BRT Insights - WW Kayaking & Hiking: Watermelon and Watermelon-Lime Sports Drink Recipes - homemade, healthy, natural and taste great too!

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Watermelon and Watermelon-Lime Sports Drink Recipes - homemade, healthy, natural and taste great too!

Maintaining good hydration during vigorous work or fitness training activities is easier if you are drinking something that you like.

Eating more watermelon is part of a colorful healthy diet. Learning about the nutritional value of watermelon has made this a "watermelon summer" for me. I've been eating lots of fresh watermelon and drying watermelon jerky chips to eat in the future.

Watermelon Sports Drinks are another way to enjoy this favorite fruit. Watermelon contains 10 g sugars per 154 g of fruit, so there are 16 g of sugar in a 1 cup serving (240 g) of watermelon juice. Diluting this watermelon juice with an equal volume of water will produce the isotonic sugar concentration desired in a sports drink. It is critical to replace the fluids that are lost to sweat during intense, prolonged sports and work activities. Experiments show that isotonic drinks are absorbed into our bodies faster than plain water.

Watermelon Sports Drink Recipe

I liquified some watermelon in my blender. This produced a pulpy juice that one could drink from a wide-mouth bottle, but not through the narrow opening of a squirt bottle. Filtering through a fine cloth produced a clear liquid juice, but much of the red color and nutritional value remained with the pulp so I don't recommend filtering. Anybody who has a juicer machine could probably extract more from the pulp to make a clear liquid watermelon juice that retains more of the nutritional value, but my simple juice made in a blender worked fine for me.

Full strength watermelon juice tasted great, but based on my calculations (see above) it contains too much sugar to use it as a sports drink. Diluting the watermelon juice with an equal volume of water produced a great tasting isotonic watermelon sports drink. Adding a little stevia natural flavor enhancer and no-calorie sweetener made it taste even better.

Electrolytes serve 3 critical roles in a sports drink. Analysis shows that watermelon contains potassium but very little sodium electrolyte. To ensure maximum speed of absorption approximately 1/4 tsp of salt should be added per half-gallon of watermelon sports drink. This amount should be adjusted to your individual taste. Add enough salt so that its taste is just barely detectable. Salty sports drinks are intended to prevent the drink from quenching your thirst so you will be stimulated to continue drinking more of the drink. Beware of adding too much salt and making the drink taste bad. The goal is to have a slightly salty drink that still tastes good so you will want to drink lots of it to maintain good hydration during vigorous activities.