Eating to Win: Gatorade, Muscle Milk, and… Chicken Nuggets?

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It was such a sexy result, right?

And I have to say, like, if you were to ask me what would be the ideal result, you know, it's like, okay, this is great.

I could tell my husband then that, you know, I get to drink the beer and he gets to be the designated driver, right?

Like, this is perfect.

It's kind of funny.

It's like, back off, boys.

Like, beer is for women.

Beer, it's for women, specifically women athletes.

That is a headline I can get behind.

And you heard it here first.

But is it true?

That's just what we're going to find out this episode.

You're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And neither of us are elite athletes.

We own gym clothes, yes, and we have even been known to break a sweat, but neither of us are podiuming to use the most charming verb in all of sports.

No, definitely not.

But our friend Christy Ashwanden has been known to win a medal or two in her day, and she's also a science reporter, so she combined those two interests in her latest book.

Warning, there's about to be one use of a swear word just won this episode.

And it comes when Christy can't remember the subtitle of her own book.

So, cover any sensitive ears for the next few seconds.

I'm Christy Ashwanden.

I'm the author of Good to Go, What the Athlete and All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of

What I need to fucking do is memorize the subtitle of my book.

Cynthia, we should make like a supercut one day of all the guests who have had to get their book.

It's so normal.

It's totally normal.

I'm so glad to know that because I feel like, oh my god, Christy, get it together.

Christy does indeed know the title of her own book.

It's Good to Go, What the Athlete and All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery.

The book isn't all about food, of course, but part of it is.

And this episode, Christy is our guide as we tell the story of the strange foods that athletes eat and drink: the Gatorade, the muscle milk, all the special bars and gooz.

And how many of us are now starting to eat and drink those weird foods, too.

Is there science behind these performance foods, or is it all just hype?

Hustle up and join us at the starting line to find out.

It all happened more than 30 years ago, but I remember it as though it was just yesterday.

It was 1967.

It was a summer of love.

But somehow someone forgot to tell these guys.

Our club 67 is underway.

Florida Gators were doing tough against the favorites Georgia Tech in their first ever orange bowl.

The Gators have no answer to that.

It's 1967 and things were not looking good for the Florida Gators.

Yeah, so some University of Florida football players were, I think the term they used, wilting, out on the field.

And so the coaches went to some of the doctors there.

According to legend, this one doctor, Dr.

Robert Cade, he had mixed up a little potion for the players.

It had water and sugar and electrolytes, which is a fancy word for salts that we usually get from our food.

In this case, the potion had some sodium and monopotassium phosphate.

And it tasted...

Disgusting.

Specifically, the players said it tasted putrid.

Dr.

Cade's wife suggested that he should add some lemon flavoring.

And so they ended up drinking this.

Well folks, I figured the Gators coach had some stern words to say to his players because they're playing the third quarter as if their life depended on it.

Larry Smith is a locomotive.

It's all over now folks.

The player of the Gators have taken the Orange Bowl.

Then they won the Orange Bowl.

This win at the Orange Bowl really fixed it in the history and sort of made it become legendary.

And you had other teams saying, oh, it must have been the Gatorade.

That's why they beat us.

So it really, it was sort of like a little bit of science, but a lot of storytelling and legend making.

Yes, this is the creation story of Gatorade.

And frankly, it wasn't until we were getting ready to interview Christy that I realized that Gatorade was, you know, aiding Gators, lemonade for the Gators, the Florida team.

I had no clue.

But yeah, so they ended up signing an agreement with this canned food company, Stokely Van Camp.

And so that's how Gatorade became commercially available.

Stokely Van Camp, of course, is better known as the manufacturers of the second most famous brand of baked beans in the U.S.

But they took Gatorade mainstream.

So their initial slogan was Gatorade Thirst Quencher, the professional thirst quencher.

So it was really about thirst and thirst quenching.

Gatorade is different than juices or fruit drinks or soda bar or water.

Research men created it.

