Sports Drinks Work In Strange Ways: Drinking Not Required

Few readers will be surprised to learn that, in an experiment conducted at the University of Birmingham, England, competitive cyclists who were given a pseudo-sports drinks that contained carbohydrates (glucose or maltodextrin) performed two to three percent better than those who were given water laced with artificial sweeteners in a challenging workout. But readers might be surprised to learn that neither group of athletes actually drank the beverage; both groups merely swished the stuff around their mouths and spit it out.
What’s up with that? Could the athletes absorb enough carbohydrates through the lining of their mouths? Not likely. Web MD reports that the researchers who performed the experiment did something else: They examined the brain activity of the athletes by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) after giving them one of the three solutions. And they found something strange: the glucose and maltodextrin triggered specific areas
of the brain that are associated with pleasure or reward, but the
artificially sweetened water did not. But how? The researchers believe the human mouth may have receptors sensitive to
carbohydrate that activate the brain, and that are independent of the ‘sweet’ taste receptor.
Read more in Web MD.
Read an abstract from the research in the Journal of Physiology.