The World's Most Inane Beverage

What if we made an electrolyte supplement that didn't have any electrolytes in it?

Common logic would suggest that you'd be thrown out of a marketing meeting for such a suggestion but, somehow, someone at Gatorade got Employee of the Week instead. So if you ever wondered how a junky beverage like Gatorade could possibly be worse, you now have an answer; by eliminating the nutrients that were the reason for creating it in the first place. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Low-Sodium Gatorade: the world’s most inane beverage.

How and why could this have happened?

Since marketing jargon has suggested that electrolytes in your diet are a good thing but excessive sodium in your diet is a bad thing, the geniuses at Pepsi (who own Gatorade) that if they could just get the sodium out of their electrolyte replenisher they'd have the perfect cocktail. The only problem here is all that pesky science that tells us sodium is the electrolyte that we need the most.

I suppose it's too much work to educate people that we only need to replenish something when we've lost it in the first place. The public hates all that A + B = C stuff anyway.

The basics look like this. When we sweat, we're losing electrolytes at an accelerated rate. When we're not sweating, we don't need to replenish them. The same thing is true for Gatorade’s other ingredient, sugar. This is why Gatorade was created for when playing sports. And sports, it seems, have been deemed a limiting factor for their marketing strategy.

I mean, why limit its application to things most of us don't want to be bothered with? Sports, after all, require us to move our bodies and, aghast, sweat. Can't we just have the sports drink without having to actually play the sports? After all, we can buy the Manning jersey and the Kobe shoes without the risk of someone D-ing up on us. Can't we have their drink, too? Now if we could just find a way to score all those contract endorsements by just watching sports, we'd really have something.