QAA Podcast - Trickle Down Episode 12: The Elixir of Life Part 2 (Sample)

Starting point is 00:00:00 On the summer day in 2014, a 17-year-old student arrived at Douglas County High School in Georgia for the day's football practice. He had been suffering from medical issues in the recent months, including cramping, dehydration, and migraines. These conditions continued after practice, so in an attempt to quell the problem, he drank a lot of fluids, much more than anyone really needed. to quench their thirst, two gallons of water and two gallons of gatorade. That helped his condition subside at first, but early the next morning, he collapsed in his home and was rushed to the hospital. The huge fluid intake caused swelling around his brain, and subsequently the collapse of his nervous system. He was placed on a ventilator, but after five days it became clear that there was no hope for recovery. No one will ever know why this young

Starting point is 00:00:54 man drank so much more than necessary that night, but he didn't do anything that was countered the common recommendations for athletes. The most common advice was to drink up, always be thoroughly hydrated for peak performance, and perhaps Gatorade is superior to water for athletes. The problem with this advice is that it did not emerge from neutral science. It didn't even emerge from the experience of athletes. Instead, this advice emerged from the need to sell sports drinks. For decades, the billion-dollar sports drink industry developed increasingly sophisticated ways to convince people that they were not getting enough fluids. This didn't just involve massive advertising campaigns.

Starting point is 00:01:33 It also involved controlling entire athletic organizations and even twisting the field of hydration science to help them sell more of the colorful liquids. I'm Travis View, and this is Trickledown, a podcast about bad ideas that flow from the top. With me are Julian Field and Jake Rockatansky. Episode 12, The Elyxer of Life, Part 2. So, yeah, this is our second part of our exploration of the influence of Gatorade, which is a lot bigger than I thought it was. And I think it's really, really interesting because it flows from the unique selling proposition of Gatorade. Now, imagine if it was your job to sell a commercial product whose main selling point was that it hydrates your body during or after vigorous exercise or some other athletic activity.

Starting point is 00:02:25 Now, as far as commercial beverages go, this is kind of a odd selling point, like Coca-Cola. It doesn't claim that primarily hydrates your body. The claim is usually that it's a tasty, refreshing treat that facilitates friendship or nostalgia. There's no, like, scientific component to it. And so their competition is primarily other sugary soft drinks. And like Budweiser, you know, alcoholics. It doesn't claim that their beer hydrates your body. They claim that it'll make you cool and feel good, or maybe it'll make you like a, you know, a real American.

Starting point is 00:02:54 And so their competition is like other alcoholic beverages. But people who make sports drinks say that their product is a thirst quencher and rehydrates you. And so their main competition is water. But even if you do successfully convince people to replace their water consumption with sports drink consumption, there's still a limit on how much of the sports drink that you can sell. And that limit is created by the fact that people tend to stop drinking when they're no longer thirsty. So if you wanted to expand the market for sports drink, drinks, you'd have to convince people that drinking until you're no longer thirsty isn't enough.

Starting point is 00:03:30 You'd have to convince them to consume more beyond the elimination of thirst in order to reach your peak health and athletic performance. You could convince them that Gatorade is the best drink to pour out for your homie who drank too much Gatorade and died. Yeah, yeah, they haven't explored the pouring out on the streets and remembrance market. Yeah, really leaving money on the table. Yeah. I got to say, though, I'm already taking heat for saying publicly on the last episode that I like the cucumber flavor.

Starting point is 00:04:00 So I don't know how much I'm going to contribute here. I feel like my Gatorade preferences are already on the cross, if you will. When will people realize that you're innocent? It's insane. It's like, tired of listening to what your body is telling you, ignore it. Drink more. You know, if you want to really be effective at convincing people to drink a lot more, you'd have to convince people with authority that drinking beyond thirst is good, not just the general public, but like scientists and athletic organizations. And that is exactly what Gatorade through the Gatorade Sports Science Institute did.