Thousands of athletes swear by it.

Gatorade thirst quencher, the professional

Gatorade turned hydration into a thing they could solve, a problem that you needed more than water to tackle.

And they invested in their own scientific research to prove it.

What ended up happening was Gatorade formed this thing called the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, which still exists, but they sponsored a lot of research looking into this.

hydration is something that's easy to measure.

And so you can show, oh yes, look, they're losing fluids.

But what ended up happening is they could measure these little changes and say, oh, that must be performance, you know, hurting, and that must be terrible.

One early gauge rate study had runners doing different runs.

One run where they didn't drink at all and one where they were drinking a lot.

I talked to one of the runners who was involved, and this is one of the very early studies.

And he said, you know, when they were giving him this water, it was something like every few minutes.

He just, I mean, it was just miserable.

And his stomach felt terrible.

He felt like he had an ocean rumbling around in his stomach.

And he felt horrible.

But, you know, all these measures that they were taking with his body temperature or whatever were more stable.

And so by those measures, they said, oh, this is better.

But when you talk to the runner himself, he said, oh, that was terrible.

And I felt awful.

And it did not feel performance enhancing at all.

Gatorade scientists ignored what the runner felt like and just focused on those changes in his body.

And based on that, they came up with advice for how much liquid athletes should be drinking while they work out.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, at one point, they're advising people to take as much as, I think I calculated that it would be if you ran a three-hour marathon, which is actually quite fast, that you would end up drinking the fluid equivalent of like a six-pack of soda.

More fluid.

Nothing cuts through thirst like Gatorade.

This is a case of everything looking like a nail if you have a hammer.

For Gatorade and the scientists they sponsored, the answer was always more fluid.

But do we really need all that fluid?

So it is true that becoming, you know, severely dehydrated can impact athletic performance, but it's also true that our bodies are really well adapted to lose some fluids, particularly during exercise.

Your body needs liquid in general, yes, but what's really important is the relationship between salts in your blood and that liquid.

And so for a little while, if you don't have enough liquid, your body holds on to the salts too.

We have built-in protection mechanisms.

Dehydration is real.

I've gotten sick from it before, but it takes a lot to get really dehydrated.

Christy says that even ultra-marathon runners, yes, they lose fluids, but they can do just fine without extra hydration during the race.

But you might be wondering, what about those wilting gators back in 1967?

Wasn't that a dehydration problem?

So the wilting is not a result, for the most part, of the hydration amount.

It's about the heat, and it's about exertion, and you can develop heat stroke.

But dehydration, it's funny.

And since I've been writing about this and working on the book, I just, I see this everywhere where dehydration is sort of like the catch-all thing that everything gets blamed on.

You know, this person had dehydration.

It must have been dehydration.

But I was unable to find a single incident, a single verified account of someone dying from dehydration out on the playing field or in a marathon.

You are not going to die if you don't drink during a race or during a soccer game.

But what's happened now is that you have people who are literally dying of hyponatremia, which is also called water intoxication.

And this really stems from this notion that you have to drink, drink, drink, and drink before you're thirsty and keep drinking.

And so hyponatremia happens when your blood becomes too dilute.

And so the salts and things, the electrolytes in your blood become too diluted and you end up with brain swelling and that's what causes the death.

So dehydration hasn't killed any athletes, but over-hydration has.

We called Louise Burke.

She's the chief of nutrition strategy at the Australian Institute of Sport, working with all the elite Australian athletes on sports nutrition research.

And she says this hydration message, it's a problem particularly for ordinary runners like me.

If you're doing a marathon and you're not really moving at a very high speed, but you're stopping at every aid station and grabbing two drinks, either because you think that's what you need to do or because you just want to have a bit of a rest at the aid station and you might as well drink while you're there.

It is possible to drink too much during sport.

Christy says there have been at least five marathoners who've died in the past 25 years from hyponatremia and even more have gotten severely ill to the point of hospitalization.

