Steer your cart through any supermarket and they are everywhere – packaged foods of every imaginable kind. Universally, these can be considered “processed” and it’s a term you’ve likely heard bantered around for years. But recently, new terminology has emerged to define certain foods and beverages that are processed and then some – in other words, ultra-processed foods.
Experts estimate that falls under this ultra-processed category – and that’s concerning to health experts. According to the American Medical Association, consuming ultra-processed foods (UPFs) regularly increases a person’s risk of health complications, including cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.
Most endurance athletes tend to think of food as fuel, and as such try to steer clear of unhealthy picks. But when it comes to gels, chews, and electrolyte drinks, that’s a tough order. After all – most sports nutrition, by definition, is an ultra-processed food. So what does that mean for athletes? Should we go back to the days of eating bananas on bike rides?
What Are Ultra-Processed Foods?
While there is no universally-agreed definition, an ingredient list that reads like a chemistry quiz is a tip-off for something being ultra-processed. These foods go through multiple processing steps, from stripping away nutrients to mixing in sweeteners, fats, salt, artificial flavors, and emulsifiers to alter taste, texture and shelf life. This flavor and texture manipulation is the reason why ultra-processed foods are tasty – and why we keep coming back for more.
Items that often fall into the UPF category include frozen meals, baked goods, soft drinks, hot dogs, boxed cereals, ice cream, white bread, fast food pizza, and potato chips. This designation also applies to most performance-oriented foods like gels, chews, and bars. Even the most casual sports fan has seen athletes gulping down neon sports drinks on the sidelines and during post-game media interviews, and gels and chews are at every aid station during a race. They’re small, shelf-stable, portable, and formulated to fuel your workouts, which is why it’s easy to overlook their ultra-processed characteristics.
What the Science Says about Ultra-Processed Foods
Some degree of processing is nothing to fret about – after all, a bag of frozen blueberries can be considered a processed food but certainly not something that should be avoided. But eating too much food that has been powerfully manipulated by manufacturers .
A in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine associated the highest consumption amounts of UPFs with a 17% increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease-related mortality and a 16% increase in the risk for all-cause mortality. A in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition links UPFs to accelerated biological aging, noting that factors beyond the poor nutritional content such as the addition of non-nutrient components like emulsifiers and preservatives might largely contribute to the accelerated aging effect.
More data shows that UPFs can impact everything from brain to bone to microbiome health. Dyslipidemia, hypertension, weight gain, and insulin resistance are why going heavy on UPFs can be bad news for longevity. Truly concerning is that now the daily calories in the typical American diet come from UPFs.
Is My Sports Nutrition an Ultra-Processed Food?
Let’s take a look at the makeup of a few types of popular sports nutrition products.
Vanilla gel
Ingredient list: Maltodextrin, water, fructose, L-leucine, potassium citrate, sodium citrate, citric acid, calcium carbonate, L-valine, sea salt, natural flavor, green tea (leaf) extract (contains caffeine), gellan gum, L-isoleucine, sunflower oil, sodium benzoate (preservative), potassium sorbate (preservative)
Is it ultra-processed? Yes.
Strawberry energy chew
Ingredient list: Organic tapioca syrup, organic cane sugar, water, pectin, potassium citrate, citric acid, natural flavors, Vit B3/B6/B12, fruit blends of apple, blueberry, pomegranate
Ultra-processed? You bet.
Lemon-lime sports drink mix
Triple source energy blend (maltodextrose, dextrose, fructose), citric acid, silicon dioxide, natural flavors
Are you drinking a UPF? You know the answer.
It’s almost impossible to argue that the above food, like the vast majority of packaged sports nutrition products on the market, are not ultra-processed based on the somewhat loose definition of this food group. So is this something to be concerned about if you frequently fuel your exercise sessions with these products? Or is it possible that ultra-processed gels and drinks are the right nutritional choice for triathletes and do no harm?
