Performance Nutrition, Sweat Sodium And The Secret Hydration Formula Of The World's Top Endurance Athletes

Hey, Ben Greenfield here. Two quick things before we jump into today's nutrition nerdiness with Alan Lim in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

I think that we, for whatever reason, always think about performance and endurance sports, about getting adequate calories. But the reality is that in the same way that we can survive for weeks without food, but only days without water, performance is very much the same if we can find a sugar ratio or a ratio of glucose to fructose that best matches the ratio of glucose fructose transporters in the small intestine. Essentially what we get is we get two lanes of traffic. There's some good literature out there that shows that chronic sodium depletion over time can lead to signs of overreaching and over training.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep, brain and hormone optimization. So whether you're an ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And I wrote an article a while back@BenGreenfieldFitness.com called the real Truth about what to eat before, during and after workouts and races. And in that article I mentioned a guy named Dr. Alan Lim and I specifically gave a shout out to the recipes that he invented when he was director of sports science for the Garmin and the Radio Shack professional cycling teams. And in that article I was talking about recipes like chocolate and sea salt sticky bites, blueberry and chocolate coconut rice cakes and things like crispy rice omelets. And I know that you cannot argue that those don't sound tasty. And yes, we will be in the interview today talking a little bit about how those type of things jive with the whole high fat low carb diet for you high fat zealots out there. But anyways, a few weeks ago I attended my Team Timex Triathlon camp where Alan was there conducting sweat sodium analyses and we had a chance to chat a little bit during my sweat sodium analysis and I'm going to include the audio of that chat as a bonus after today's interview. But I had so many other things that I wanted to talk to Alan about. Everything from the ingredients that are used in sports nutrition compounds these days to whether electrolyte intake during exercise is useful, useless or beneficial to fat utilization during exercise and ketosis that I thought he'd be a great guest to get on the show. And if you don't know much about Alan Lim, we'll be sharing a little bit more of his story when we jump into our conversation. But he's basically an exercise physiologist. He's a cycling coach. He's the founder of something called Scratch Labs. He's the guy who developed the method of testing for biological markers of performance enhancing drugs that led to professional cycling's biological passport. He's worked with dozens of top American cyclists. He's also worked with a bunch of professional triathletes. He's worked with guys like Lance Armstrong and George Bush. And he's also the author of a couple of books, the Feed Zone Cookbook and Feed Zone Portable, two books that I personally own and use. So we're going to be jumping in and chatting with Alan. If you want to access any of the resources that we talk about today, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com scratch that's scratch with a K. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Scratch so, Alan, thanks for coming. What's going on, man?

Thanks for having me.

Hey, I'm curious how exactly you got into all this, because at TimexCamp you were sharing with me, I believe, about how you are. You're like Filipino Chinese or something like that.

Yeah, all my parts are from China, but I was made in the Philippines and programmed here in the United States of America. So we immigrated here when I was just a baby pretty much, and grew up in Los Angeles. Fell in love with cycling, fell in love with human, a really young age and kind of set out to make it my career ever since.

Nice. How did you get involved with professional cycling as far as Team Radio Shack and Garmin and working with Lance Armstrong?

Yeah. Well, I had started out racing bicycles in Southern California on a little team called the Montreux Cycling Team. Grew up with a great group of riders from my cousin, my brother, guys like Halden Morris and Tony Cruz and Freddy Rodriguez, and we kind of stormed all over the place in Southern California race bicycles. And by the time it was time to go to college, I realized that I didn't really have it to be a professional cyclist. So I started studying exercise science at the University of California, Davis. My senior year at Davis, I started coaching the collegiate team there, helping out the women's team. And we had a lot of success and it was a ton of fun. And I realized that not only did I love the sports science, but I love the coaching aspect. I then left Davis, went to the University of Colorado at Boulder Started coaching at CU Boulder, got my master's degree in exercise physiology under the direction of Dr. William Burns. Then I got this little gig coaching as a resident coach at the Olympic Training center, and it just kind of continued. After about a year or so of that, I went on to do my PhD in the Integrated Physiology Department at CU Boulder, again under the direction of Dr. Bill Burns. Worked in his Applied Exercise Science laboratory. And a big part of my project was trying to understand how portable power meters could be used to better understand training load. At the time, I had been working with these engineers with a product called the Powertap. And eventually the Powertap was sold to the SARA Cycling Group, and they invested pretty heavily in my education and in development of the Powertap. And I became, you know, one of the kind of early guys using portable power meters to try to understand training load and professional cycling. My. By the time that I was finished with my PhD, my dad had passed away, and I wanted to take some time to just be with my mom and human being and mourn. And, you know, I found myself without a job, doing pretty much nothing. And it was at that time that Powertap came to me and said, hey, you want to go onto the Pro Tour and, you know, help some of the riders that we sponsor, etc. So I came into the sport of professional cycling around 2005, and it was crazy. You know, it was this dream come true for me. On one hand, being at events like the Tour de France. On the other hand, it was so much work and the sport was in so much chaos. It was kind of 99. 1. It was 99% bullshit, 1% pure magic. Ended up figuring a way to, you know, try to live for the magic and try to make things better in the sport. And that led me to conversations with Jonathan Vaughters, what he was doing with his young TIAA Craft team. And we decided that, you know, it'd be great to try to start from scratch with the sport of cycling, give this new young generation of American cyclists a chance to ride clean and really prosper in a very American way. And so, you know, we started working with the guys at UCLA and started doing this, our own version of the bio passport, and groomed these young kids into the Garmin professional cycling team. And then, you know, I did a few years there and then eventually went to Radio Shack for two more years, and then, you know, retired from the sport and started Scratch Labs. So it's been a kind of a crazy, wild ride all over the place.

Yeah. Now Speaking of scratch labs, I think one of the first places that I saw you, Alan, was on YouTube and you were doing a video about eggs and hydration. I don't know if you recall the details of that video, but if so, can you kind of share the idea behind that video? Because it was kind of a perfect way to express your unique ideas when it comes to hydration science.

Yeah. You know, what we found when I was working with Garmin was that if the sports drink was too sugary, if it was too sweet, if it had too many ingredients in effect, if it was at a higher concentration than blood, and if riders drank too much of it one time, they would get gastrointestinal distress. They would feel bloated. You know, the water wouldn't pass through their small intestine at a fast enough rate. And in worst case scenarios, they would end up with diarrhea. And I'm sure for many endurance athletes, they've experienced this quote, unquote, gut rot, right?

Yeah. What kind of concentration are we talking about, like, in terms of percentages?

You know, you can. You can get gut rot as low as 6%, depending upon how many other ingredients are in a solution.

So, and to put that into context for folks, what would be, well, let's say like Gatorade or Powerade or something like that. What's the concentration of something like that?

Yeah, those drinks are probably in the 6% range. That's 6 grams of carbohydrate for every hundred mils of fluid.

Okay.

