Gatorade
Energy Deficiency and Our Physical Response
Dr. Matt Hermes

Sports Science

Rehydration

Energy  Replacement

Quiz

Problems

Micro/Macro
and Symbolic
Representation
Chemistry uses macroscopic, large scale observations to help describe and understand matter at the unseeable, molecular level.

And then we represent both the microscopic and macroscopic with often complex symbolic representation.

Chemists consider the specific chemical reactions that represent the oxidation of fats, carbohydrates and proteins. The chemical equations, with their shorthand symbols, represent both the metabolism of the food - a large scale, bodily process, and the oxidation of individual food molecules.

At the University of Florida in late summer 1965, the freshman football coach asked for help.  His athletes, practicing in the hot sun, wilted.  The coach watched as a dozen of them were carted off to the hospital.   Dehydration and heat prostration crippled his practices for the upcoming season.   A young physician, Dr. Dana Shires said he could help the coach.  Dr. Shires was a research fellow of Dr. Robert Cade in the medical school.  Dr. Cade and his associates would consider how we respond to vigorous exercise. And from their research would come Gatorade®

How does chemistry explain the limits of our capacity to exercise?  Let us look at the processes taking place when we exert ourselves, and how the limitations of those processes restrict our exertions. We might think of the exercising person as a system; a vessel in which chemical reactions take place. Let us consider a number of processes that occur:

Oxygen we take from the air during respiration reacts with carbohydrates, fats and proteins in the body to produce carbon dioxide gas, urea, water, and energy. The energy appears as work -- the exercise itself -- and as heat generated in the system.

Fact:  Our performance is limited by the chemistry of conversion of fuel to energy -- by the amount of oxygen and fuel we can process and the rate that we can process it.

The Florida football team practicing on a humid summer afternoon is well fed, the air at sea level is rich with oxygen, yet after a time we can see the players, hands on hips, heads down, panting and nearing exhaustion. "Out of gas," we might say. What happens is, as the athlete exercises he or she uses up the reserve of easily available energy-producing material, primarily carbohydrates which he or she has stored in the muscles and liver as glycogen. There remains no readily available fuel for generating energy. These athletes need to refuel.

And in 1965, we did not understand the mechanism of such refueling.  How fast can the body metabolize food to restore energy-supplying glycogen?  What fuel -- carbohydrates, fats, or proteins -- will be the most readily available for exercise?  

It was these questions that the inventors of Gatorade faced as they began to develop their beverage.

Chemical Concepts
Here are some concepts of solution chemistry that the inventors of Gatorade used in developing the sports drink:

We will see how Dr. Cade and his associate researchers used these simple chemical concepts to invent and develop Gatorade and we will use these principles ourselves to evaluate and decide on issues of testing and ownership of Gatorade