Gatorade to Go Organic ... Why It's Still Not a Healthy Option

By Michelle Schoffro Cook
The neon-colored Gatorade loved by many sports enthusiasts will soon be available as an organic option. PepsiCo Incorporated announced that it will soon launch its new organic Gatorade throughout the U.S. The company's strawberry, mixed berry and lemon beverages have already been tested for consumer interest in some Kroger Co. supermarkets.
Gatorade
But how healthy will it be? Based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture organic certification, the beverage will definitely be a step up from its additive-laden counterpart, but it still won't be a healthy beverage option for anyone looking to fuel up after a workout … or for anyone else for that matter.
Gatorade has long been criticized by nutrition experts because of its less-than-healthy ingredients, which in a traditional bottle of the beverage include:
"Water, Sugar, Natural Flavors, Citric Acid, Salt, Sodium Citrate, Monopotassium Phosphate, Sucralose, Acesulfame Potassium and Color"
The organic Gatorade ingredients include:
"Water, Organic Cane Sugar, Citric Acid, Organic Natural Flavor, Sea Salt, Sodium Citrate and Potassium Chloride"
The move away from sucralose, which goes by the brand name of Splenda, is definitely an improvement as sucralose has been linked to many serious health concerns, ranging from anxiety and allergies to headaches and weight gain. Sucralose is a chlorinated artificially-created sweetener, despite what the manufacturer may claim. So, PepsiCo Inc. gets one star for removing this undesirable ingredient.
The company also gets another star for eliminating colors which have been linked to many diseases and for the move from "Natural Flavors" to "Organic Natural Flavors" since the latter is much more restrictive. Both of these ingredients can include many less-than-desirable components, such as dried beaver's sac, sheepskin excretions or insect excretions, but the term "organic natural flavors" at least minimizes possible unwanted ingredients like solvents and pesticide residues.
And, while Monopotassium Phosphate and Acesulfame Potassium may sound like harmless minerals—they are not. While the study results have been controversial, the latter substance has a dubious reputation as being linked to cancer. So PepsiCo gets another star for making the switch to potassium chloride.
But, organic Gatorade falls short when it comes to the amount of sugar found in each bottle. That's because every 16.9-ounce bottle contains a whopping 29 grams of sugar. No health expert or nutritionist could claim that this constitutes a safe amount of sugar because it is excessive, particularly for any beverage company that claims it is a healthy post-workout option for rehydration.
Is Sugar More Addictive Than Cocaine? https://t.co/MdUG8ZsVBq via @ecowatch— Mark Hyman, M.D. (@Mark Hyman, M.D.)1461946646.0
Out of a possible 5-star rating, I couldn't give organic Gatorade more than 3 stars due to its high amount of sugar. While there are definitely some improvements to the product over its predecessor, it's still not a healthy option and is best avoided.
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
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