You know, so 6 over 100. That's your 6%. And that's an easy way to talk about how sweet or how much sugar drink has. But what people, I think, really realize was that it's the net molecular concentration that affects the movement of water across the small intestine. And that net molecular concentration can be measured in units of milliosmoles, or osmolarity. So we often talk about the molecular concentration as the osmolarity or as the osmotic pressure of a solution. And that osmotic pressure is not just the sugar, but it's also, you know, the, you know, coloring agents. It's also the emulsifiers. It's also the flavoring agents. It's also all the electrolytes that you have in that drink. And so if you only have so much room to pack a bus, you want to hopefully carry, you know, useful cargo, human beings. But if you get on a bus with a bunch of goats and chickens, you tend to screw yourself. And that was kind of the problem With a lot of drinks, if you look at the ingredient, you know, list, and you compare one drink to another, they may all look the same in terms of, say, your carbohydrate, your electrolyte concentration. But if one drink has more of these excess food additives, you're going to have a higher osmotic pressure in that drink than one that is simpler.

And when you have a high osmotic pressure, what happens in the gut?

Well, it depends. The egg video that I did was a demonstration of something called osmosis. It's a demonstration of how water moves across what's called a semipermeable membrane. A semipermeable membrane is a membrane that is selective to certain ions. So water can pass freely, but others, other, you know, molecules or ions, can't. Now, when you have a solution that you know, or let's say you have a barrier, right? And you have a solution on one side, and you have a solution on the other side. Perfect example of that is the human body. You have this membrane or this barrier called your small intestine or your gut. And one side is blood, and that has osmotic pressure of about 280. Okay. On the other side is whatever you might eat and drink. And if the osmotic pressure on the other side is greater than 280, water likes to move from an area of lower pressure to higher pressure or lower concentration to higher concentration. So if you drink something that has a higher osmolarity via osmosis, water will tend to flow into your gut, not into your body. Now, the one caveat is that, you know, the semipermeable membranes, they're selective to certain ions.

Now, and water, when you say it's flowing into your gut, where is water flowing into your gut from?

From your body, from inside your body. You know, the human body is interesting when we think about the gastrointestinal tract. I think that people don't realize that when you put something in your mouth, you're not actually putting it inside your body. It's still your GI tract, from your mouth to your butt is continuous with the outside world. Have you ever seen those little slippy things, you know, that you hold in your hand and it kind of hard to hold? They're filled with water.

Yeah.

The inside of our GI tract is like the inside of that tube, right? And what happens is when we eat something, foodstuffs and water, you know, they sit in our intestinal lumen. And there are two ways that that stuff can. There are two paths for that stuff. Either it can be absorbed into the body, into the bloodstream, or it can pass through your GI tract out. And if this water from inside your body is spilling into your intestinal lumen, because what you have just consumed is highly concentrated, that can ultimately lead to diarrhea.

Okay, gotcha. So you've got a high osmotic pressure and solutions that are too concentrated, whether it be from the carbohydrates that are present in them, or emulsifiers, fillers, et cetera. And that was the problem that you were encountering when you were working with these professional cycling teams.

That's essentially right, yeah. One other thing to consider is that when you talk about the things that you might have in your food or in your drink, there's this issue of tonicity. And tonicity refers to the non penetrating molecules, meaning the molecules that don't have a way to get across your gut. If you have molecules that are easily transported, say like glucose or fructose or say sodium. Right. As those molecules get physically transported across the gut, they lessen the osmotic pressure of the solution that you just drank, and water will tend to follow. So water can enter into the body in basically two ways. Either through simple osmosis or it can pull across once other molecules are transported. That changes the osmotic pressure. In addition, if you pull across some sodium and some glucose, you'll pull across a lot of water with it. In fact, the stoichiometry on that is like 200 or 2 molecules of sodium. One molecule of glucose pulls across about210 molecules of water. And that's why oral rehydration solutions have a lot of sodium and just a little bit of sugar. So it's not just the osmotic pressure. It's also whether or not the molecules in that drink are recognized by the body and can be transported across the gut.

Okay, got it, got it. So in terms of the solution, building a better solution solution, how did you proceed once you realized that this was occurring in the guts of the endurance athletes you were working with?

Well, initially we did what everyone does, I think, naturally, is you dilute your sports drink. That's what we were doing. We were just using about half the concentration that was actually recommended, which meant that we were putting our guys at about a 3 or 4% sugar concentration. Unfortunately, the problem with diluting your sports drink is that you also dilute out the sodium in it. And what we were finding is that when we were diluting out our sports drinks, we were getting signs and symptoms of something called hyponatremia. In the athletes I was working with, essentially they were losing too much sodium, and over the long haul, it was affecting their performance. In some cases, it was making them sick. And so the evolution was we started like most people do, by diluting out their speed, diluting out the sports drink, and then we started adding back extra sodium. And then we started thinking, well, is this, is there an easier way to do it? Is there a better way to flavor it? And this whole thing just kind of manifested through trial and error. You know, I was really fortunate to be in a situation where I was working with athletes who were consuming or needing to consume so much of this product. And so the trial and error occurred pretty rapidly and pretty quickly. And what we ultimately realized was that when we used about a 4% sugar content concentration, something not so sweet, when we replace the sodium that they were losing in their sweat, close to it. And when we flavored with really simple ingredients like just freeze dried fruit and left the rest of the drink alone, that's when it worked best. And it worked best because everything that we put in the drink was serving some purpose. The fruit was not only a functional food, but it was also a really simple flavoring agent that would wash away very cleanly. Unlike other flavoring agents, whether they be natural or artificial, you don't end up having that taste in your mouth all day, which can lead to flavor fatigue, which can lead to people not wanting to drink their solutions. You know, we realized that the guys needed more salt or that there was a lot of variability in how much salt people needed. So not only do we add more sodium to the drink, but we also started making savory foods so that guys could consume salt with their food rather than always relying on really sweet foods when they were, when they were training or racing.

Now, once you're reducing the actual concentration of a sports drink like this, so that the water in the sports drink is able to adequately hydrate the athlete and so that the electrolytes and the sugars in the sports drink are able to be utilized, you've got a very relatively weak solution, right? Like 4%. And I don't know, how many calories does that come out to in say like a serving of something like this?

Yeah, that comes out to about 80 calories in half a liter, 160 calories in a liter. It's not an appreciable amount. That's 40 grams of carbohydrate for every liter that you're consuming.

But the epiphysis and about how many of Those half liter, certainly. Well, half liter, that's like 16 ounces, right. So in most cases, I guess with the athletes that I've worked with, they might top off their water and take it maybe twice that. Right. Like perhaps 32 ounces of water per hour. So if they were using a concentration like this in every drink that they took, in every water bottle that they took in, they might be at, you know, 150 or perhaps 180 calories per hour, which is far lower than what you'd see recommended as far as total calorie intake. So what, what happens as far as being able to provide enough energy?

