Gatorade when was it made

They found water loss was staggering for the two-hour practice — 8. Down in a basement lab one evening, the doctors mixed up a solution to replicate sweat and then poured it into cups. They clicked their cups in a toast having no idea what they had just created and took a swig, Cade wrote. The doctors who were standing next to a lab sink quickly spit theirs out. The doctors tinkered with the formula, adding lemon, orange and a non-nutritive sweetener. And, at last, Gatorade was drinkable.

Not tasty, but drinkable. Soon after the doctors introduced their drink to the team, the Gators began winning. The varsity team started consuming Gatorade, too, and it began to defeat heavily favored teams in intense heat.

The following season, the Gators went and won the Orange Bowl for the first time in the school's history, beating Georgia Tech Tech coach Bobby Dodd told reporters after the game that his team lost because, "We didn't have Gatorade. That made the difference. Meanwhile, Indiana University School of Medicine was developing an artificial kidney and kidney transplant program in It recruited three doctors from Florida. Shires said in a IndyStar article, "We were all working in the area of kidney disease in Florida and we were brought here to work on the kidney disease program.

Stokely and several upper level executives in the company and told them about the wonderful new drink Gatorade," Cade wrote. Bradley asked Cade to send samples to Indianapolis. He made up three batches of lemon lime, orange and a grape flavor. A couple of days later Bradley called to tell Cade that the executives, especially Alfred J. Stokely, liked the idea and wanted to investigate commercialization of Gatorade.

Twice a week, high-profile Indianapolis attorney Claude Spilman would go to the veterans hospital. Claude said he would do the legal work for them.

Word about Gatorade began to spread outside of the state of Florida, and both the University of Richmond and Miami of Ohio, began ordering batches of Gatorade for their football teams. Orders from other college football programs across the country soon followed, as playing without Gatorade on your sidelines began to be likened to playing with just ten men on the field.

Today, Gatorade can be found on the sidelines of more than 70 Division I colleges as the official sports drink of their men's and women's intercollegiate sports. In the summer of , Coach Ray Graves of the Florida Gators suggested to the Kansas City Chiefs that they use Gatorade to combat the staggering effects of a blistering Missouri sun during training camp.

In the years that followed, more and more NFL teams began placing Gatorade on the sidelines of their games and practices, and in , Gatorade became the official sports drink of the NFL—a title it holds to this day. Two decades after Dr. Cade and his team worked diligently to develop the optimum hydration formula that would become Gatorade, the Gatorade Sports Science Institute was founded in Barrington, Illinois, to conduct scientific research in the areas of exercise science, hydration, and sport nutrition.

Three years later, the lab would be expanded to provide advanced testing for athletes and new Gatorade products and flavors and develop education materials for sports health professionals around the world.

In , after determining that professional race car drivers were not staying adequately hydrated throughout the course of their races, Gatorade and GSSI begin working with auto racing organizations to develop a hydration tool that could withstand degree temperatures and keep drivers hydrated safely throughout the course of a race. These days you can get Gatorade in a number of tasty flavors. Back in Gatorade's early days, however, that definitely wasn't the case and it tasted pretty darn gross.

When Dr. Robert Cade was first developing the drink down in Gainesville, Florida it was mostly made of water, fructose, sodium citrate, and monopotassium.

Mmmm, right? Not hardly. The drink reportedly tasted so bad that some athletes vomited after drinking it. Cade was a physician specializing in nephrology and was focused on the kidneys, not taste. The hurdle that he had to overcome wasn't just finding a way for his new drink to replenish the body with electrolytes, but to do so in a way that athletes could stomach during a hot day on the football field.

While he could have taken the concoction to an already existing beverage company and had them find a way to make it taste better, Cade decided to do it himself in a very odd way. So the early Gatorade prototype was straight barf-fuel and players told the well-meaning doctor that his drink tasted like toilet bowl cleaner and even worse, urine. If one ever needed proof that Dr. Cade was willing to go above and beyond to make his new sports drink drinkable, they only need look to his next move.

Cade took the athletes' criticisms to heart and taste tested his Gatorade against a bottle of urine. He came to the conclusion that the players were right on the money. The next step was finding a way to make Gatorade not taste like a bottle of pee and it was Cade's wife who had the answer.

Cade suggested that he add some lemon juice to the mix to cut the harsh taste, and after some tweaking, Cade had a drinkable Gatorade formula. So that's what we did. Vintage ads of Gatorade imply that it's the beverage choice of winners, great for kids , and even superior to water.

While chugging a bottle of Gatorade during a football game is going to be a slightly better choice than soda , not everything about it is doing your body good. The whole idea behind sports drinks is that they replenish your body with electrolytes which are needed for proper nerve, muscle, and brain function.

It's the added electrolytes and carbs for energy in Gatorade that are the selling point of the drink. The downside to Gatorade is that it does contain a lot of sugar, as much as 34 grams in a ounce bottle. That might be fine if you're running up and down a football field for three hours, but not so good if you're sitting at home watching Netflix.

It also contains various food dyes like Red 40 and Yellow 5 which have been linked to health risks such as cancer. As visible as Gatorade is in sports, you would think that every athlete would have a bottle of it in their hand every waking moment. That's not the case at all, and many athletes try to avoid drinking it. Gary Fisher, a legend in mountain biking, argues that "engineered nutrition" products can easily work against an athlete and cause them to put on unnecessary weight. Sports nutrition doctor Timothy Noakes said that he advises athletes to listen to their bodies and hydrate with water whenever they feel thirsty.

As much as Gatorade would like to say they've fueled Tom Brady to five Super Bowl wins, that's just not the case and you'll never see him chugging the stuff. Sure, whatever he's drinking on the sidelines may be in a Gatorade cup or bottle, but it's actually a special concoction made just for him. Prior to , Gatorade was just another flavored drink. Then, in August , a commercial ran with Michael Jordan drinking the stuff and it became the drink of the biggest sports star on the planet.

Jordan had previously done marketing spots for Coke, but the soda giant didn't want to give him a year deal, so Gatorade came knocking. Using the Jungle Book film's "I Want to be Like You" song for inspiration, the commercial featured Jordan doing lots of hoops action, hanging out with kids, and of course, plenty of thirst-quenching Gatorade footage.

The "Be Like Mike" tag line drove home the message that Gatorade was liquid fuel for the star athlete. Ads proclaimed that it worked 30 percent faster than water and helped the star beat the flu in the NBA finals.

Despite health groups slamming the advertising and a partnership that's been over since , Jordan and Gatorade have continued to capitalize on the marketing campaign. Watch any NBA game or just look through a few photos of players on the bench and you're sure to see a jug of the stuff in the background.

That's because it's the only drink besides water allowed on NBA benches during games. The company doesn't take it well when people question the power of its drink to fuel NBA players either.