Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps is apparently refusing to train without a bottle of PureSport at his side. Or at least that’s what the PureSport CEO Michael Humphrey says.

After being caught smoking a bong and placing his swimming career in extreme jeopardy a few months ago, the 14-time Olympic gold winner trained hard and got his body back into peak swimming shape. He lost quite a lot of weight before competing in the world championships in July, where he broke the record for the men’s 200m butterfly.

According to Humphrey, Phelps says PureSport is the “best sports drink he’s ever found and refuses to train without it”.

Is PureSport something special?

“The key factor in a sports performance drink is the carbohydrate/protein/electrolyte blend,” Humphrey told The Examiner. “Carbohydrates provide instant energy and proteins provide sustaining energy. That balance is critical and PureSport contains the optimal blend of carbohydrate and protein for better performance and faster recovery.”

Celeb Diet Doc

Here’s the ingredients for PureSport:
Ingredients: Whey Protein Isolate, Dextrose, Maltodextrin, Crystalline Fructose, Citric Acid, Sodium Chloride, Magnesium Sulfate, Monopotassium Phosphate, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Silicon Dioxide, Ascorbic Acid, Sucralose, Red 40 Lake.

While Pure Sport does not contain sugar, it contains crystalline fructose. Fructose has become a favorite ingredient of diet manufacturers because it has a low glycemic index. Low glycemic foods tend to have less of an impact on your blood sugar, so you release less insulin and store less fat. That’s the simplistic version. However just because foods are low glycemic does not make them healthy. Coke, which contains high fructose corn syrup, is also low to moderate on the glycemic index but no one would argue that it’s in anyway healthy!

So back to crystalline fructose and other processed fructose products. They lead to high cholesterol and fatty livers. My advice is to stay away from processed performance drinks. Any sort of performance edge that Michael Phelps is getting is psychological not physiological. But the mind is a powerful thing, performance drinks are not.

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