It depends on your exercise intensity. Right. So if you're getting close to 200 calories in an hour and you're losing about a liter of sweat, the thought is that for a lot of endurance activities, especially if you have a lot of stored glycogen, that under four hours, that's probably going to be adequate if you're exercising an intensity that allows you to generate enough heat that you're losing, say, a liter to a liter and a half. Here's the question that we started pose and we started asking ourselves, and I think this is kind of the big misnomer. The question is, are you sweating at a higher rate than you're burning calories, or are you burning calories at a faster rate than you're sweating? And in the heat, most people are sweating way more than they're burning calories. Right. And you have to be burning about 800 calories an hour before you need to consume, say, 400 calories an hour. Right. So the general rule of thumb is that if you replace about half the calories you burn per hour, you're probably going to make it, especially in long endurance events, because we do have plenty of stored fat and plenty of stored carbohydrate to get us through. So a lot of the carbohydrate that we consume exogenously is there to help maintain our blood glucose and help to supply another source of sugar for active muscle.

Yeah, but in something like the Tour, where you've got athletes going at relatively high intensities for really long periods of time, were they only relying on something like this formulation, this scratch formulation, as their calorie source, or were they doing other things? Things?

It really depends. What we started finding at the Tour de France was that if we looked at the total water that somebody was consuming in a day, and this waswhat we were trying to do is we were trying to keep them from losing more than 5% of their body weight. Okay? So they're still getting dehydrated. They're still not getting enough access to water to be at the same weight before and after the event. But Even at a 5% loss, if we looked at all the water they consumed, and we looked at all of the carbohydrate they consumed, and we looked at how many grams per how many mils, it almost always came out to about 4 to 5% solution. Right? And we're talking about carbohydrate from all sources. We're talking about carbohydrate from energy bars or from rice cakes or from, you know, little sandwiches or, you know, whatever they might be eating. And we're looking at water from all sources. We're looking at water that they might grab from the side of a road to, you know, drink or even the sports drink that we were providing them. And so what we figured was that 4% solution because it hydrated very, very well and was easily absorbed. That was a foundation. And if they felt they needed more calories, they could eat their calories. Right? So on average, in the tour, the guys are consuming about 80, maybe anywhere from 70 grams of carbohydrate an hour to, at most, 100 grams of carbohydrate an hour and 100 grams of carbohydrate an hour. That's 400 calories, and that's pretty full tilt. You almost never have days where the average rider at 154 pounds is burning more than 800 calories an hour. My sense of it was that, holy cow, if this is what was working at the very, very highest level of sport, the fittest athletes in the world, then this is probably gonna work for people who aren't burning as many calories, right?

Yeah. So for our listeners, you know, if they're going out and doing something like, say, an ironman triathlon, where they're still gonna be getting off of the bike, Right. And doing a full marathon, and they can't get off of the bike with their energy levels necessarily not being topped off. Even though we'll get into ketosis and fat utilization, hopefully here in a little bit, they're probably going to need to be taking in sources of exogenous calories in addition to what they might be getting from this formula. Correct?

It depends on if they drink enough. Right. If they're under hydrated, then the answer is yes, Right. If it's adequately hydrated, not losing more than 3 to 5% of their body weight, then probably not. But it Requires a lot of access to fluid and a lot of drink solution to make that happen. And so I think what happens in many triathlons and a lot of endurance events is that is not necessarily physiological as much as it is logistical. Right. You just logistically don't have the access to enough fluid. There seems to be plenty of access to carbohydrate in these events because people can carry a lot of sugar with them and a lot of food with them, but they simply can't carry enough water to meet their sweat rates. And so my general sense of it is that in many of these events, people fall apart not because they get inadequate calories, but they fall apart because they become dehydrated or they become hyponatremic in more rare cases. So, you know, if I think one of the best exercises that people can do is to go out there on a hot day and really try to understand what their sweat rates actually are, and then make a plan, first and foremost, to replace the water they lose, then make a plan to replace the calories that they think they need. I think that we, for whatever reason, always think about performance and endurance sports, about being getting adequate put calories. But the reality is that in the same way that we can survive for weeks without food, but only days without water, performance is very much the same. We fall apart very, very quickly when we don't have enough water. And we fall apart very, very quickly because we get a thermal load and we overheat. And so that fluid that we replace is really, really important because by maintaining a proper fluid balance, we can more. We can better regulate our core temperature. And ultimately, especially for very fit athletes, it's that regulation, the core temperature, that ends up being the big bottleneck.

Interesting. So if someone were to go out and perhaps not have access to, for example, the sweat sodium testing that I'll include more information about at the end of this interview, because I kind of did a separate interview with you about the sweat sodium stuff. But if someone doesn't have access to that, what is the best way for them to determine their sweat rate?

Well, for sweat rate, and there are two different issues here. There's your sweat rate, how much total fluid are you losing? And then there's your sodium concentration. How much salt are you losing for that amount of sweat rate or sweat loss? Sweat loss is really easy to determine by weighing yourself before and after exercise. So if you, say, lose two pounds over the course of an hour workout, you know that you've lost Approximately, you know, 32 ounces of fluid. Right. Or a liter. So weighing yourself before and after exercise is really important. Now, obviously, you're also burning off some fuel, but, you know, the fuel weight is not as significant as the water weight. And so for the most part, you get really close by just measuring a change in total body weight. Divide that by time, and you get a sweat rate. Right. So one liter over an hour, that's a liter per hour. Now, the question is, what's in that sweat? How concentrated is that sweat? Well, what's in that sweat? About 90% of what's in that sweat is simple table salt, sodium chloride. The rest of it is potassium, magnesium, and some calcium. Essentially, what you find in your sweat is what you find in your blood. And what you primarily find in your blood is mostly sodium, a little bit of potassium, a little bit of calcium, a little bit of magnesium. And so the reality is that you've got to replace that sodium if you want to, to stay level. The sodium that we lose in our sweat is highly variable across the population. And so there are tests out there like the one I performed, the TimexCamp, where we can actually measure the concentration of that sodium and help prescribe what people might need. But what I've also found is that, you know, people listen to themselves and they listen to their perception of taste for salt, just like they might listen to their thirst. They can do a pretty good job of. Of replacing what they need. And what you tend to find is that people are all over the place. Some people like to have salt during exercise. People don't like to have salt during exercise. And before I started doing a lot of these measures, I kind of didn't understand why. Why was there this kind of individual variability? As I started doing these tests, I started to realize that people were pretty smart in terms of listening to their bodies and that when they did, they covered their bases. But when they didn't, and they tried to kind of do everything by pure numbers, they tended to make mistakes and fall apart.

So you are a fan of basically.

Drinking to thirst versus drinking ad libitum during something like endurance sports?