Let’s dig into what we know about the benefits and risks.
Yes, You Can Still Use Some Ultra-Processed Sports Nutrition
There is a reason why rely on the various guises of packaged ultra-processed sports nutrition products to get them to the finish line: because they work. We have that purposefully using a UPF around training and competing can be helpful for performance. Sports foods are specially manufactured for athletes to provide the nutrients they may need during training or racing. (Imagine running for many hours with a sack of bananas.)
Sports nutrition is processed to create fast-digesting carbohydrates in the form of gels, chews, and beverages to keep your muscles adequately fueled. As we increase the intensity of what we’re doing, we need more and more carbs (and calories!) as a fuel source. Ultra-processed sports foods use a mix of simple sugars to help with the digestibility and use of those carbs, while added citrusy or chocolatey flavors make them desirable to consume. That’s something most people don’t think about until they encounter an unflavored or unpleasant-tasting gel: If you don’t eat or drink something, then you can’t fuel the machine.
Athletes have special nutritional requirements to maximize their performance, and ultra-processed products can have a place in helping fulfill this. From a health perspective, we don’t yet have any convincing data that when UPFs are consumed in the context of long-duration or vigorous exercise they will have a deleterious impact on well-being. It’s easy to argue that getting a load of heavily-processed sugar from ultra-processed gels and drinks during a century ride is better than not getting fuel at all.
The vast majority of research linking UPFs with poor health has looked at the diet as a whole, and also involved a population of non-athletes. of basketball players found that a high intake of ultra-processed foods led to no noticeable detriment to performance or cardiovascular health. So there was no spillover effect in this aspect. However, a high intake of UPFs affected their microbiome negatively, the consequences of which are unknown. No other studies have specifically looked at ultra-processed foods in endurance athletes.
Consuming ultra-processed foods sporadically in a sports-nutrition context is likely not detrimental to overall health. It might only become problematic if you start leaning on bars and sugary sports drinks too heavily when you’re not working out. If using UPFs to boost your workouts helps you increase your overall cardiovascular and muscular fitness, perhaps this benefit can counteract any disadvantageous characteristics of these items.
But There Might Be a Limit
With all the bad news about them, it’s understandable why about UPFs. We should not dismiss the notion that there will be some degree of detrimental impact on health with heavy ultra-processed sports nutrition product use over the weeks, months, and years due to the nature of their production and formulation. These days, many pro triathletes are pumping in more than 100 grams of carbs for each hour of activity, and most, if not all, of those calories are hailing from ultra-processed products. But perhaps what you eat for performance is not necessarily the best for your health.
In showing that athletes can tolerate more than 100 grams of carbs hourly and that this amount increases carbohydrate oxidation, there is some concern that not all this sugar gets used up during exercise. It could then sit around in your system afterward, resulting in a downturn of metabolic and microbiome health. We just don’t know for sure, and we don’t have the answers to this dilemma. As more athletes increase the quantity of use of high-sugar UPFs, we desperately need research to address this.
using continuous glucose monitors found even athletes with high rates of energy expenditure can spend long periods with blood sugar levels that would be classified as pre-diabetic. Perhaps some of that can be attributed to high-sugar consumption from UPFs during workouts. Even in endurance sport, you’re not fully protected from the adverse effects of added sugar intake pumped into UPFs, no matter how many miles you are cranking out.
There is also the concern about the health risks of eating non-nutritive ingredients added to ultra-processed foods, such as emulsifiers and artificial flavor. While hard-charging athletes have more room for “discretionary calories,” has shown there are health risks from eating UPFs, regardless of whether a person has an otherwise healthy diet. That means that eating too many UPFs – which can include fueling products – may be risky even if you normally also eat lots of whole, fresh foods.
suggests that endurance athletes that use whey or beef protein powder long-term may have a detrimental impact on the gut microbiome, which might not necessarily be because of processed protein, but instead the emulsifiers that are in so many of these products.