, but who actually benefits from them and when?It was 1965 at the University of Florida in the US, and then-assistant Gators football coach Dwayne Douglas had something on his mind. As Prof Dr Robert Cade, the school’s first kidney researcher, later explained, Douglas asked him, “Doctor, why don’t football players wee-wee after a game?”The obvious answer was that the American football players couldn’t urinate because they were losing so much fluid through sweat.But it wasn’t just water the players were losing.The losses were sapping their strength and stamina.Sugar would help the gut absorb the sodium.It still wasn’t delicious, but soon the team’s performance improvement could not be ignored, especially in the second half of games when the opposite team’s players were starting to wilt in the Florida heat and humidity. Prof Cade, who died in 2007, said he never dreamed Gatorade – the eventual commercial end result of his initial solution – would be purchased by regular consumers.While it seems that everyone is drinking electrolyte supplements these days, not everyone actually needs them. A good rule of thumb is that if you are exercising for less than two hours, plain water is probably fine, said Assist Prof Huston. The average healthy person can tolerate losing around 2% of their body weight in sweat before they really start to feel it, he says.Everyone is different though.In the world of extreme sports like ultramarathons, athletes often get professional help to test how much they sweat and get a tailored nutrition plan. “Most folks that are exercising, that are, say, doing a marathon, are gonna be way past that two hours, and it does then make sense to be thinking about ‘What’s going to be my fluid and electrolyte replacement plan?’” Assist Prof Huston said.Darren Rovell has followed the rise of sports drinks from a niche market to the mainstream.First in Thirst: How Gatorade Turned the Science of Sweat Into a Cultural PhenomenonWhen he was a runner in high school, he said, they were given Gatorade to drink and told the reason it tasted bad was because it was good for you.After PepsiCo purchased the brand in 2001, “that really became the first time where you see Gatorade everywhere in front of your face, including in a pizza place, and it starts to be, ‘OK. Is this just a different type of soda?’” Rovell says electrolyte brands market the idea that drinking their products will either make you an athlete, or if you already are an athlete, give you a performance edge. “It all starts in the aspiration of being better, but you know we do have to check ourselves,” he said.The supplements out today have an incredibly wide variety of electrolyte concentrations, said Stanford Health Care clinical associate professor of emergency medicine Dr Patrick Burns, who occasionally runs in ultramarathons. With some having five times the sodium of others, consumers should not assume all supplements are the same. Assoc Prof Burns also warned that people should be careful about supplementing potassium, because it can be dangerous in large amounts. He noted that many brands now offer zero sugar varieties, even though the glucose in sugar is what allows for rapid absorption of the sodium.“For optimal absorption, you need some sugar in with your salt.”“Electrolytes can help, especially with heavy sweating or exercise, but for most people, they’re not something you need every single day, and you definitely don’t need large amounts of it,” Zumpano said. For a healthy person who is not sweating intensely, the beverages probably won’t hurt you, but they won’t help you either. “You’re getting extra sugar, and there’s no reason rapid absorption of sodium because you’re not sodium depleted,” said University of Florida College of Medicine professor of nephrology Dr Mark Segal.As far as making your own electrolyte powders, the experts said it can be done, but you have to know what you are doing.“How do you know how much you need?” Zumpano asked.Related stories:
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