Is Your Energy Gel Causing You To Underfuel?

When it comes to any nutrition intervention, it’s important that you get the dose of the active ingredient required to have the effect that you’re looking for.

For example, as we covered recently on caffeine content of coffee. With caffeine, we generally want to ensure that we consume a dose of 3-6mg per kilogram body weight to maximise the ergogenic effect and also limit the negative side effects of high doses. But in order to achieve the precise dose, we need to be careful when selecting what delivery method to us. As using coffee, which has a huge amount of variability in it’s caffeine content, may result in an athlete either not consuming enough caffeine or too much.

For any cyclist, given the importance of fuelling with adequate carbohydrate on the bike for performance and health, it’s essential that they receive the dose of carbohydrate they have planned to take in whilst on the bike. If the gel you’re consuming only has half the carbohydrate it says it does, this could have a significant effect on your performance over a few hours of competition. 

The supplement industry has a fairly poor reputation for it’s ability to regulate itself. Many products contain ingredients that simply aren’t well-evidenced to provide any benefit. Many supplements have the potential to cause an athlete to fail a drugs test, often as a result of cross-contamination during production. And, of relevance to this article, we also regularly see products that do not contain the amount of the active ingredient stated on the label, often due to shady practices by some brands to maximise profit or simply poor controls within the product’s production. In effect, any product without the stated amount of the active ingredient is likely to be ineffective and potentially negatively influence an athlete’s performance.

In recent months, there has been some controversy within the endurance sport world, as a result of anecdotal reports from athletes of a particular brand of energy gel, not containing anywhere near the amount of carbohydrate it say’s on the packet. Leading to many athletes noticing that the product didn’t perform as they expected and as such, negatively impacting their performance.

Reddit – False Nutritional Info On Spring Energy Gels

This lead to a well-known coach and group of academics in the fiel of sports nutrition sending off a number of popular commercially available gels for independent analysis of their nutritional content using gold standard techniques requiring expensive machinery and expert technicians to run the analysis, to give a high degree of presision. The results of which has just been published as a peer-reviewed scientific paper.

Before we get into the result, it’s important to note that many food regulators allow for around 20% plus or minus variation of the nutritional composition of a product relative to the label. Owing to the natural variability within the nutrition content of ingredients, which are incredibly difficult to control. For example, the carbohydrate content of fruits used in the ingredient which can be affected by growing conditions. 

The results where quite surprising! As a consumer, you may expect that the product you consume to contain 100% of the active ingredient listed on the product, but this wasn't quite the case, as shown on the table below from the paper. 

In effect, aside from the Spring Energy gel, which caused the controversy that result in the paper, that had a fraction of the carbohydrate content stated on the packet, most were within tolerance with relatively small amounts of variability in terms of their carbohydrate content.

What does this mean for you as an athlete? As such, it's important to be aware of any eariability and consider this when formulating your fuelling strategy. It may also be worth weighting sachets ahead of key events to ensure they are within tolerance for weight. If you notice a product isn't fuelling you as you'd expect, be aware this could relate to the composition of your gel. 

Coach Ben 

Reference

Tiller, N. B., Burke, L. M., Howe, S. M., Koop, J., Ohm, J. R., & Burgess, B. (2024). What's (Not) in Your Supplement? An Energy and Macronutrient Analysis of Commercially Available Carbohydrate Gels. International journal of sport nutrition and exercise metabolism, 1–9. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijsnem.2024-0174