I am, but I'm also a fan of and advocate people becoming educated about how much they lose and knowing where they stand. Right. You know, if you're drinking to your thirst and you're losing only 3% of your body weight over the course of a five hour endurance event, then you're doing great. And whatever senses are leading you down that path are fantastic. And if you have no problems with your performance and no signs and symptoms of hypernatremia and your body's all good, then whatever you're doing is fantastic. I tend to follow the rule, if it's not broken, don't try to fix it. But what I tend to find works even better is when people who have a good sense of feel are given real feedback and good data, they could slowly hone themselves in. Ultimately, training and racing is a trial and error process when it comes to a single individual. Obviously I come from a scientific background, so for me understanding the literature is really important. Understanding what happens is really important. But what I've realized about coaching individual athletes is that it's not About n equals 1000 at that point, it's about N equals them. And it becomes about the scientific process. It becomes about learning what works for them. Because if they're an outlier one way or the other, well, if that's not addressed, then you're not really practicing science there, you're practicing belief, right?

When it comes to the maximum rate of something like carbohydrate oxidation, most studies show that to top off at whatever like 240 to 280 calories ish per hour. And ultimately when an athlete is, let's say, burning 800 calories an hour, they're not necessarily going to be able to pull off replacing all the calories that they're burning just because the gut can only take on so many calories per hour. When it comes to water and electrolytes, is there any type of formula or any type of research out there that shows that, hey, an athlete is losing X amount of water and X amount of electrolytes per hour, and the maximum amount that they can replenish would be X percentage of that.

There's this. I mean, I think that all the studies that I've read that have tried to replenish what athletes have lost that they can. It works, right? You can absorb that fluid through the gut so long as it's at a low osmotic pressure. For example, with the scratch product, we sit at about 160 milliosmoles, blood is about 280. Even at where our drink is, there's a lot of room for that water to rapidly absorb in. Since everything in our drink is transportable and we're using a particular fructose and glucose ratio which enhances that carbohydrate absorption, we can get a lot of water through athletes. In fact, I think that it's easier, you know, physiologically to bring on that water than it is to replace or oxidize that carbohydrate So I don't think it's a problem, but in reality, it's a massive problem because logistically, people never have access to enough fluid to match their sweat rates.

Yeah, well, I mean, actually, you know, in like an Ironman or even a half Ironman or triathlon, there's aid stations full of water like every 10 miles in many cases.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, one thing that, that's. That's interesting to me is that, is that as runners, you know, pass these through these aid stations, how much are they actually getting in? Right. I think that it is available. Getting the right concentrations, though, getting enough sodium, that becomes kind of a funny little lab experiment as you're running down the road. So one of the complaints I've always heard is that while there are a lot of aid stations, people aren't exactly getting what they need. And it's hard to figure it out when you're on the fly. Maybe what it is is to try to integrate that into practice, right. And say, okay, if I grab this many bottles or this many Dixie cups, this is what I'm getting from this particular source. And you can unload either carbohydrate, electrolytes through other sources.

Right. So what it sounds like to me.

So far is that for the smart.

Athlete who's actually committed to doing well in the sport and maintaining adequate energy levels, they need to a determine their sweat sodium loss and their fluid loss and try to replace as much of that as possible. Experimenting with in their training to see what it feels like when they're approaching that, and also ensuring that they're not using concentrations of fluids that exceed about that 3 to 4% level. And then as far as perhaps an athlete who finds that even when they're replacing that much that they're still bonking or still running out of calories. I want to ask you about the sugar, the glucose fructose combination that you're using in this beverage and why you're using that. But before I do, is there a specific type of solid food source that mixes well with this stuff? And this is kind of a leading question because I know I asked you the same thing at timexcamp and I believe your response was sushi rice.

Yeah, I like sushi rice. It's not just because I'm Chinese, but with respect to the summary, I think that, yeah, all within reason. What I kind of advise is based on my own experience and the experience that I have with athletes. But I think it's really important for people to recognize that they're their own scientific experiment and that in training you've got to vet this stuff out. And you may find that if you over drink that, your performance goes down. And you can over consume water as much as you can under consume water. And you can over consume sodium and electrolytes as much as you can under consume sodium and electrolytes. There's kind of a Goldilocks and the three bears scenario for everybody out there and that. There's plenty of time and training to pay attention to this and work this out and come up with a plan. Once you have a plan, it all becomes experimentation from that point on, with respect to your racing.

What is the sugar composition, the carbohydrate composition of sushi rice? Do you know?

It will all break down primarily into glucose.

Okay, so with that you're getting glucose, but in your beverage scratch, you've got. Well, basically the ingredient level says cane sugar. Why did you choose that specific sugar source?

Source.

We chose that specific sugar source for a few reasons. First and foremost, our goal is to have a particular glucose to fructose ratio in the small intestine. You have essentially three carbohydrate transporters, you have a fructose transporter, you have a glucose transporter, and you have a galactose transporter or milk sugar. Some people are intolerant of milk sugars. They don't have a lot of the galactose. So we kind of just ignore that as a potential energy source, right? And so if we can find a sugar ratio or a ratio of glucose to fructose that best matches the ratio of glucose fructose transporters in the small intestine, essentially what we get is we get two lanes of traffic, right? We get two lanes that are, that we can send carbohydrate down as opposed to one lane. Now, you know, if, if we have, you know, let's say the ratio is 50, 50, right, and we have one carbohydrate, we have one glucose lane and one fructose lane, then the correct ratio is exactly 50% glucose, 50% fructose. But I think the nature of it is that there's slightly more glucose transporters than there are fructose transporters. And so we have a ratio of sugars to match that. Cane sugar is very interesting because for one molecule of cane sugar or sucrose, okay, you get that breaks down into one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose. And so, you know, we now have a way to have a low osmotic form of both Glucose and fructose. So we use cane sugar to get a 50, 50 match of glucose and fructose, and then we add back a little bit of glucose to, you know, increase the ratio so that we have a little more glucose than fructose.

Why wouldn't you choose the fructose maltodextrin blend that a lot of sports nutrition manufacturers use, like these long chains of carbohydrate via the maltodextrin and then the fructose? So that you're using, I believe when maltodextrin breaks down, it's still using a glucose transporter and then that's combined with fructose. Why wouldn't you use maltodextrin?

That's right. So the question why don't we use a long chain malto and fructose? Because you can certainly do that. And the main reason is that it's taste, right? If at a 4% solution, you're using malto, a long chain, when it first touches your mouth, it's not going to taste very sweet. It's not going to taste very good. By using cane sugar, we get the same ratio of glucose and fructose, but we vastly improve the taste of the drink. For us, it's not just about doing the science and saying what's optimal in terms of hydration, but we're also kind of foodies and we're connoisseurs of what you're going to want to drink over the long haul. Cane sugar and glucose is far superior in terms of taste than a malto fructose blend, in my opinion.

Now, what about an athlete who would want to use something like this for their daily hydration needs? Right. Like the same way that you'd use something like noon or any of these other effervescent electrolyte tablets. Do you get concerned about an athlete dumping cane sugar into their body if they're, say, sedentary or standing around at their office during the day trying to stay hydrated?