The problem was they bought into the message that they had to keep drinking during what for them was a many-hour run.

Basically, the Gatorade message has been: you need to drink.

You need to drink before you even feel thirsty because you're losing fluids and electrolytes through your sweat.

This message is trickled down for everyone.

I've heard that plenty: that if you feel thirsty, you've waited too long to drink.

But actually, that's that's not good advice for the average person.

If you're out on a run, your body will hold on to water while you're exercising.

Bonus, you stop needing to pee, and you can easily replenish when you're done.

As Christie points out, you can literally just drink water when you're thirsty, and maybe not while you're working out or even during a race at all.

You might just wait till after.

And then you eat some salty foods after you work out, you're fine.

At least for most of us.

But I fall more into the camp with the elite athletes that I deal with is to say you need to have a plan because it's a nice idea to say you can drink when you're thirsty, and that's okay if you're running a marathon as a recreational athlete.

But as an elite athlete, you're moving as fast as you can, moving through aid stations as quickly as you can.

And so you can't afford to wait till you're thirsty before you start drinking because by that stage, you're not able to drink enough at any one aid station to be able to reduce your thirst.

So, really, long and short, first of all, you don't actually need Gatorade.

You can get salt in your normal foods, and plain water is great for hydration.

And you certainly don't need to drink it until you're thirsty, unless you're one of Louise's elite athletes.

But Gatorade is old school anyway.

All the cool kids these days are drinking muscle milk.

See these mussels?

I love my muscles, and my muscles love muscle milk.

If you haven't come across the miles of muscle milk in local stores, well, we are now talking proteins.

So hot right now.

So when I started in sports nutrition, there was a lot of debate about whether athletes needed more protein overall than the sedentary person, and the feeling was no, that there was enough protein being consumed if you were following the the recommended dietary intakes or guidelines.

We should point out that Louise Burke has been in this field for 40 years.

And when she started out, protein was strictly for weightlifters.

Muscles are protein, right?

And so it just makes intuitive sense that if you're trying to build muscles, you need to have protein.

And this has been a concept that has been embraced by the bodybuilding and weightlifting community for a long time.

Nobody had thought to make money off this focus on protein for muscle mass until the 1950s.

That's when a bodybuilder named Bob Hoffman got the idea to sell protein powder.

Bob Hoffman was an entrepreneur as well as a weightlifter.

He started a company called York Barbell and he founded two magazines, the endlessly fascinating Muscular Development and also Strength and health.

But at some point, he and some other people in the field realized that, you know, if you sell a barbell or something to someone, they buy that once.

But if you sell them a protein powder, they take that every day.

And so it was a way to sort of keep monetizing this whole business.

Bob's high-protein powder, that's protein spelled E-E-N, it came in chocolate, vanilla, and black walnut.

And it was marketed exclusively to bodybuilders.

High protein powder hit the shelves in the early 1950s, and before long, it was joined by dozens of rival protein powders, including our favorite, muscle milk.

It was, according to the family that started the company, it was supposed to be a play on mother's milk, the like nutritional content of mother's milk, breast milk, basically, which is such a weird, like, Oedipal thing for bodybuilders to be like wanting to drink.

Casey Johnston is a powerlifter and a writer.

She writes a column for Self magazine called Ask a Swole Woman.

And I should say that despite the story behind the name, muscle milk doesn't actually have the same nutrient balance as breast milk.

It's mostly protein.

Last year, Casey wrote a story about muscle milk and the family that invented it, the Picketts, for Eater.

Personally, I've somehow resisted the pleasure of cracking open a cold muscle milk, so I asked Casey to describe it.

So it's just like a conveniently packaged drink that you can grab off a shelf and crack it open, and it has

usually like 25 to 50 grams of protein depending on what kind you get and how big the bottle is.

And you drink it and it's

doesn't taste great.

They're sweet and like they're fairly palatable.

Not the best thing you've ever tasted.

Mussel milk is mostly made of the whey that's left over for making cheese.

