Allen Lim Demonstrates Why You Shouldn’t Drink Your Calories, UPDATED

But if I eat real food and drink his special drinks, what happens then? What are the ratios then.

Somethings missing here.

And what does Dr Lim things that happens in your stomach when you eat an energy bar and drink some of his ‘Scratch labs hydration mix’. The concentration of particles will increase compared to the case when you’d only drink something, so the effect is the same as when you’d add more carbohydrates to your drink.

This demonstration proofs nothing, but I’d like what he did with the eggs.

BikeRumor: The troll factor is getting out of control. Seriously, a fairly informative little video on hypertonic sports drinks and someone goes off about Lance within 20 minutes?

Please, link comments to Facebook profiles already. Seriously, it kills the trolls. No one is going to want their product reviewed on this site if the comments are the level they have been recently.

I regret asking him about infusing blood into Floyd (and Levi) before a Tour of Cali (per Floyd’s statements). Or maybe just ask him about Floyd’s other statements about Allen. I like the overall idea of his drink, but will not buy his product because I think he has a high concentration of weasel in him, and my stomach won’t absorb it. There is a similar product called Osmo (I think) that I plan on trying.

Oops, meant I regret NOT asking him.

Quite an elaborate way of not really getting to the core of the matter. People don’t just need “calories”. People need calories by way of proper nutrition.

At a minimum, your body needs:

Carbohydrates, Proteins, Fats, Sodium, Potassium, Chloride, Fiber, Calcium, Iron, Phosphorous, Iodine, Magnesium, Zinc, Selenium, Copper, Manganese, Chromium, Molybdenum, Vitamin A, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Vitamin K, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin, Folate, Biotin, Panthothenic Acid.

If you wanted to, you could drink all that and with sufficient calories. People on feeding tubes and people with severe GI irritation or absorption issues do it. Such formulas could easily be reworked to suit athletes. Or, you could just eat a good diet and add supplements as needed.

Allen Lim may have a PhD, but he’s also got products to sell. This is why he made a 6+ minute video to answer a “question” where two sentences would have been sufficient:

“People don’t just need “calories”. People need calories by way of proper nutrition and you don’t get that from a hydration drink.”

I’mma block all this out and follow the path of ignorance is bliss. Way out of my scope of knowledge.

I’m interpreting it like this: the body treats the calorie heavy drink as food, and all the water that went down with isn’t being absorbed and you end feel bloated? So basically the light mix is still considered and is treated as fluid, instead of food, and it hydrates you, yet replenishes the electrolytes lost from perspiration?

Basically, this boils down to how efficiently you deliver energy and hydration to the body and how mixing food and drink together is like a sitting down for a relatively heavy meal?

I had the best ride of my life on gumdrops and rootbeer.

Wonder what would have happened with plain water.

I get that he’s talking about calories, but his result is X% hydrated, not how many calories were absorbed.

What a product pusher! Fill your bottle with 1/2 water, half real juice, 1/8th tsp salt. for a ride up to 30 miles you should be ok, take some raisins and almonds for longer rides. No need for concoctions by a doping advisor!

Lim did a nice job pushing dope for Phloyd & Levi…why give him a dime. He’s as crooked as they come. Go with Osmo or First Endurance.

Hey Zach: Maybe before posting crap like that, you should do some real digging. You can check the public records (business registration – see CO secretary of state) to see that SIms was never part of scratch and her and Allen dissolved their partnership long before secret drink mix. I thank Lim and Sims for both of their companies. There are some slight differences between OSMO and Skratch but the real bottom line, is that they’re both way better than anything else out there.

Does anyone down a whole packet/drink at once? I’m not PhD, but seems equilibrium/osmosis here isnt representative of what’s going on in the body.

This isn’t very representative of the digestive system. Let me break it down for you guys that are too lazy to google.

1. Your body gets things from your digestive system from diffusion, osmosis, and active transport. If it were just osmosis, all you’d ever absorb is water, no food.

2. Osmosis (diffusion of water) primarily happens in the large intestine. Water soluble materials like carbs are diffused or moved by active transport through the membrane of the small intestine. First, however, complex carbs need to be broken down to simple sugars by enzymes from the mouth and small intestine. Fats are water insoluble so they need bile and enzymes to package them to be absorbed by the body. Proteins are broken down into amino acids by the stomach and pancreas then absorbed in the small intestine. SOOO nutrients are absorbed, then water is absorbed.