Absolutely. As a professional emailer, I tend to find myself where I once found myself, reaching for the exercise hydration mix that we made to just drink. Because it tastes good, Right? It's like drinking a soda or something. But it's all about context. We designed this formula specifically to replace fluid loss and electrolyte loss during exercise. It's not intended to be used casually. It's not intended to be used when you're just sitting around for regular hydration. It's for that reason that we actually developed our daily electrolyte mix. Which is half the Sugar. It's a 2% solution. It's mostly just fruit powder, and it has a very small amount of electrolyte because the water that we lose when we're sitting around has almost no electrolyte loss with it. And so we design our daily drink to flavor water so that if you're just sitting around, you have something to drink that is a little more interesting than plain water. But the fact of the matter is, is that if you're becoming dehydrated and you're not physically active, if you're becoming dehydrated due to an insensible water loss, water vapor lost through your respiration, for example, then drinking plain water is perfectly fine. So we make a big point to say that this is a sports drink and that there is not necessarily a bad food. There's just bad behavior.

Yeah.

Now, why wouldn't you use something like stevia, for example, in something like this, like the daily instead of a sugar?

Yeah. For me, it just fundamentally comes down to the taste. I'm not personally a fan of the way that stevia tastes. It leaves, in my opinion, an aftertaste. And that aftertaste drives me insane. Anytime I drink a product with stevia in it, and I taste that drink five minutes, ten minutes after I've had it, it drives me freaking bonkers. So for me, it has nothing to do with the plant, has everything to do with the mouthfeel of that product.

I don't know if you're familiar with this, but there's a couple of research studies out there that look into how genetics play a role in people's taste receptors and how stevia may actually taste bitter to some people and then taste perfectly fine to others.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that I fall into the category of it tastes bitter, it tastes weird to me, and doesn't appeal. And so I guess that's maybe one of the luxuries of making your own drink products.

Yeah. A little bit of a rabbit hole, I know, but I just. I was just curious about youryour choice of sugars and the ingredients. Now, this, of course, leads into what for some people I know is probably the elephant in the room. That's the fact that we've talked on this show quite a bit about performing in a low carbohydrate state or training low, and even in some cases for athletes who have trained themselves to train in a low carbohydrate state for the glycogen sparing or the fat oxidizing effect, to even use that approach. In competition to do something like ketosis and either use MCT oil or coconut oil, or even use these newer fancy liquid ketone bodies to actually avoid sugars for the most part during exercise. How familiar are you with Jeff Volek's research on fat utilization during exercise and kind of this apparent need for fewer carbohydrates in athletes who have become fat adapted?

Yeah, I'm somewhat familiar with the work. Obviously it's not something that I spend a lot of time thinking about, I think, because the sport of cycling that I come from is very different than a lot of steady state endurance sports like triathlon where you're, you know, say, exercising at a fixed intensity. Professional cycling is very different because it's very stochastic in terms of the intensity. Meaning that there are huge, huge undulations in intensity. Right. You're going from, you know, very low intensity to these very sudden quick accelerations. You're constantly back and forth. You know, obviously the higher the exercise intensity, the greater the need for carbohydrate at lower exercise intensities. You know, we can use primarily fat as a fuel source. And so in theory, it makes a lot of sense to me, fat adapting if you're going to be doing very prolonged, very steady state activity. But it doesn't make sense if you're doing prolonged, very stochastic intensity exercise. At least that's what I have found. What we did on the pro tour was we worked really hard to fat adapt our athletes when they were training. So we would restrict carbohydrate, we would glycogen deplete, we feed them higher fat diets. But we found that if we didn't start increasing carbohydrate intake in the week leading up to an event and give them very high carbohydrate diets during racing, that they didn't do well. So I think that our compromise was a combination of the two. We fat adapted when they were training, but we carbohydrate loaded when they were competing.

Now these are athletes participating in multiple stage competitions like day after day.

That's right, day after day exercise. But a very, very unique pattern of exercise intensity. A road race is very, very non steady. It's high, high, low in terms of exercise intensity. In fact, if triathlon is mostly at, say just below the lactate threshold, what's very interesting about a professional road race is that you're never at lactate threshold. You're either above it or you're under it. While the average intensity of professional road race might be the Same as a triathlon race, right?

You're burning more matches, though, you're entering glycolysis more frequently. Now, what I'm interested in doing personally, because I know that even if I were to drink enough of this scratch formula to satisfy my hydration needs, that I would probably still need some additional calories. And I just know this because having experimented quite a bit over the course of 11 different Ironman triathlons and the training that leads up to that, I generally do well, for example, on the bike at close to 400 calories per hour. And what I'm interested in experimenting with is whether I can use the scratch formulation to maintain really, really good hydration because of this 4% concentration. But then add something like an oil or a fat, like a coconut oil or an MCT oil or something like that to bring in some extra medium chain triglycerides as my additional calorie source sources. So I'm kind of getting just enough carbohydrates to allow myself to stay hydrated and to drive some of that salt into my system and then also get the additional benefit of the oils.

I think the answer, Ben, is yes, you can do that. I think that where I would be careful is be careful. When you think about your gastric emptying rate versus your intestinal absorption rate, right? When you think about, say, how the GI tract is working during the. During exercise or when you're eating a meal, right? Digestion begins when we start chewing a food or we swallow something, and that goes down to the stomach. The stomach is really kind of a big reservoir for food, and it's a mixing chamber where foods get digested. Ultimately, that stuff is liquefied into a chyme and it moves through the pyloric sphincter at a regulated rate and hopefully at a rate that matches the ability of the small intestine to then absorb that stuff. Where people get GI distress is when a lot of their calories ends up being in liquid form, whether it be liquid carbohydrate or even fats. What happens is in those situations, you can potentially get, depending upon the form of food that you eat, a faster gastric emptying rate. And while we often think of a fast gastric emptying rate as a good thing with exercise performance because it means that we're able to kind of speed fuel into our body a little faster. If all of a sudden the stomach is no longer a bottleneck. Well, the new bottleneck potentially might be the small intestine. And so if we empty stuff out of our stomach, at a faster rate than our intestines can absorb. Once that stuff is in the intestine, there's only one two places it can go, either into the body or out the. But so in my. In my form of thinking, you might need something to bind that fat, you know, whether it's a little bit of carbohydrate or, you know, a little bit of rice or even something solid. So that.

Yeah. So you could potentially even use like one of your sushi rice cake recipes or something like that, and just add some extra coconut oil or something along those lines. Interesting. And you are spot on, by the way. I do know there's been research that have shown that MCT containing drinks actually have a faster gastric emptying race than. Right. Than drinks that contain just carbohydrates. So I do know that fats do indeed speed up the gastric emptying rate.

Yeah. And, you know, one thing that people don't think about is they don't think about the stomach as a reservoir for food as being an advantage. Right. If you can load up your stomach, Right. With some these extra fats and MCTs, and they can bind to something that holds them there for a little longer, and then the stomach begins to digest it. Essentially. Now you have a kind of a glucose fat drip. Right. You have your stomach allowing you to another pocket for food as opposed to trying to hold all that stuff in your back pocket. Right.