There's a lot of protein in the liquid you get after creating cheese curds that you'll use in cheddar or gouda or mozzarella.

They're pretty they're fairly like secretive about it but they told me at one point one of their major sources for their whey was the largest manufacturer of mozzarella cheese in the U.S.

You know, a lot of these protein powders are made from milk byproducts, and so it's really kind of a very clever way of taking something that would otherwise be, you know, this thing that there was no purpose for, and now you're turning it into this thing that you can sell for a lot of money.

For a long time, muscle milk was not something you'd see unless you went to a supplement store or bought a specialist magazine called, say, Muscular Development.

And then a couple of things changed.

This is the story that Christy tells in her new book, Good to Go.

The story starts in the 1980s.

A researcher named John Ivey was working at the University of Texas, Austin.

What Ivey's research had shown, you know, he was basically thinking, like, hey, we know that for bodybuilders, protein is really good.

It helps them recover.

It helps them to repair some of this damage that happens when they're doing this hard workout.

And he thought, you know, that's happening to endurance athletes, too.

And so they played around with adding some protein to this post-exercise, you know, whatever whatever it is that you're taking.

And they found that that seemed to be beneficial.

And so that was sort of the big revelation at that time was like, oh, you know, the endurance athletes, runners, cyclists, they needed some protein too.

Because prior to that, you know, protein was sort of for muscle heads.

But now all of a sudden, protein was for everyone.

But still, non-muscle heads were not necessarily into buying weird powders and mixing up drinks at home.

And that's where muscle milk had a breakthrough.

They started making ready to

bottles in the mid-2000s.

And initially, it was just sort of like an offshoot product, but then they started flying off the shelves in these supplement stores.

And it just sort of blew up into this whole thing.

And now, at least when I walk into like a bodega or convenience store in New York, if I'm going to see a protein drink, muscle milk is the brand that I see.

Today, as you might have already heard, a lot of people, particularly, let's say the upper middle class, they're obsessed with getting enough protein.

This has been a thing that's been going on for a few years, like even predating the piece that I wrote, which is that different foods have started to advertise themselves based on the amount of protein that's in them, even if they're not a good source of protein, such as cereal.

But yeah, that's really just sort of the degree of ridiculousness that it has gotten to that foods are trying to get in on this protein craze.

Whenever I hear this kind of hype, I want to hear some science.

So we asked Christy.

So protein is absolutely important for athletes.

If you're damaging your muscle, your body needs protein in order to recover.

But we've sort of made it unduly complicated.

Like you do not need any special powders.

You don't need special drinks.

You don't need any sort of special supplements.

You know, the best sources of protein is actually food.

Louise agrees.

We always go for a food first

focus, and there are plenty of ways to quickly add protein to meals.

And actually, we can't even absorb a huge amount of protein protein at once, like the amount that's in those big bottles of muscle milk.

And it's not just that we can't absorb big doses of protein particularly well.

In the past five to ten years, Louise and her colleagues have discovered that it's actually better to get your protein in smaller, regular amounts anyway.

So, our guidelines are probably coming back to it's not important to eat more protein overall than most Western people do, but rather to spread it over the day so that your body's always got a good source of protein to keep using.

to take advantage of the fact that when you've done some exercise, you've got a stimulus that lasts probably about 24 hours to make new proteins in the body.

And if you can spread your protein over the day, then you're going to maximise your ability to respond to that muscle message.

That's true for all athletes, and actually it's true for non-athletes too.

And in most Western societies, when you look at the way people eat protein, they don't spread it well over the day.

They eat most of it at their evening meal.

And in many cases, they either skip breakfast or have sort of carbohydrate-rich protein-poor breakfasts.

I hate to sound like a broken record here, but just like you don't need Gatorade, you don't need muscle milk.

But what you could use is some eggs or yogurt or peanut butter or heck, even beans for breakfast.

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Louise thinks beans are a great source of protein at any time of day.

And guess what?

