One day I was watching the morning news and saw a segment about avoiding sugar or cutting calories by cutting out sugar. They had an expert on as a guest, and if I remember correctly, it was someone from Good Housekeeping magazine.

Good Housekeeping is pretty big, but you never know if the news shows are getting real “experts” or just someone that will create controversy to boost their ratings…

They starting going over drinks like fruit juice, sports drinks, and soda, while offering comparisons of nutrition facts such as sugar content. You know, drinks that seem like the healthy option (juice) up against the evil, unhealthy option (soda.) The segment really focused on sugar content and calories though, leaving out any other health benefits (or drawbacks.)

What was the conclusion?

That fruit juice is bad for you because it has so many calories. We’re talking about orange juice and apple juice here, and they say it’s the unhealthy option!

Worse, they went on to recommend that you stay away from juice, and instead go for the drinks with artificial sweeteners. The recommended lineup included Diet Pepsi.

Are you kidding?! Diet Pepsi instead of apple juice?!

No thanks, I’ll take my fruit juice and Gatorade and the extra calories, along with the health benefits. You can keep the diet sodas full of aspartame, and the resulting cancer, for yourself.

Although I’ll admit that claiming that diet soda is healthier than fruit juice was a great way to catch people’s attention!

Photo credit: Maulleigh

After a couple small attempts at this, I think I figured it out for the third time!

If you remember, the whole point of this is to find something to give me more calories in a mountain bike race without adding solid food. We’re talking about a 2.5-3 hour race, maybe a 6 hour. I think there will be a lot more testing though, if I try to figure out the proper nutrition method for a 24 hour solo attempt…

So really, I just needed to add a couple hundred calories to my 2 bottles of Gatorade. And that is what I did on day 3 testing. I took 2 bottles of Gatorade/maltodextrin mix out for a 2 hour ride. And it went great! (Well, from a nutrition standpoint it did, I was a bit sluggish because I was fighting off a cold…)

In the end, the main finding is that I can combine Gatorade and maltodextrin powder and use it successfully while riding.

If you’ve been reading a while, you know that I’ve been planning out a nutrition strategy for training and racing. Last week was the first day I tested the addition of maltodextrin powder to my normal fluid intake.

I did a little less than two hours on my mountain bike over hilly terrain, but no serious efforts. I used a bottle of Gatorade/maltodextrin powder and a bottle of water. Everything went fine. Granted I didn’t use that much maltodextrin, but I was doing the unthinkable - mixing simple and complex carbs! Uh oh!

My next ride I will be using quite a bit more maltodextrin, so keep reading to see what happens!

Ever since I came up with the genius idea of getting some maltodextrin powder and mixing it with Gatorade to use as fuel for my endurance rides (instead of buying the expensive specialty drinks), I have been told not to mix simple and complex carbohydrates! Apparently there are big problems mixing complex sugars like maltodextrin with simple sugars like sucrose, which is in Gatorade…

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