Yeah.

What ends up happening is that the flow of calories and fluid into your body ends up becoming much more steady. And so think of the water and the foodstuffs that you're consuming during exercise as kind of traffic flow slow. And if you have these big periods where there's a big traffic rush, that's when you potentially have an accident. And that's when you start to slow things down. You have a little meter, which is your stomach allowing foods to enter progressively throughout the whole entire time frame of your exercise. Then traffic ends up being smoother, and I think the risk for GI distress ends up being lower. And what you suggested, I think could work really, really well.

Now, another kind of elephant in the room, in addition to the potential for fat utilization and ketosis during exercise is this idea that's been presented by Dr. Tim Noakes. He has a book called Waterlogged, and I've interviewed him on the show about his feelings that electrolytes, for example, the need for electrolytes is much lower than what we've been led to believe. And he cites research, for example, of people who have been on like day long marches in the heat and maintained just as high plasma electrolyte levels as they had when they had begun without actually taking in exogenous sources of electrolytes. And he proposes that perhaps the body has larger stores of electrolytes and sodium than we've been led to believe and that the need for life for electrolector kind of from Gatorade or something like that. So what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think that obviously the human body is really, really resilient and that there are so many examples of human survival and extreme environmental stresses. And we're basically designed to survive and we're designed to adapt. And Dr. Noakes makes some really good points about that. That being said, as I think there's a difference between survival and optimizing one's performance. Just because you didn't die doesn't mean you did your best or that you reached your human potential. And for me, I come from it thinking about how do I get this human machine to perform at its highest level for the entirety of this event. I also come from it from the perspective of not just one day of performance, but 21 days of performance for the grand tour or in the case of a TRAP triathlete, all the days of training leading up to that particular event. There's some good literature out there that shows that chronic sodium depletion over time can lead to signs of overreaching and over training. There's also, as we saw with the group of Timex athletes, a huge variability in sodium loss in sweat. And so you can certainly find populations of athletes who have self selected to lose very, very little sodium in their sweat.

I actually thought that was very interesting. You brought that up when you were testing the athletes at Timex camp how genetics may influence the actual sweat sodium loss. Can you go into that? Yeah.

You know, I think that if you look at the history of salt in society, there's a very, very interesting history. Right. This was one of the most precious minerals in humanity. And there were some regions that had, you know, very, very high access to salt. And these areas of the world became very, very prosperous. And there were other areas with very little access to sodium. And getting salt was really, really difficult over thousands of years of evolution. I think what happened was that if you were losing a lot of sodium and you lived in an area where there was very little salt, you just died, you didn't make it and you didn't have kids that lost a lot of sodium. Right. On the other hand, if you came from a region Potential sodium access was very high. It didn't really matter. Right. You could always get what you needed. And so a lot of what we understand about sodium loss and sweat comes from the field of cystic fibrosis. And there's a genotype that's been identified that actually regulates the reabsorption of sodium in the sweat gland. And while we used to think that it was a training effect or dietary sodium that were the main determinants of sodium sweat loss, we're starting to find that very variability of this gene probably predicts more of the difference in people than the training effect or the dietary effects.

So what it comes down to is it sounds like some people may actually need to take in electrolytes, depending on whether or not they genetically lose more sodium or don't have these sodium conservation mechanisms. And in addition to that, that people need to take into account chronic sodium depletion. Like an athlete who is training heavily each day leading up to an ironman and losing electrolytes consistently each day leading up to that point may be different than, for example, the. Let's, for example, use the case of something like that. No, brings up, like, the military personnel who maybe has one march in this single month, but isn't necessarily to going. Going out and sweating profusely every single day like an Iron man triathlete.

That's right, exactly. You know, I think that Noakes makes a great point, but his point is kind of moot in the big picture. And it's moot in the big picture because you can also say that people can survive and do pretty well, perform very high with two or three days of sleep deprivation. Right, but that doesn't mean that we don't need sleep.

Yeah, yeah, no, it makes sense. Now, one other thing I wanted to ask you about, and this is based off of the audio that I'll play after we finish up here with the sweatsodium analysis, is customization of the frequency of water intake versus this Scratch Labs electrolyte intake based on individualized sweat sodium losses. So let's say that someone finds out. I don't even. I don't know if you have my data in front of you, but I think I was losing somewhere around like it was slightly above 1000. As far as I believe it was millimolars. Was it millimolars per liter sweat, but.

We can convert that to milligrams. And so converting to milligrams, you were at 1035 milligrams of sodium loss per liter of sweat.

Okay, so based on that, how Would you go about creating a customized rehydration scenario based off of something like 1035 milligrams per liter of sweat?

Yeah. So in your situation, I would say, for example, our exercise hydration mix has 720 milligrams of sodium per liter. At 720 versus 1000, you're replacing about 30% less. Now for any given day of exercise performance, you would be just fine using our exercise drink because, as no does point out, you have stores of sodium. There's kind of an acceptable loss of sodium that you can have during an exercise bout before you have any kind of ill consequences. You're within that acceptable range. That being said, I think that if you look at it chronically, you could probably say that you can just drink our drink. And if you need extra carbohydrate, make sure that there's salt in that extra carbohydrate and be at 1,000 milligrams of sodium for every liter of solution that you might drink. Finally, the third way that you can do it is some ratio of our exercise hydration mix and our hyper hydration mix. We make a drink mix that is essentially equivalent to the sodium content in a bag of saline. It's the same sodium concentration as blood. And what we use with that drink is we use it as a way to titrate am extra sodium so that people can get the right ratio over the course of an endurance event. So, for example, at 720 milligrams per liter of our exercise hydration mix, and at 3500 milligrams of sodium loss for sodium for our hyper hydration, for every six or seven bottles of the exercise hydration mix that you would drink, you would need to have one bottle of our hyper hydration to be just over a thousand. This, in my mind, isn't about customizing a drink mix as it is about titrating between two solutions. For example, if you were lower than 720, there was one person in the camp who, for example, was at 330 milligrams of sodium loss, they would drink some combination of our exercise hydration mix and titrate that out with water.

Yeah, that makes sense. So if I was drinking, let's say, 32 ounces of water per hour to satisfy my hydration needs, that's like a liter of water per hour. And if I were adding just one of the exercise hydration mixes to that, that would put me at 700mg, when in fact, I actually need an additional 350. Ish milligrams over and above that. So I would have to figure out how to get that extra 350 milligrams of sodium via salt added to any solid food that I might add, or by adding an extra, I guess, half packet of this exercise hydration mix or something like that.

Yeah, exactly. So for us, you know, let's say like in the case of multiple riders on a team, the solution there is to say, you know, we're going to make three bottles, we're going to make bottles with water, we're going to make bottle with our exercise hydration mix, and we're going to make bottles with our, our hyper hydration mix.

Now how does that hyper hydration mix not create the same type of osmotic pressure issues that we were talking about at the beginning of this interview? As far as like the extreme concentration.