Starting point is 00:04:40 Before I get into that, I want to talk a little bit about drinking strategies, because there are two main competing fluid intake strategies that people might. might subscribe to. Now, the first is drinking the thirst, which is also called by its Latin name ad libitum. Now, ad libidum, just like sounds, consumption of fluid, whatever you feel like, and drinking, you know, as much or as little as you like. It's fluid consumption guided by your natural, innate, biological impulses. When you, you know, you feel thirsty, when you drink, when you feel like you've had enough, you stop. Pretty simple. The second school of thought for hydration is program drinking. This is drinking predetermined amounts of fluid with the purpose of minimizing fluid losses. And this usually means drinking even after you've satisfied your thirst.

Starting point is 00:05:26 And this is based on the idea that, like, you know, when you do vigorous exercise, you lose a lot of fluid, mostly from sweating, and this leads to a corresponding drop in body weight. Proponents of this strategy argue that a more regimented hydration strategy is better at preventing dehydration and heat illness than merely drinking the thirst. Before I get into the scientific backing of either position, I think it's worth talking about their history because the idea of program drinking is fairly new. Like I talked about in the last episode, for most of the 20th century, even like top endurance athletes, very often drink nothing at all during athletic events. Also, not necessarily a good idea. That's just the way it was. But even after the

Starting point is 00:06:08 invention of Gatorade, athletes generally drank the thirst. There was no suggestion that you should just choke down large amounts of fluid for health or performance reasons. This automatic preference for drinking the thirst slowly changed in the second half of the 20th century. And this happened when some advice popped up, just like in the collective consciousness, that related to very specific advice on drinking. Now, you might recall hearing the recommendation that you should drink at least eight glasses of water that consist of eight ounces of water each per day for a total of 64 ounces in a day. This is sometimes called eight by eight.

Starting point is 00:06:45 Kind of weird advice when he says, like, everyone should do this. Like, regardless of your health, regardless of your athletic activity, regardless of your body weight. This is just the advice for everyone. It's very odd that everyone just gets the eight glasses of water, eight ounces a day. Where the hell of this come from? When I was a kid, I would, like, at the end of the night, I would realize, you know, oh, I don't think I've drunk enough water today, you know, because this was part of the accepted reality. and I would go into the bathroom and we had these like solo cup, you know, these solo cup dispensers with little, you know, wax cups or whatever, and I would slam eight of them.

Starting point is 00:07:21 And I would go to bed just about every night with a belly just like swished full of water. You know, I would feel like a ship, a ship sinking, you know, as I crawled into bed. But I thought that that was, I thought I was doing something good for myself. We're all very grateful that Jake is still alive. Yeah. I mean, this is strange advice that, you know, affected perhaps impressionable neurotic people like young jazz. Yes. Just can you imagine me just in my jammies?

Starting point is 00:07:51 Just swish, swish, you know, eight big glasses slammed all at once. I was all water. And surprisingly, surprisingly didn't, I was not a, you would think that bed wedding might come next. But that didn't happen. Don't ever. Oh, that's good. Yeah. Make it clear.

Starting point is 00:08:07 Make it clear. But I guess dating young Jake would be like owning a waterbed. I mean, I was like eight or nine. I was eight or nine. I wasn't dating. I wasn't thinking about, I was thinking about, you know, Batman. So you stopped this activity later? I did.

Starting point is 00:08:20 Yeah, I am an under hydrated person now. I exist on the minimal amount of fluids to survive. Yeah. Maybe if Gatorade invented like a Gatorade pouch, you could heat up between your thighs. That would change. Hey there, you've been listening to a sample clip of trickle down. This is a side project that I've been working on. It's a 10 episode series about misinformation and bad ideas that flow from high authority sources.

Starting point is 00:08:52 I think it's fascinating, and I mean, it's a way for, I guess, me to explore the way people who should know what they're talking about don't always actually. I'm not going to lie, some of it's kind of a bummer, but if you're anything like me, that's actually more of a reason to die. into the subject matter. Like with the premium episodes of Q&N anonymous, all the episodes of Trickled Down are available to people who support us through Patreon. Still the same five bucks a month. Double the extra content, same price that we've been doing since 2018. We are inflation proof. Inflation proof. Inflation proof. Inflation proof. You know, I'm going to be.

Starting point is 00:09:37 Thank you. Thank you.

QAA Podcast - Trickle Down Episode 12: The Elixir of Life Part 2 (Sample)

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