3. Enzymes play a huge role. How many of you are lactose intolerant or sensitive? That’s one specific enzyme to break down one specific carbohydrate. The Lim experiment had NO enzymes. Any lipids, proteins, or complex carbohydrates couldn’t be absorbed by the egg.

Allen Lim’s product is sound. He just did a piss poor job of explaining it. Your body won’t absorb and use everything that you ingest. If it did, nothing would come out at the end. Osmosis relies on a concentration gradient of water. If there’s the same concentration of salts in your cells as there are in your large intestine, there will be no net movement of water. It is, however ridiculous to say that your body won’t absorb the nutrients in your sports drink. It just won’t absorb as much water as it would if the concentration of salt (when I say salts I don’t just mean NaCl, just all solutes (stuff dissolved in the water)) were lower like in pure water or the skratch drink.

What Lim’s product has made me do, is be less likely to buy his product. Instead I drink straight water so more of it gets absorbed (and faster marginally) than the skratch mix. And then I eat calorically dense food. This will be absorbed faster than the stuff in skratch since the concentration will be higher. His marketing kind of backfired in my case…

What Fm said. Your intestines are much more complex than a semipermeable membrane. Passive and active transport of nutrients, simple diffusion down concentration gradients, etc. On top of that our intestines differ from person to person (different enzymes and different concentrations of enzymes, etc.). The point is you just have to try different stuff and find out what works best for you.

Yeah, Lim is a total loser. I’m serious. Someone earlier actually claimed Lim is going around saying he is a doctor. So what if he is a PhD. No self-respecting scientist with a PhD is going to throw around their title as a doctor to everyone.

Lim’s science and marketing of Skrach labs is total Quackery.

FM – thanks for the osmo link.

Hobbanero – check this out: http://www.skratchlabs.com/blogs/education/7238184-hydration-science-and-practice

Lot’s more info and plenty of geeky science links.

Lim pretty quickly invalidates any scientific experimental evidence here by putting ~3 hours worth of calories in about 40 mins worth of hydration and then says “see it makes you dehydrated”.

Stacey Sims may be on to something and I will undoubtedly try her approach to see if it works better for me but people should also critically read the corresponding opposing view in Hammer Nutrition literature which also relies on some pretty high brow science which I am not entirely qualified to fully evaluate but essentially says that by using complex carbohydrates (mostly maltodextrin) you can ‘drink’ your carbs in higher concentration without raising osmolity above that of Osmo and Skratch simple carb solutions and still hydrate.

One of their more straight forward articles here:
http://www.hammernutrition.com/knowledge/why-are-strong-simple-sugars-strong-bad.2900.html?sect=frequently-asked-questions-section
One about not combining simple and complex carbs:
http://www.hammernutrition.com/knowledge/simple-sugars-and-complex-carbohydrates-an-incompatible-combination.2890.html?sect=endurance-library-section
Theres a lot more stuff under knowledge tab on their website for those who want to read.

[Note: No company affiliation other than buying and using Hammer products for past few years and probably will try the Osmo stuff this summer]

I am not sure that having a comment section is even worth the time and I certainly regret talking the time to read it. All I got out of the comment section was very many people that appear to have zero credentials of their own putting forth opinions that are useless. Their comments have absolutely zero worth to help any consumer make a decision. The closest any of them get (except for the Dr.) is references to google, referencing to do their own research and referencing that everyone is different and that they need to try various products on their own.

It is painfully obvious that an egg membrane is different than the human body and believe it or not most normal thinking adults can understand that this was for demonstrative purposes only.
Taking the time to point readers to other sources of information, studies, and differing scientific opinions has great value. Spouting off how everything is wrong and incorrect without sharing or providing any bona fides of their own education and scientific background is worthless to the vast majority.

At least there were a couple that tried to keep the discussion about the science in general

Why is also that MD’s think they have the last word yet most all of them defer to nutritionists. Jason, I can appreciate that you have a medical degree but unless you are a expert in this exact field I’m not sure you are totally correct either. In fact if your statement about the body absorbing what it needs was correct their would only be perfect weight people and there would be no need to regulate sugar or insulin or anything else. At least those are the thoughts that statement raises with me.

I also love the comment the one poster had “if you have a PHD here is a link to the study. So without a PHD I am a dumb*ss that could not possibly read those really big words? lol I know that is not fair. Your post aside from that comment really did have value to it. I am just caught up in the general pool of negativity and for that I apologize.