Of something like that, because it has less sugar, only has three ingredients, it's just the sodium citrate, it's just the cane sugar and glucose, and then it's just mango powder for flavor. So it's really, really simple. You know, whereas you're trying to put in some other additional electrolytes in our exercise hydration mix.

Okay, so, so that hyper hydration milk still comes out close to the 4%.

It comes out less. It comes out at about 3%.

Okay.

You know we're only using sodium.

Right. So, so I could, for example, use something like the 700 milligrams, the exercise hydration mix. And if I did that for two hours in a row, I might learn that that third bottle or that fourth bottle that I took in needed to be the hyper hydration mix instead of the exercise hydration mix. So that over the course of say like a five hour cycling event, I would average 1,000 milligrams of sodium.

That's right. And in your case, it's every sixth or seventh bottle.

Okay, interesting. So every sixth or seventh bottle of, with a bottle being how many, how many liters in a bottle? A half liter? Are we talking about a 16 ounce bottle?

It doesn't end up mattering. It's a race. Right. So if your bottles are tiny or if your bottles are small, if you're always using the same size bottle, then every sixth or seventh bottle, you know, you would drink a bottle of hyper. Right?

Yeah, that makes sense.

You know, one other issue with hyper is that even though it has a high osmotic pressure, since it's basically just sodium and glucose, it works a lot like an oral rehydration solution where we're able to take advantage of the sodium glucose transport to move water in. Right. And so, you know, if we didn't have very or highly transportable molecules in that solution, it wouldn't work. So if it was, you know, a highly concentrated solution with a lot of food coloring in it, then, you know, it'd probably be going out the back end.

Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. Out the butt. Well, this is, this is so interesting. I mean, I could talk to you forever. We didn't even get into this, this new power meter for running that you're creating this, this stride meter. So I may need to get you on again just to talk about that alone because that's, that's another fascinating thing that we talked a little bit about at Team Timex Camp. But I know we're kind of running.

Short on time is really the genius of Li Shang and his engineering team with the University of Colorado Boulder. I'm just kind of, you know, hanging on for the ride and helping them out while I can. But it's a really neat. That measures the center of mass power that is actually distinct from metabolic power, but I think can be really useful in terms of coaching runners and giving them feedback about their performance.

Yeah. Yeah.

Cool.

Well, maybe I'll just put a link to that in the show notes and folks can go explore it on their own until we get a chance to talk about it. Maybe in a future interview if you're interested in a power meter for running. It actually is pretty cool stuff. So, Alan, thanks so much for your.

Time and yeah, thanks, Ben. Thanks. It was a lot of fun and best of luck with all you do.

Hey, thanks, man. All right, folks, well, if you want to check this out, just go to BenGreenfulFitness.com scratch for the show notes. I'll put a link to Alan's book Feed Zone portables and also the Feed Zone cookbooks, the Skrach lab stuff, the infamous egg hydration video, and much more. So Again, that's@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Scratch with a K. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield and he's Alan Lim signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com scratch don't hit stop yet because you're about to hear a little bonus add on from the sweat sodium analysis that Alan did with me a couple of weeks ago at Team Timex Camp. Enjoy.

So I'm sitting here with Alan Lim of Scratch Labs at Timex Sports Camp, and he's just placed two. What did you just put on Me.

Electrodes on my forearm.

I put two electrodes on your forearm.

Connected with nine volt battery.

Okay.

And basically we're going to push a little drug into your skin called polycarpine. Polycarpine is a cholinergic drug, essentially acetylcholine. And that's the neurotransmitter, when you get hot, that is released that causes sweat glands to sweat.

Right.

So we're actually inducing sweat in the same way that heat Wood, you're causing.

Just this tiny little area on my forearm to sweat.

That's right.

Then what we're going to do is.

We'Re going to put a little plastic disc on to that patch which is going to form an airtight seal. There's a tiny hole in the backside of that disc which leads to a capillary tube. And via capillary action, we're going to absorb your sweat without causing any evaporative loss.

So all that sweat that comes off of this place where you're inducing sweat is going to get collected in that tiny tube.

That's right.

That's right.

And then what happens?

Then we're going to basically take the sample out of that tube, put it into a little sodium analyzer, and measure how much sodium you lose per liter of sweat. So we're going to get a concentration of sodium. If you know what your body weight loss is during the workout, this will help to inform how much sodium and fluid you need to take in during exercise.

Gotcha.

Okay, what's the name of this protocol called? Is it just sweat sodium analysis?

This is sweat sodium analysis developed by a company called Westcor. They use a system. This particular device is called a macroduct system. Macroduct system was actually initially developed to do sodium sweat tests in babies for the diagnosis cystic fibrosis. So we're just borrowing technology that is used to diagnose another disease to measure sodium concentration in you.

And this is something that varies significantly.

From person to person.

It's something that varies significant stifling from person to person. It can be as low as 300 milligrams in a liter. It can be as high as 2000 milligrams in a liter. And in cystic fibrosis, they lose up to all the sodium in their blood, which is 3,500 milligrams per liter.

Wow, that's amazing. So is it primarily if it's not cystic fibrosis, is it usually due to. Sorry for the sound in here.

Genetics training status, what you've eaten that.

Day, like, what's the biggest, biggest thing that plays a, I'd say just like.

A variable like VO2 max, about 80% of it is genetics.

Right.

And the genotype for that is actually named after cystic fibrosis. It's called CF1. And CF1 determines the ability of your sweat gland to re sequester sodium as plasma moves through it. So, you know, if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, people who grew up in very high sodium rich areas could lose a lot of salt with little consequence. People who lived in low sweat, they.

Would show like an allele of this CF1 gene that would actually indicate they'd be not heavy sweaters, but high sodium loss. Yeah, high sodium loss, yeah.

And then in other areas where sodium wasn't plentiful, if you lost a lot of sodium, you would die.

Right.

You would literally not make it to have children. And there's this real evolutionary pressure around the, this particular genotype and it has some real performance implications. What I found is that guys who do really, really well in grand tours have naturally self selected to not lose a lot of sodium. But now that people are getting more informed, we're able to get people who normally wouldn't do well in grand tours who normally do well just say on.

A day and get them through big races.

Now besides genetics, other things can affect it. If you eat more sodium, you're going to have a higher sodium loss, but not appreciably, but it can affect it. Your sweat rate will affect it. If you're sweating really heavily or you sweat more, more fluid is pushing through that sweat gland. Even if you can resuppluster a lot, you can't keep up with the loss. Gender? Probably not.

Age?

Probably not. If anything, men tend to have a slightly higher sodium concentration, as we've seen.

Has anyone ever gotten their, their genes tested like through 23andMe or DNAFit or something like that and actually matched up their specific genetic markers with their sodium loss to see if they do present that gene. If they do. In fact, like the reason I ask is I have 23andMe data. I'd be curious to see.

Yeah, I haven't seen that data in athletics, but that data, data exists in the cystic fibrosis.

Interesting, interesting. Am I holding up the process here, by the way? We're just simply sitting here waiting for.