Gladiators competing in the Olympics, the very earliest ancient Greek Olympics, the original ones, those elite athletes ate beans too.

Galen, a famous ancient Greek physician, highly recommended beans to help athletes bulk up, although he did warn that beans should be boiled long enough to avoid flatulence.

Galen also said that heavyweight athletes like wrestlers and boxers needed fattier foods, but all Olympians should avoid the very weakest foods, vegetable stalks and cucumbers and olives and shellfish.

Snails were also off the menu for athletes, maybe because they're slow.

Sometimes people believed that you needed to eat the animal whose attributes you wanted to have, so you needed to eat cheetahs if you wanted to be strong and fast.

And I think in most cases it was always about having to have something special or different to the community.

So whatever

the community was eating, an athlete needed to do something better and special to optimize their performance.

This idea that athletes have to eat something different from the rest of us, something carefully designed to make them them into winners.

That's something that's inspired an entire field of study.

A field that Louise has devoted her scientific career to.

Even now, sometimes, you know, I think what I do is pretty frivolous, trying to make athletes go higher, faster, stronger when, you know, there are other things that you could be contributing to the world.

But it's a fascinating area because it

goes to the limits of the human body and what it can do.

Louise says that perhaps unsurprisingly, the ideas about nutrition that Galen and his contemporaries held in ancient Greece are now considered mostly passe.

But even in modern times Louise has seen broad prescriptions for what athletes should eat come and go.

I think the changing ideas about carbohydrate have been really interesting.

So when I started sports nutrition we probably had a view that there was one diet for an athlete and it should be based on high carbohydrate eating and that was based on the idea that when you're doing sport, particularly at high intensity, that carbohydrate stores provide the main muscle fuel.

And so the idea was that all athletes need to carbo-load.

You've heard this term, you've maybe even used it to refer to a giant pasta dinner, but that was the mantra.

It was applied uniformly across all sports, and so we had all athletes thinking that they needed to carbo load every day.

And it turns out that just like we've learned that the rest of us shouldn't be eating carbohydrates all the time, well, athletes shouldn't either.

Obviously, athletes don't want to run out of fuel.

that's where the idea of carbo loading came from that you could sort of bank extra carbs as fuel but carbs are not the only fuel so when you look at the fuel sources in in the muscle in the in the body the body sources of carbohydrate are so minor compared to body fat stores it's really intriguing to think well how could we make more use of fat as a fuel because it's there in relatively unlimited amounts even in the leanest of athletes so it just it just makes sense to look at it and and think we have to think of ways of making more use of it.

Louise wondered if she could help an athlete's body learn to use fat more effectively, and maybe she could do this by changing their diet, by having athletes eat fewer carbs and more fat.

So, she tested it out.

And so, when you do studies that have athletes exposed to high-fat diets, and it doesn't take very long, as little as five days of exposure is enough, it greatly retools the muscle and a whole lot of pathways involved in the delivery of fat into the muscle and into the mitochondria where the fat is oxidized to fuel.

It upregulates all those pathways and makes the muscle very good at fat burning.

So we can show that.

Awesome.

So that means athletes should be eating a stick of butter.

Hold the bread, right?

What we haven't been able to show, and this is over nearly 25 years, is that can then translate into better performance of endurance sports.

Right.

Louise tested this with elite racewalkers.

If you've ever watched them, they do that really awesome, funny butt wiggle as they walk, and they are freaking fast.

And so what we found in racewalkers was that when we converted them to being able to burn fat, it reduced their speed.

Basically, it turns out that however good your body gets at burning fat for energy, it's still less efficient than burning carbs.

So low-carb, high-fat diets, those are actually not great for athletes.

But nor is constant carbo loading.

Just like Louise said that protein is important but the timing matters, the same thing is true for carbohydrates, at least for elite athletes.

We're now talking to athletes about periodising their carbohydrate intake and not necessarily eating high carbohydrate intakes on a daily basis.

