sports drinks

Editor Mike Haney is training for the New York City Marathon with all the help from high-end running tech he can get. Read his previous posts here.

Did you know that several of the NASA research centers scattered around the country keep lists on their Web sites of the technologies they have available to license and sell to the public? Neither did I, but that's why I'm not launching businesses like David Belaga is. He's the CEO of Wellness Brands, which plucked a beverage NASA developed to keep astronauts hydrated and just started selling it as The Right Stuff, a concentrate for elite athletes that want to separate their electrolyte intake from their carb intake (carbs in sports drinks typically being some form of sugar).

I consider myself more of an elite non-athlete, but on a few recent runs, I poured some Right Stuff vials into bottles of water to see if it helped keep my whistle wet.

There’s an old fashioned brawl brewing in the sports drink industry. The undisputed champion, Gatorade, has filed a lawsuit accusing its perennial challenger, Powerade, of “knowingly misleading consumers and deceptively overstating the product benefits of its sports drink Powerade ION4.” The lawsuit is in response to a rash of bold Powerade ads which claim ION4 is an “upgrade” from Gatorade because the Powerade drink contains four electrolytic ingredients, whereas Gatorade contains only two, thus making Powerade a more “complete” drink.