Yeah, we're just injecting the drug right now. This take another few minutes and then once that's done, let's drop it.

If someone were listening to this and.

They wanted to have this test done. Is this just pretty much like totally proprietary right now?

You can only.

No, not at all.

If you happen to be.

Not at all.

There are plenty of exercises physiology laboratories across the country who have this equipment and use it.

West Core.

Yep, it's the West COR Macroduct system.

Okay.

You know, pediatricians, many of them will be able to do this, right? Because it's specific to diagnosis.

Yeah. Do you ever have athletes who just like approach a local pediatrician and ask for this test?

Yes, I've been told that.

That's, that's, that's good to know. That's good.

You can come to. You can come to Scratch lab for. Schedule an appointment with us if you're in Colorado.

You guys are in Boulder, we're in Boulder.

I know that. For example, Colorado Multisport in Boulder, Colorado, as part of their FIT service. They have the same system and they'll do it.

Okay, so I know I'll get this question, so I'm just going to ask it to you.

How is it not like the, the.

Fox guarding the hen house for someone who makes electrolyte replacement beverages to be telling people how much sweat they lose? Like, because.

Well, first off is that, you know, it's not a warm one size fits all sort of sort of thing. So for us, we don't solve that problem by trying to make multiple different types of sports drinks. We solve that problem essentially making two.

Right.

Our sports drink, which is right at the medium, 800 milligrams. And that helps inform us what our product needs to be for the middle. But then we have our hyper hydration, which is basically a saline level drink. And the feedback that we give to people. Say you're 1500 milligrams of sweat loss. We know that for every, say, three bottles of our scratch, you drink, you need to have one bottle of our hyper.

Okay.

And let's say now you're on the other side. You're at 400 milligrams. Well, we know that for every, say, three bottles of spatch you drink, you need to have one bottle of water.

Gotcha.

All it does is it informs. It allows us to inform people what ratio of.

Right.

You would have the bottle of water if you were experiencing less sodium.

That's right. So we're not trying to use this to necessarily push our own product. We're trying to do this to help other people. And the fact of the matter is, is that between two very different concentrations of sport drink, any single individual can then titrate the right ratio to make.

Sure that do you replace what you.

Lose or do you replace a percentage of what you lose?

We go to try to lose or try to replace what you lose, but almost always it's impossible to do. So given race logistics, given training logistics, there's always some loss.

But it's not like food, like calories.

Where if you're burning a thousand calories an hour, you can't obviously eat a thousand calories an hour.

That's right.

Sweat and sodium is different.

Well, sweat and sodium is actually similar in the same way that you have a storage of glycogen and a storage of fat that will keep you going. You also have a storage of water and a storage of sodium. So this sort of stuff only really becomes important after about two or three hours of exercise and severe heat.

Okay.

Before that, like the person going out and doing like a sprint triathlon. This is not something like they don't have to head out there with like 12 electrolyte pills or like, probably not.

It's not going to hurt them. It may actually help their performance by having more, more fluid volume on.

Right.

But they're not going to experience the same kind of catastrophic performance decline as someone in an event.

Longer than about two to three hours is where this stuff starts to get really important. Interesting.

That's right.

So in the same way that pretty similar to where like glycogen deprivation sits into like one and a half minimum, like two plus hours. Yeah.

Once you start to tap out your sodium stores, once you start to tap out your fluid stores, then you get in trouble. But you can also preload on sodium and fluid before an event as well. A lot of people don't like to do it because they feel really heavy coming to an event. But as you hold onto that glycogen and extra water and if you can put on more fluid just through increases in salt and water intake coming into event, you're gonna be better off than if you didn't.

Nice.

It'll be interesting to check back in.

Here in a little bit and see.

What my personal sodium losses are.

That's right.

I've actually done a very, very rough.

Version of this test a long time ago.

Yeah.

With the maxi package.

I actually don't recall if I was. If I was a heavy sweater or a light sweater, but I think I.

Was kind of mid range, so it'd be interesting.

Or at least in this situation, you know, we're not measuring sweat rate, we're measuring concentration.

Yeah.

We can do the sweat rate by looking at your weight.

Change over a workout.

And then you basically assume that that's mostly water. You know, if you have a caloric estimate, you can also subtract out some of the fuel weight and then you're good to go.

Yeah. Cool. All right, we'll check back in.

All right, let's take maybe about two more minutes still.

Okay.

So we just took my band off. And Ellen, what are you doing with this now?

So I just stuck the capillary tube onto the sensor, and I'm going to flow your sweat into the analyzer.

The analyzer is basically a really precise voltmeter.

So we're going to measure the conductance, and that conductance is going to be proportional to your concentration of sodium.

We're going to get that in millimoles.

So you're just going to like, inject.

My sweat straight in that tube and it's going into this conductivity analyzer.

That's right.

And that's made by this west core.

That's made by west core.

Okay. It's gonna give me my sodium millimolars.

Per liter, it looks like.

That's right.

Okay.

Looks like a pretty. Pretty precise.

Process to be able to fit the head of that tube over the syringe.

Yeah, but it fits pretty well.

It's a little needle thr red. And you can see you're at 49 millimoles per liter.

And 49 millimoles per liter. Okay.

Yeah.

So what's that come out to? Oh, I'm on the second highest that you've tested.

Yeah. You say 1014. Actually, you've come up a little bit. I'll put you at 50.

Oh, 50.

So that means I. I lose a.

Decent amount of salt.

Yeah. 1035.

That's awesome because I love salt.

Put this one on too.

All right, I got. I got some questions for you. One, is that on a scale of.

1 to 10, one being low sweat.

Rate versus 10 being another sweat rate.

Relative to your peers, Are you the type of person who sweats a lot or a little?

Compared to your peer group, I'm about a seven, probably.

Okay. Okay. Next question is.

At the end of a very long.

Workout, say a six hour workout, are.

You the type of person who has no evidence of salt on your jerseys?

1 or 10?

A ton of salt on your jerseys?

Oh, it's like almost nothing.

It's really weird.

I don't see a lot.

Yeah, I don't see much, like the white crust, all that stuff.

I don't get any of it. Yeah, I would say like a one or two maximum.

Yeah.

Okay. I'll say 1.5. Okay.

How old are you in the heat.

Color compared to your peer groups?

10 being awesome.

1 being how well do I do in the heat?

Yeah, I would say probably about a five.

Okay, nice. Last question. How do you like, how do you feel about salt compared to your peer group? Are you neutral about salt?

I freaking love salt. I have like big bags of salt.

On my counter and like put on everything.

Yeah, I brought my own salt.

All right, so what we're going to.

Do is we're going to take these questions and we're going to see because I'm just interested if there's any kind of correlation between the answers to these.

Questions and the range of sodium sweat.

It's going to be very interesting.

Yeah.

And we'll discuss that tomorrow. I'll do a little presentation.

Cool.

Awesome.

Thanks, Alan.

Okay.

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Sam.