Periodizing sounds complicated and certainly Louise has put a lot of research into it, but at its simplest, it really boils down to matching the amount of carbohydrate you eat to different training goals.

So if you're doing a long slow training session, Louise might recommend not taking in a lot of carbs because being low on carbs will stress your body and encourage it to make more mitochondria, which will help your muscles become more efficient.

But if an athlete is working on sprints, then yeah, carbs are critical.

And those carbs are crucial on race day too because your body needs that ready, available energy to burn.

That's what'll keep you going.

That took about a minute to explain, but Louise has spent 25 years carefully parsing out the science on carbs versus fat as fuel.

And it's not that she's slow or even just that she's a very rigorous scientist who wants to replicate her results, which she is.

It's because studying sports nutrition is really hard for a lot of reasons.

Oh gosh, there's a million.

We could start with the funding.

There's very little funding availability for doing this kind of research because there's very little funding for nutrition research anyway, but to then want to try and drag that money that is available to the pointy end of sport is a bit frivolous, as I've said.

Side note, this is part of why so many scientists will take gay trade money to study hydration in athletes.

You can't do science without money.

But as we've seen again and again, your funding source does tend to influence your results.

But even if you can get the money then the next kind of challenge is going to be getting the athletes to want to be part of the research because you know it it is very demanding if you want to do very invasive and sort of far-reaching research.

You need to have the cooperation of athletes to be able to give up their time and change their training and be able to be available to be in the lab on the conditions and the days that you want them to be there.

And so, getting athletes to be able to commit that kind of time and motivation is difficult.

Louise is fortunate, though, because she's basically the top sports nutrition scientist in Australia.

Elite athletes do want to work with her because they think her work is important and they think it also might help give them an edge.

But even once you've done that, then you've got sort of all the problems about how can you measure this and how can you measure that in a way that's meaningful.

This question of measurement is something that Christy actually ran into when she designed an experiment of her own to study the recovery beverage of champions.

You're talking about beer, of course.

Yes, we're talking about beer.

Something that I have to say is pretty surprising to me as a recovery friend.

I have it.

Post-CrossFit beer is the best beer of the week.

That makes me think that perhaps you're not an athlete.

I mean, I run a lot.

I go running.

I cycle a lot.

Maybe I'm not part of athlete circles.

I was going to say you don't train with

a group of people.

Well, it is interesting.

There's actually some research suggesting that athletes do tend to drink a little bit more than some other people.

Is that like right or not?

That's going to be my excuse.

That's going to be my excuse.

I'm just an athlete.

Christy enjoys a beer after working out, and she's apparently not unusual there.

In fact, there are even low-alcohol beers marketed basically as sports recovery drinks.

And there wasn't much scientific literature on whether or not this actually worked.

So Christy thought, well, why not dig into it herself?

So at the time, I was a contributing editor for Runner's World magazine, and I ended up talking the magazine into sponsoring the study.

I went to my local university, which is Colorado Mesa University, and we actually devised a study to look at this.

Christy's hypothesis was that if you ran and then you had a beer, it would affect your run the next day.

So everyone in her study came into the lab and did a pretty hard run.

And then afterwards, we fed them with a pasta dinner and also gave them beer.

And the amount of beer that people got was just below the legal limit to be intoxicated for driving in Colorado.

And then the next day, we brought people in and tested them again.

So we basically put them back on the treadmill and had them run at a pretty hard pace until they could go no longer.

And that was our measure of how recovered they were.

And what everyone wants to know, does beer work?

So what we found was that women actually did better on the run to exhaustion the morning after they'd had the beer, whereas men did worse.

Hell yeah.

This is the kind of science I can get behind.

Pass me a cold one.

I don't want to burst your bubble, Nikki, but well, Christy's about to do just that.

Taken together as averages, women did better and men did worse after drinking the beer, but there was an incredible amount of individual variability.

So there was one guy who did much, much worse, and that sort of brought the average down.

And there was one woman who did a lot better.

