I’ve used http://www.accelerade.com/mountain berry as a hydration drink for quite some time. It works pretty well, but it has a problem – it’s sweetened mostly with sucrose, which means that it’s quite sweet. They use some citric acid to counter that a bit, but after a couple of hours it gets too sweet to drink.
Some people dilute it, which makes it less sweet but also reduces the number of calories in a bottle. I prefer to make the existing drink less sweet.
What we need is a sugar that acts like sucrose but is less sweet. Maltodextrain is a complex carbohydrate – a chain of glucose molecules all hooked together (sometimes known as a glucose polymer), and it breaks down to glucose very easily.
I get mine from the supplement house:
My current recipe is 2.5 parts Accelerade to 1 part maltodextrin. I did one batch at 2:1 which is another option.
Recipe:
3 3/4 cups Accelerade (750 grams)
2 1/4 cups Maltodextrin (300 grams)
1 teaspon salt
Put in a big bowl and mix. This amount will fit in one of the small accelerade containers. The amount of salt is slightly more than what it would normally have – if you want to keep the sodium the same, you need 8/10ths of a teaspoon.
This also has less protein – instead of the 4:1 ratio, you’re down to something less than that. You could add more whey protein if you wanted.
So, what do you think ?