Benefits of Healthy Sports Drinks

Sport drinks or healthy drinks are a big market of non-alcoholic drinks. These are drinks that claim to have additives by way of additional minerals and electrolytes. These drinks are targeted towards sports persons, athletes and exercise fiends. But today energy drinks are popular drinks.

One important point about the health drinks that it contains large amounts of caffeine just like sodas.

These drinks also make claims of rehydrating better than water. These claims are somewhat unsubstantiated. Sports drinks facts talk about positives and negatives of these drinks. These drinks seem to be doing very well but are also loaded with lots of sugar and caffeine, both of which can be very harmful. Athletes and sports persons often prefer these drinks as they taste better and all that caffeine provides a big boost of energy. But like all chemically enhanced energy, the eventual dip in energy is a strong one. The adrenaline rush from sports drinks is usually short. Most commercially available brands contain carbohydrates and electrolytes.

These energy and sports drinks also contain loads of sugar and flavoring. Some of the popular brands are Gatorade and Red Bull. Excessive consumption of these drinks has been known to need hospital and medical intervention. Different concentration of minerals in the energy drinks helps in the classification of such drinks. Based on the concentration of minerals, energy drinks are classified as hypotonic, isotonic or hypertonic sports drinks. Isotonic drinks are drinks that absorbed into the body immediately. Hypertonic and hypotonic drinks are based on the proportion of minerals and other additives added to the drinks. Hypertonic drinks are drinks that need to consumed few hours before the exercise or sport to be undertaken. List of sports drinks is a long list with names like Gatorade and Red Bull leading the queue. Some of the main sports drinks ingredients are salt, sugar, mono-potassium sulphate, food starch, accepted coloring and artificial fruit flavouring. Commercially manufactured sports drinks often contain fructose syrup which is also quite harmful. Most sports or energy drinks have fewer calories as compared to calories in sodas and colas but the calorie count is still high. Sports drinks also tend to contain gaurana, ginseng, taurine and ephedrine. Sports drinks do provide benefits but these benefits are good only in small packets. There are healthy sports drinks but it is always better to rely on water or perhaps water with basic salt and sugar dissolved in it.

Submitted on January 16, 2014