Soft Drink

Nowadays, majority of children and adolescents like to drink soft drink every day and drink energy drink, sports drink and caffeinated sodas after doing exercise. However, those drink are high sugar and high calories drink that will increase the risk for overweight or obesity in children and adolescents. They have imbalance diet when energy intake exceeds energy expenditure. The report "Sports Drinks and Energy Drinks for Children and Adolescents: Are They Appropriate" recommend that we can eliminate of calorie containing beverages from a well diet, but the low-fat or fat-free milk can have exception, because the low-fat or fat-free milk are containing calcium and vitamin, which are important for young peoples. Furthermore, the other drink such as juice, soda and coffee are not good hydrators. Juice and soda have higher sugar rate that will slow down the water absorption; coffee and tea are diuretics that make our kidneys pull water out of our bloodstream.

Water is the better liquid and can help body to recover faster, so peoples should drink water before and during exercise. In the article, American Association of Pediatrics has a new idea to improve the taste of water. They are adding flavors to the water as a substitute for those drinks such as True Lemon, True Lime or True Orange in the water. Also, those True Citrus have no calories, carbohydrates, artificial ingredients and they ass the natural Vitamin C in the water.

In order to know how much water need to drink during exercise, we can calculate our sweat rate. The sweat rate formula is: (A+B) ÷ C.

A is our before exercise body weight MINUS after exercise body weight (1lb = 16 oz) here we count in oz.

B is how much water we drink during exercise (Count in oz)

C is the exercise duration. (Count in hr)

Here is my sweat rate example (3/25/2013)

A: 115 - 114 = 1lb = 16oz

B: I drink 2 cups during exercise so is 16 oz

C: 30minutes = 0.5 hr

so my Sweat rate is (16 oz + 16 oz) ÷ 0.5 hr = 64oz/hr

In my example, I know I need to drink 64oz water in one hour during exercise. If we eat decent and high carbohydrate in three hours before work out, we don't need to a sports drink to recover our energy because our muscle can store 60 to 90 minutes worth of carbohydrate.