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The Hyponatremia of Exercise, Part 10

Prof. Tim Noakes shares a telling anecdote that demonstrates how Gatorade and the Gatorade Sports Science Institute (GSSI) sought to promote their commercial interests by mischaracterizing dehydration as a medical disease and propagating a fundamental misunderstanding of the causes of hyponatremia. In 2004, Noakes took a quiz on the GSSI website. The quiz was designed to test scientists’ and medical professionals’ knowledge of the factors that cause hyponatremia. Noakes, a foremost expert in the field, failed the quiz, which he determined was a lesson in indoctrination, not real science. Here, he recounts the experience while analyzing the flaws in each of the quiz’s seven questions.

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