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[pct-l] Any Thoughts on Cytomax?



there is not really any electrolyte replacement drink that suffciently 
replaces the electrolytes that you lose during exercise.  I am also on 
an Ultrarunning email list in which there is a woman getting a PHD in 
exercise science with an emphasis on electrolyte replacement.  She is 
chock full of information and she posted once about all the different 
electrolyte replacement drinks and how much sodium/potassium they 
contained.  there was virtually no difference between all the sports 
drinks, even the so-called "pro" or "scientifically formulated" drinks 
had barely more than gatorade or poweraid.  her list went on to list 
other drinks that had TONS more electrolytes that she recomended 
instead of sprots drinks.  that list included:
- v8 juice (spicy hot v8 was even better than regular)
- Pedialyte
- Ensure
- Bloody Mary Mix
- Chicken Soup Concentrate with as little water as possible.

All of those sources has like 7 or 8 times as much electrolytes (mostly 
sodium) than sports drinks.

Personally, I've never had any electrolyte problems while hiking,  All 
my problems have been during runs.  I think that if you eat enough food 
and don't over do it on the water, most hikers will probably be ok.

Coincidentally, there is an article in the Ny Times about this today:

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/health/14water.html?
ex=1114142400&en=4152baa026e288ad&ei=5070

April 14, 2005
Study Cautions Runners to Limit Their Water Intake
By GINA KOLATA

After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to
avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much
during intense exercise poses a far greater health risk.

An increasing number of athletes - marathon runners, triathletes and
even hikers in the Grand Canyon - are severely diluting their blood by
drinking too much water or too many sports drinks, with some falling
gravely ill and even dying, the doctors say.

New research on runners in the Boston Marathon, published today in The
New England Journal of Medicine, confirms the problem and shows how
serious it is.

The research involved 488 runners in the 2002 marathon. The runners
gave blood samples before and after the race. While most were fine, 13
percent of them - or 62 - drank so much that they had hyponatremia, or
abnormally low blood sodium levels. Three had levels so low that they
were in danger of dying.

The runners who developed the problem tended to be slower, taking more
than four hours to finish the course. That gave them plenty of time to
drink copious amounts of liquid. And drink they did, an average of
three liters, or about 13 cups of water or of a sports drink, so much
that they actually gained weight during the race.

The risks to athletes from drinking too much liquid have worried
doctors and race directors for several years. As more slow runners
entered long races, doctors began seeing athletes stumbling into
medical tents, nauseated, groggy, barely coherent and with their blood
severely diluted. Some died on the spot.

In 2003, U.S.A. Track & Field, the national governing body for track
and field, long-distance running and race walking, changed its
guidelines to warn against the practice.

Marathon doctors say the new study offers the first documentation of
the problem.

"Before this study, we suspected there was a problem," said Dr. Marvin
Adner, the medical director of the Boston Marathon, which is next
Monday. "But this proves it."

Hyponatremia is entirely preventable, Dr. Adner and others said.
During intense exercise the kidneys cannot excrete excess water. As
people keep drinking, the extra water moves into their cells,
including brain cells. The engorged brain cells, with no room to
expand, press against the skull and can compress the brain stem, which
controls vital functions like breathing. The result can be fatal.

But the marathon runners were simply following what has long been the
conventional advice given to athletes: Avoid dehydration at all costs.

"Drink ahead of your thirst," was the mantra.

Doctors and sports drink companies "made dehydration a medical illness
that was to be feared," said Dr. Tim Noakes, a hyponatremia expert at
the University of Cape Town.

"Everyone becomes dehydrated when they race," Dr. Noakes said. "But I
have not found one death in an athlete from dehydration in a
competitive race in the whole history of running. Not one. Not even a
case of illness."

On the other hand, he said, he knows of people who have sickened and
died from drinking too much.

Hyponatremia can be treated, Dr. Noakes said. A small volume of a
highly concentrated salt solution is given intravenously and can save
a patient's life by pulling water out of swollen brain cells.

But, he said, doctors and emergency workers often assume that the
problem is dehydration and give intravenous fluids, sometimes killing
the patient. He and others advise testing the salt concentration of
the athlete's blood before treatment.

For their part, runners can estimate how much they should drink by
weighing themselves before and after long training runs to see how
much they lose - and thus how much water they should replace.

But they can also follow what Dr. Paul D. Thompson calls "a rough rule
of thumb."

Dr. Thompson, a cardiologist at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut and a
marathon runner, advises runners to drink while they are moving.

"If you stop and drink a couple of cups, you are overdoing it," he said.

Dr. Adner said athletes also should be careful after a race. "Don't
start chugging down water," he said.

Instead, he advised runners to wait until they began to urinate, a
sign the body is no longer retaining water.

The paper's lead author, Dr. Christopher S. D. Almond, of Children's
Hospital, said he first heard of hyponatremia in 2001 when a cyclist
drank so much on a ride from New York to Boston that she had a
seizure. She eventually recovered.

Dr. Almond and his colleagues decided to investigate how prevalent
hyponatremia really was.

Until recently, the condition was all but unheard of because endurance
events like marathons and triathlons were populated almost entirely by
fast athletes who did not have time to drink too much.

"Elite athletes are not drinking much, and they never have," Dr. Noakes 
said.

The lead female marathon runner in the Athens Olympics, running in
97-degree heat drank just 30 seconds of the entire race.

In the 2002 Boston Marathon, said Dr. Arthur Siegel, of the Boston
Marathon's medical team and the chief of internal medicine at
Harvard's McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., the hyponatremia problem
"hit us like a cannon shot" in 2002.

That year, a 28-year-old woman reached Heartbreak Hill, at Mile 20,
after five hours of running and drinking sports drinks. She struggled
to the top. Feeling terrible and assuming she was dehydrated, she
chugged 16 ounces of the liquid.

"She collapsed within minutes," Dr. Siegel said.

She was later declared brain dead. Her blood sodium level was
dangerously low, at 113 micromoles per liter of blood. (Hyponatremia
starts at sodium levels below 135 micromoles, when brain swelling can
cause confusion and grogginess. Levels below 120 can be fatal.)

No one has died since in the Boston Marathon, but there have been near
misses there, with 7 cases of hyponatremia in 2003 and 11 last year,
and deaths elsewhere, Dr. Siegel said. He added that those were just
the cases among runners who came to medical tents seeking help.

In a letter, also in the journal, doctors describe 14 runners in the
2003 London Marathon with hyponatremia who waited more than four hours
on average before going to a hospital. Some were lucid after the race,
but none remembered completing it.

That sort of delay worries Dr. Siegel. "The bottom line is, it's a
very prevalent problem out there, and crossing the edge from being
dazed and confused to having a seizure is very tricky and can happen
very, very fast," he said.

Boston Marathon directors want to educate runners not to drink so
much, Dr. Siegel said. They also suggest that runners write their
weights on their bibs at the start of the race. If they feel ill, they
could be weighed again. Anyone who gains weight almost certainly has
hyponatremia.

"Instead of waiting until they collapse and then testing their sodium,
maybe we can nip it in the bud," Dr. Siegel said.

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