Best sports nutrition for endurance athletes

Best sports nutrition for endurance athletes

By definition, the best sports nutrition for endurance athletes should be made to the highest standards and using the best ingredients available. After all, these are products to sustain health-conscious folks taking their bodies to the limit.

But as we've already seen with maltodextrin and acesulfame K that the ingredients in most sports nutrition endurance products are cheap junk - things you'd run a mile from if you saw them in a sweet shop.

A quick glance at the companies making many of these products provides one clue as to how this swill is passed off as optimum nutrition because plenty are companies whose major interests may really lie in the balance sheet rather than with customers. 

Take GlaxoSmithKline. The fourth largest pharmaceutical company in the world they also produced Lucozade until recently.

GSK are also the same company who had to pay out the largest healthcare fraud settlement in US history ($3bn or £1.9bn) for bribing doctors and encouraging the prescription of unsuitable antidepressants to children. 

Whoops.

This isn't the only blot in their copybook. From trying to silence doctors critical of their diabetes drugs to marketing an antidepressant for 10 years claiming it wasn't habit forming only to have experts and a US court find this incorrect, they've been busy. 

Most recently they were embroiled in a major criminal investigation in China for allegedly bribing doctors. Again. Doh.

GSK aren't the only ones either, by a long way.

Listed as the world's most profitable corporation in 2011, Nestlé (who made all Powerbar products until selling the brand) have, among other things, demanded $6 million in debt from Ethiopia while the country was in severe famine, been embroiled in a horsemeat scandal when traces were found their Buitoni beef pasta meals, and been headed by a CEO (Peter Brabeck) who thought the idea of water as a basic human right was "extreme".

Nestle sells bottled water.

With companies like these behind most sports nutrition for endurance athletes, it's no surprise much product isn't all it's cracked up to be.

At 33Shake we only use the best, whole, fresh superfood ingredients and make all of our products individually. This is much more labour intensive, time-consuming and costly than using bucketloads of cheap filler and firing products out from a production line in the third world, but we'd rather make something truly great and make a living, than flog crap for a packet and make a killing. We'll leave that to everyone else.

We were endurance athletes before we started 33Shake and we're still endurance athletes now. We use our own products daily. The day we can't stand by these products and hand on heart say they are the best they can possibly be is the day we've failed. And we're really not into failure.

Ready for some real sports nutrition? Have a browse in store at our products here

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