What are you guys thoughts on athletes consumption of soda “Pop” during heavy training/competition?
I notice when I stop drinking soda I feel better as far as hydration and overall bodily fluids. What experiences have you guys had w/ Soda w/ athletes?
Any studies out there on Soda and athletes w/ its effects on training/performances?
I know the sugar content is very high in Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, Dr.Pepper and other drinks something like 39g :mad:
Kenny Mac~~~~
Soda is garbage. Its the number one reason why kids in America are becoming fat arses. I read in an article that consuming one can of coke a day increases the chance of obesity by 60%. That means if you want to become a sumo wrestler, just drink 2 cans a day! Ive never heard of soda becoming a performance enhancing benefit…that is, unless you mix it with 12 mentos:)
kenny was talking about it being crap.
i try too drop it during the season. and gennerally try and go with water and juice all year round. but coke is the drink of the gods. it’s a hard battle.
i am sure someone can direct you to a study of the sort but i am not that person.
i think it’s almost gennerally accepted that it is crap and any liquid that doesn’t have 9000ingredients and 400grams of suger pwns it.
Why can’t you just drink diet soda? Never heard the argument against that. It’s always “ewww soda, that has 40g of sugar”. Well diet soda doesn’t have any.
I was asking about the neg not the pos, there’s no pos in drinking soda. I think you read my post wrong.
Kenny Mac~~~
Ken, I was just stating my opinion. There are no positives to drinking soda as you said. It doesn’t matter if it is diet or regular, still inferior to water. The carbonation leaches your bone density, and the sugar in regular coke will give you an insulin spike so large it will make you gain bodyfat at increadible rates. These two aspects are the main ones I remember reading about off the top of my head.
A football coach in high school told me that, say after lifting weights a person went and drank a mountain dew (he use that as example, so I assume coke/pepss/dr pepper would be same), then the lifting done would have basically been pointless due to the consumption of ‘pop’. Can anyone think of any reasoning to this. I too myself have always wondered why ‘pop’/soda is considered so damn bad to consume. Yea people break out the ‘its got loads of sugar’, calorie numbers, etc,but why are all of these things so bad.
I myself half-way gave up ‘pop’ 3 years ago. Now that summers here, I’ve had one here and there, but I won’t drink pop during season. I’ve gone on 6-7 month periods where I wouldnt consume pop,really I dont know why, word of mouth I suppose b/c of how people talk bad of pop, but again, I’ve always wanted to hear legitimate(detailed) reasons WHY.
Being in college, I could also throw out, how does pop compare to beer? Anyway, just some food for thought.
You would think drinking “Soda” along w/ taking 80-100g of supplements (ie. Creatine, protein supplements, ZMA, BCAA’s, Multi Vit’s,) daily the acid in Pop would guzzle the chemicals in the supplements one might take?
Just thinking out loud 
I know what Coke can do to a car battery as far as cleaning your cables 
Kenny Mac~~~~
Reasons why “Coke” is bad (I’m from Kentucky…everything is Coke whether it’s Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, or Dr. Pepper):
high fructose corn syrup is even worse than sugar: fructose has to be processed by the liver and appears to derange liver function in large amounts. It brings about insulin resistance quickly and is used to cause Type II Diabetes in lab rats (don’t worry about fruit…kinda self limiting due to bulk). Plenty of other reasons: http://www.mercola.com/2002/jan/5/fructose.htm
soda causes a huge dump of insulin. Insulin puts the body in fat storage mode. The body will not release fat with gobs of insulin circulating. Growth hormone and insulin are antagonistic…when one is circulating, the other is not. Crank up your sugar (followed by your insulin) post-workout with a high-carb recovery drink and…well, you can add.
lack of anything good. There is NOTHING in a soda can that is any good for you. There are no vitamins or minerals. There is no protein or fat…just lots of sugar. Even juice, which is also highly sugary (added sugar or not) has some vitamins.
Oh, but wait, there is that ascorbic acid (vitamin C) they add to make it seem healthy. Oh, sorry, that reacts with the preservative sodium benzoate to form benzene, a carcinogen: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4763528.stm
Diet soda: aspartame is a known neurotoxin. Splenda is questionable at best…it’s sugar with 3 chlorine molecules added. Chlorine is toxic and there’s no proof that the body isn’t breaking some of the Splenda down into its sugar and chlorine componenets. When humans realize that we can’t “best” Mother Nature, we’ll be better off. Honey or stevia if you need something sweet. And there’s no evidence that diet drinks help anyone lose weight either. http://www.mercola.com/2004/jul/17/artificial_sweeteners.htm
Dietary displacement: Calories from sugar often displace calories from whole foods. Obviously this is bad. Unfortunately, calories from soda are liquid and the body doesn’t recognize them as readily as food calories, which means you are going to take in additional calories in the form of sugar…not a good thing. http://www.johnberardi.com/articles/nutrition/dietary_1.htm http://www.johnberardi.com/articles/nutrition/dietary_2.htm
As velocegatto pointed out, soda is highly acidic. Most of the standard Western diet is already highly acidic, which explains why, even with one of the highest calcium intakes in the world, we have one of the highest rates of osteoporosis…it ain’t about calcium intake. It’s about calcium balance, which relates to acid-base balance. http://www.johnberardi.com/articles/nutrition/bases.htm
Get your calories from real food, with it’s natural vitamins and minerals. Get your hydration from water, tea, and coffee. Leave the soda for 4th of July (if you’re American), Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
Nice post ski. Humans have this funny thing called intuition. They seem to think that modern technology makes food amongst other things much better. Technology really makes few things better, but it definately does not make food better for us.
Go to a museum and look at greek statues from back in the day…then compare that to the average population walking around nowadays. If you guys havent seen “Over The Hedge” which is a new animation here in America…you really need to see it. Really makes a mockery about how fat, discusting, and lazy poeple in general have become.
For post workout recovery drinks, I have found that most contain an fructose or aspartame or some type of artificial sugar. Reading the mercola article talks about the Maillard Reactions which “results in a decrease in protein quality and a toxicity of protein in the body.” So what would you guys offer or say would be an good recovery drink or food after an intense sprint day and a tempo day.
Thanks this is a nice post, this is what I was looking for, Thanks !!
What do you think about stuff like Gatorade, powerade etc? What’s up with the sugar content there?
Oh, and what about beer and other alcohol? How does it affect strength, speed, recovery…?
Nice post SK12879!
Good stuff; that’s exactly the stuff I like to hear/read --> the actual ‘reasonsing’ and ‘whys’ for things (i.e how things happen at the cellular level). Again, good stuff!
Soda isn’t that evil. It’s just carbs with no nutritional content. It’s not gonna make you fat if you drink a can or two a day. I used to drink it all the time and my bf% was low as hell. The insulin spike post-workout can actually be beneficial.
What about a soda pop after a high tensive training session where you need high GI carbs?
Can’t imagine pop being first choice for an after training drink (though I did it all the time when I was running). Also, the actual type of sugar often varies by area and even manufacturing date due to fluctuating prices of sugar vs fructose.
Just as an aside, I used to work with a CEO of a major pop company and he had a lawsuit against ADM for overcharging a fraction of a penny per pound for fructose-- 11 BILLION pounds of it! Somebody’s drinking a hell of a lot of pop out there!
So would dextrose be better than high-fructose corn syrup?
Dextrose is the main “driving agent” in most of the after workout drinks.