If you’re already shopping the perimeter and the farmer’s market and eschewing packaged foods and artificial crap, then it’s time to look at what you’re drinking on the bike.
Wholedration did, and the result is the first sports drink we’ve seen that’s certified organic and non-GMO, and it’s using real food sources for the carbs and electrolytes rather than lab-made chemicals or cheap sugars.
Meant as a hydration sports drinks rather than an energy supplying, carb dense drink, it’s kept at just 7-9g of carbohydrate per serving. That’s inline with modern thinking about osmality and absorption, so it’s the source is what really sets the drink apart: Coconut palm sugar. That, along with dried coconut water and sea salt, also provides the electrolytes sodium, potassium, chloride, magnesium and calcium in ratios that approximate what you’re sweating out.
Since different folks, activities and temperatures yield different sweat rates, there’s two versions to fit the situation…
Wholedration Red (Strawberry) is for higher sweat rates and contains more electrolytes. Blue (Acai-Blackberry) is a bit lower for days when you won’t be soaking your helmet’s wholly inadequate pads. Why more electrolytes instead of just encouraging more drinking? Because their research showed that the concentration of electrolytes lost through sweat increased as sweat rates increased, so if you’re sweating more, you need more. The benefit of this approach is that you can leave the salt pills and electrolyte tablets at home.
This isn’t the first to use dried coconut water, CarboRocket and Coco Hydro both do, but this is the first with the healthy certifications and the addition of coconut sugar.
The coconut palm sugar is mostly sucrose with a small amount of glucose and fructose. Other carbs come from cane sugar and tapioca, both crops that generally avoid genetic modification. Wholedration’s founder says 90-96% of U.S. corn and beet crops are genetically modified, yet they’re the most common sources of sports drink ingredients like maltodextrin, glucose, citric acid, vitamin C, etc. And there are several reasons for avoiding GMO crops. First, long term human safety hasn’t been studied. Perhaps more importantly they reduce natural biodiversity, and that means plants lose their natural evolutionary ability to defend against pests and disease, which means farmers need more pesticides and fertilizers, which ends up in our lakes and streams and then drinking water. OK, rant over, but think about it. For the children.
As for taste, they say it’s light and refreshing. We just got a tub of each and will test that for ourselves. They retail for $24.99 for 45 servings (8oz serving size).
