Scientists Try to Make Athletes Eat Mashed Potatoes Instead of Sports Gels
Flatulence was a problem.
If you’re a certain kind of high-performance athlete, you’re familiar with the sports gels that serve as a carbohydrate and electrolyte booster.
Those gels are standard issue for cyclists, runners, and many other athletes. But what if there’s another solution? What if athletes could eat…mashed potatoes instead?
Typically we don’t highlight research with such obvious conflicts of interest as this new study, conducted by a researcher at the University of Illinois and funded by the Alliance for Potato Research & Education. That funder has an explicit interest in promoting the potato, and this particular study has a variety of issues with it. That said, it is a hilarious study, and we would like to talk about it.
In this study, twelve serious cyclists—all of whom had to pass a threshold of physical fitness and training—were given one of three refueling options during a 120-minute cycling challenge. They’d either have plain water, a commercially available sports gel, or a potato puree.
Sports gels, according to Runner’s World, typically consist mostly of simple sugars, often both glucose and fructose. Some include salts, and some include a stimulant like caffeine. Potatoes are very high in carbohydrates, though mostly those are starches, rather than sugars. But they aren’t nearly as dense in carbs as these gels are.
Many of the gels listed in this roundup by Cycling Weekly offer about 25 grams of carbs in a package typically clocking in at around 35 grams total—very dense indeed. You’d need around 150 grams of potatoes to get to 25 grams of carbs, according to figures from the USDA, which comes out to about one cup of diced potatoes.
Owing in part, say the researchers, to this high volume of potatoes, the test cyclists “experienced significantly more gastrointestinal bloating, pain and flatulence than the other groups.” So it may not have been fun to hammer back mashed potatoes while furiously cycling for two straight hours, but did it work?
It actually did! At least, in this study. The researchers say that the potato group and the commercial sports gel group had nearly identical numbers in their performance, heart rates, and blood glucose levels, indicating that the potato can actually work as an energy fuel. That all said: this is a study of twelve people, a pretty ridiculously low sample size, and the gastrointestinal distress doesn’t seem very fun. Maybe one day, we’ll all be filling our Nalgenes with mashed potatoes. Also: maybe not.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].Scientists Try to Make Athletes Eat Mashed Potatoes Instead of Sports Gels
by Dan Nosowitz, Modern Farmer
October 21, 2019
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
In the 18th/19th century, England recruited heavily in Ireland to fill the ranks of their armies. The Irish lads were raised on a diet of colcannon potatoes and stood an average of 2 inches taller than their English compatriots. Bloating and gas be damned. Potatoes are good food. Do these modern foodists want all the food with no farts or fecal matter?
I realize the research is by The Alliance for Potatoes. but perhaps someone else would like to experiment with other real food alternatives like turnips and white rice. The problem with potatoes, as I understand it, is the resistant starch that forms in cooked then cooled potatoes. Potatoes in this form “resist” digestion and that creates bloating and gas.