The current issue of the British Medical Journal is chock full of papers slamming the makers and marketers of sports drinks for a lack of good science backing up their claims. David Tuller over at Mother Jones does an excellent summary of the studies. All I'll add is that many of these off-the-shelf performance boosters for athletes actually do seem to work ... just not due to the advertised mechanisms.
Athletes looking for an edge are extremely susceptible to placebo effects (See the recent $57 million legal settlement against the makers of Power Balance bracelets, for example. They sold millions of the $30 bracelets, and garnered endorsements from a small army of top-flight professional athletes, before some actual science with placebo controls called their bluff).
Athletes looking for an edge are extremely susceptible to placebo effects (See the recent $57 million legal settlement against the makers of Power Balance bracelets, for example. They sold millions of the $30 bracelets, and garnered endorsements from a small army of top-flight professional athletes, before some actual science with placebo controls called their bluff).
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