But if you looked at the individual data points, it didn't look as convincing.

For Christy, doing this experiment really revealed how hard it is to study sports nutrition.

For one, there were only 10 people in the study.

And that's pretty normal.

Like Louise said, it's hard to get people to volunteer their time for this kind of research.

But 10 people?

That's hardly enough to see a clear pattern out of all the individual variation.

The other problem Christie faced was something Louise also mentioned, and that's how to choose what you're measuring.

Christy chose this idea of doing something till exhaustion, and that's a common measurement in sports nutrition research.

But really?

What is exhaustion?

There's where you want to stop and where you physically have to stop, and they're not necessarily the same thing.

As a participant, I sort of lost faith in it because it really felt like it was a test of mental tenacity or sort of like how interested I was in like really helping this study.

Christy even got some evidence that her concern that the measurement wasn't great, that concern might be justified.

Before the study, we had asked the lead researcher how long we would expect to be able to run on this run to exhaustion.

Everyone wanted to know that and he said, oh, about 20 minutes.

And pretty much everyone afterwards, you know, this is sort of in the debriefing later, people said, yeah, you know, I sort of felt like after 20 minutes, people felt like they sort of had permission to step off if they wanted to.

But there were two people that ended up missing that initial meeting where he had divulged that information, and they lasted not nearly as long.

In fact, I think they were the only ones who didn't go at least 20 minutes.

In other words, exhaustion really is a relative concept.

Frankly, Christy is not a huge fan of a lot of the nutrition science that's been done.

That said, she does admire Louise Burke and the work of her lab in Australia.

It's rigorous.

But even Louise agrees that part of why sports nutrition science is so hard to do is that it's hard to choose a measurement of improvement and then to measure it.

When you're working with elite athletes, very small improvements in performance make the difference between a gold medal and coming eighth in the final.

And it's very difficult to measure performance because performance changes from day to day for so many different reasons.

And when you're wanting to get an elite athlete to perform as hard as possible, you have to have them fully motivated.

and able to do it because it's not something that most people can reach inside themselves and produce their their absolute best on any given day.

They may be able to do it for an Olympic Games because they've been building up to it and they've got a lot of belief in why they need to do it that day and also they'll be rewarded.

But when you're trying to get them to repeat that inside your lab to see whether your intervention is going to add that tiny little bit of improvement to performance that could be meaningful, it's really difficult to try to get all those things happening in the lab the same way they do out in the Olympic arena.

There's another not-so-small problem, which is that actually we don't fully understand what happens in our bodies when we exercise.

Literally, when we exercise there are roughly a thousand chemical changes that take place in our muscles and we understand about 10% of them.

Still, Louise's research overall has contributed a lot to understanding how the bodies of elite athletes work and how they use food and this has trickled down to a better understanding of the role of food and exercise for the rest of us too.

But this is clearly ongoing ongoing science.

And frankly, when you're talking about a hundredth of a second, the placebo effect, the belief that what you've eaten will give you an edge, that's just as strong.

Look, the placebo effect is an incredibly important effect in research in real life.

Athletes are the most superstitious people you'll ever meet.

So people will definitely have

superstitions about what they should eat.

Yes, they most certainly do.

And there's not a lot of science behind it.

It's interesting.

If you look around the world at what different athletes from different cultures eat, they're not all eating the same thing.

And you know, in Norway, where some of the best Nordic skiers in the world live, you know, they start their days by eating this brown cheese, which no one in the U.S.

eats.

You know, people in the U.S.

eat different things.

And so, you know, I'm not about to say that Norwegian skiers are good because of that brown cheese, but I think what it shows is that there are a lot of different ways to eat.

NBA players love their PBJs.

PBJs.

The best team in the NBA is addicted to PBJ.

Need somebody to make my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for me.

I'm real high maintenance like that.

Eric Howlison,

he makes a sandwich for me,

puts his love in it, sits it right on my chair in my locker, and that's my snack.

Some other players from another culture might like, you know, ramen.

