Who Invented Sports Drinks?

Sports drinks are a multibillion-dollar business that traces back to just two brands: Lucozade from the 1920s, and Gatorade from the 1960s. Learn how they were conceived in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/everyday-innovations/who-invented-sports-drinks.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brainstud a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogebam. Here, A stroll down the beverage aisle in
any American supermarket will present you with a wall of
veritably glowing sports drinks and a rainbow of colors and flavors,
with options from major soft drink companies like Pepsi and

(00:22):
Coca Cola, jockeying for your attention, all promising to improve
your performance or quench your thirst in some superior way.
It's an industry worth some thirty billion dollars a year.
But how did all of this get started? And does
your average exerciser need sports drinks to replenish during or
after a workout. In the United States, Gatorade gets credited

(00:47):
as the first sports drink, but there was one on
the market in the United Kingdom decades before Gatorade got
its start. It's now called lucas Aid. A chemist named
William Owen developed what would become Luca's Aid in nineteen
twenty seven, and the initial purpose of the glucose in
water mixture was to provide an easy source of calories
and energy for people who were ill. Because of its

(01:09):
inclusion of glucose. The drink was originally called glucoseade. Glucose
is a form of sugar used by all living organisms
that we know of to produce a denisine triphosphate, or ATP,
which is what cells use as energy to get stuff done.
Everything that a cell does, it uses ATP to do.
During the first couple decades of the nineteen hundreds, researchers

(01:33):
were learning about glucose and its link to energy in
our bodies. There were a bunch of Nobel Prizes given
about these discoveries, so it was a savvy marketing move
at the time. The name of the drink switched over
to lucose Aid a couple decades later, as the brand
was sold to the pharma company Beacham Group. Through a
number of mergers over the years, that company became glaxosmith Klein,

(01:55):
which then sold the brand to Sumtory in the twenty teens.
The reason that lucas Aid doesn't get the first sports
drink cred it deserves falls almost entirely on a marketing problem.
It wasn't until the mid nineteen eighties that the manufacturer
realized that it could sell lucas Aid as more than
just a drink for sick people. The company repositioned the

(02:16):
brand as a drink to replace lost energy, developed new flavors,
and started pulling in millions in sales. It's still the
number one selling sports drink brand in the United Kingdom,
but Gatorade was the one that sparked the lucrative sports
drink market. It was also the first drink developed specifically
to support athletes in training. It was nineteen sixty five

(02:39):
at the University of Florida or UF. An assistant football
coach and campus hospital security chief by the name of
Dwayne Douglas noticed that his players were losing a lot
of weight during training and games. They weren't urinating despite
drinking a lot of water sometimes, and some even experienced heatstroke.
Douglas teamed up with a few doctors, led by doctor

(02:59):
Robert Caid, a kidney disease specialist at UF, to talk
the problem through. Caid worked with the UF's College of
Medicine to develop a drink to replenish what these athletes
were losing through their strain and sweat. Carbohydrates aka sugar
and electrolytes. Electrolytes are a set of minerals that your
body needs to maintain its fluid levels and regulate its

(03:20):
muscle function. A Caid and his research team formulated a
drink that was essentially water with sugar, salt, and potassium.
The only problem was the drink was disgusting, so Caide's
wife proposed adding lemon juice to make it a little
bit more palatable. Later that year, the football team the
Gators started drinking gatorade during practice games, and not only

(03:42):
did the weight loss problem improve, but they also saw
a significant drop in the number of players experiencing heat exhaustion.
It's hard to say whether it actually improved player's performance
during these games, but they did go on to achieve
an eight to two record that season. Part of the
reason for the players improved was that at the time,
there is something of a superstition that drinking water during

(04:04):
exercise would lead to debilitating stomach cramps, so the switch
from drinking nothing to literally anything water based probably would
have helped. Gatorade was originally made on campus, packaged in
individuals serving milk cartons on UF's dairy farm, but by
the fall of nineteen sixty seven, a company called Stokely

(04:25):
Van Camp bought the rights to the recipe and the
name and started expanding tremendously through acquisitions. PepsiCo now owns
the Gatorade brand, which has expanded to a number of
drink and snack products and earns Pepsi at least a
billion dollars in sales every year, and there are lots
of competitors in the industry, including Power Aid owned by Coke,

(04:47):
Body Armour, Vitamin Water, Propel, Prime Rain, Ghost, Roar, and
on and on. Most sports drinks or drink mixes are
a blend of carbohydrates and electrolytes. The car are generally sugar,
and the electrolytes are generally a mix of salt and potassium,
designed to replenish what you lose in sweat during an

(05:07):
intense workout. Most also have flavors and colors added, which
is how you end up with varieties like Fierce Green
and Frost Blue. The sugars in these products can add up.
Keep in mind that a single serving is usually only
eight ounces, and most bottles are two to four times
that size per serving. They contain around fifteen grams of

(05:28):
carbs equaling about fifty calories, so if you drink a
whole bottle that can pretty easily add more calories to
your diet than you'd actually burn during a thirty to
sixty minute workout session. If you're exercising for less than
forty five minutes, chances are that you don't need a
sports drink at all because you're not burning enough calories
or losing enough electrolytes to require that kind of hardcore

(05:51):
replacement strategy. You can switch to a sugar free formula,
but just drinking water should do the trick unless it's
super hot and you're sweating back. Some distance runners and
other endurance exercisers just add a pinch of salt to
their water instead of purchasing sports drinks. However, no matter
how much marketing plays up the athletic angle, sports drinks

(06:14):
really can help during certain kinds of illness. If you're
losing fluids through excessive sweat, diarrhea, or vomiting, the carbs
and minerals and sports drinks can help your body replace
its lost hydration, energy, and nutrients. Today's episode is based
on the article who Invented Sports Drinks on HowStuffWorks dot com,

(06:35):
written by Becky Strip. Brain Stuff is production of by
Heart Radio and partnership with How Stuffworks. Dot com and
is produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts from My
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