Theory of Knowledge

Q - to what extent do these companies manipulate the consumers to thinking that sports drinks are a better alternative than water?

Over the past couple of years all people who exercise have been using water as a source of replenishment for hydration, but not long ago sports drinks where invented and rapidly became popular around the world, and their companies where able to make the consumers believe that “water is not enough”. In 1985 Gatorade Sports Science Institute were able to convince the public that thirst is an unreliable indicator of dehydration to help and try to promote their products. And the experts who made this information were most likely supported or sponsored by the sports drinks companies. But they have also proven themselves correct by supporting with evidence about hyponatremia. Hyponatremia is a drop in a person’s serum sodium levels and has had a bad effect on marathon runners causing death and life threatening illnesses, and for a fact the excess consumption of water can be a cause to hyponatremia. Using this evidence an experiment was conducted to compare if sports drinks also caused hyponatremia in athletes and concluded that it does not making it a better alternative than water for these marathon runners. We also have to distinguish between professional athletes and other people. It has been claimed by the European Food Safety Authority that sports drinks hydrate better than water and can help maintain performance in endurance workouts and exercises like marathons, but this does not apply to the people that only exercise for a few times a week. So people are not going to study or conduct an experiment about this topic on a person that does not exercise a lot daily because you wouldn’t be able to obtain accurate data about if the sports drinks affected the person or not. Companies like Gatorade have been able to reach out to the youth and have made programs that promote the consumption of sports drinks during exercise. Choosing to target the youth is a very intelligent idea because these kids are still young and can be manipulated to do or like something very easily, and that is exactly what sports drinks companies do; advertising with famous icons like LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Lionel Messi, Tiger woods and many more that vary between all types of sports and that helps them sell their product.it basically gives out the message that if I drink this product I could be able to play like these professionals because they drink it too, so including these athletes also helps obtain more consumers to help increase their sales. Counter claims against promoting sports drinks to kids have also been made because the intake of these drinks can also contribute to the rising levels of obesity in children from the all the added sugars included in them, but somehow these companies were still able to manage to get several studies to show the belief that sports drinks could be a healthy option and even be essential for us. All this just shows us how much effort sports drinks companies have put out to try to make us believe that this is the better alternative than water and most importantly to increase their sales and income by trying try to make it a “worldwide trend”.