It's all good.

Like when you were going into a major competition,

what did you eat?

Vegetables?

Nah.

Tofu?

I want to be fast.

Mostly chicken nuggets.

I know, it works.

Really?

Stick to what works.

Usain Bolt won gold nuttles eating McDonald's at the Olympic Village.

So, you know, there is that.

Not what I personally might want to eat before a race, but frankly, I'm nowhere near the league that Usain Bolt was in ever in his life.

But the larger point here is not that chicken nuggets are the secret to success.

It's that, you know, sometimes some of these sports nutrition things seem almost more like a religion.

Like you have to chug protein shakes or you need to drink your electrolytes.

And that's just not where the science is at.

We have this idea that what we put in our bodies must be really, really important, right?

I mean, it makes intuitive sense.

Of course, whatever fuel you're taking in is going to affect your performance.

It's like, you know, that's why race car drivers pay attention to what kind of fuel they're putting in their tanks, right?

But at the same time, we don't really know.

We have this idea or this feeling that we really want to optimize everything.

And if we really just perfectly optimize whatever we're putting into our bodies with food, that performance would just be so much better.

And, you know, I don't think that we have the evidence in that sort of granularity to say, you know, this particular food or this exact amount of some nutrient is going to make you perform better.

And so, you know, I think if if I were to give sort of just catch-all overall advice, it would be, you know, eat real food.

Pay attention to your hunger signals.

You know, if you're hungry for salty food, you probably need a little bit of salt.

If you are, you know, craving a steak, maybe you need some protein.

It's good to eat things in balance.

You need protein, you need some fat, you need carbohydrates.

But this idea that there's an absolute perfect ratio or an absolute perfect food, I just, I don't think that we have the evidence for that.

Louise is focused on the slivers of difference for elite athletes, the hundredths of a second that can make the difference for them between meddling and coming an eighth.

Food could make that kind of difference.

So could the right shoes, and so could believing you have the right shoes or you ate the right thing.

But most of us aren't worried about hundredths of a second.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, think of it this way.

If what you ate made an enormous difference, you wouldn't need a study to know it, right?

Right.

If one particular dish suddenly made me shave a minute off my average mild pace, I'd know.

you'd stop making gastropod and go make your fortune selling that dish high and low but meanwhile back in the real world for all of us regular non-elite athletes obsessing about coconut water and cherry juice and whatever can actually be a distraction i mean i think the downside is that you're paying attention and you're focusing and you're sort of obsessing over these things that best case scenario will make a tiny little sliver of a difference when what you should really be focusing on are the the things that are really important so like for recovery, that's sleep, number one.

Also number two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, you know, probably the top 20 is sleep, right?

And so, you know, that's so much more important, like orders of magnitude more important.

Christy's take-home message for 99% of us, supported by Louise's research.

Eat real food, maybe sprinkle your protein throughout the day instead of getting it all at night.

Complex carbs are critical if you get a lot of exercise and get your sleep.

More so, even the beer is a recovery beverage.

That is advice I can live with.

Sleep is my favorite part of the day.

A huge thanks this episode to Christy Ashwinden.

Her brand new book is called Good to Go.

And we only touched on a tiny bit of it, the part to do with food and drink.

There is so much more in there, like whether those fancy cryotherapy treatments do anything.

Or whether you should float in those sensory deprivation tanks.

I'm planning to try that soon just for fun.

Anyway, check out the book Good to Go.

We have a link on our website, gastropod.com.

Thanks also to Louise Burke from the Australian Institute of Sports Nutrition and Casey Johnston, aka Ask a Swole Woman.

We have links to their work and stories on our website too.

Thanks so much to all of you who responded to our survey last month.

It was super helpful and we really appreciate it.

We've already chosen a winner of the $100 gift certificate.

Thanks.

Next time, Cynthia and I go through one of life's major milestones together.

Losing our pawpaw virginity.

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This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

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Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers.

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Why do we want that so badly?

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