Gatorade Has Been Trolling You for Years

Matthew Carrigan
Jul 22, 2017 · 2 min read

“Hey, great game guys! Why don’t you sit down and have a nice cold cup of Gatorade. After all, you need your electrolytes!”

This is what I (having never played a single sport in my life) imagine a standard dialogue is like between a coach and player after an intense sports game.

Unbeknownst to almost everyone, electrolytes are just a buzzword created by the geniuses at Gatorade to sell their product.

The premise behind electrolytes is absolutely genius:

Create a fictional biological chemical. Emphasize that everyone should maintain it, unconditionally.

Cultivate a sense of product necessity. Create a narrative where the drink is indispensable for replenishing nutrients after physical activity.

Market the product to a niche group of people. They kind of participate in these electrolyte-requiring activities.

And those are the ingredients for Gatorade. Not water, sucrose and that other bullshit.

Let me clarify my stance — as a fellow troll, I’m impressed that a corporation could make such an impression on modern science. I dream of a day where I too can manipulate people into believing their body has a specific chemical, and that my unique drink can provide it. Not to mention, cornering a market and making a profit.

Think about the last Super Bowl you watched. Did the players pour water on their coach? Apple juice? Dr. Pepper? No, it was Gatorade. How can I tell? The commentators talk about it. More importantly, it’s on the branded cooler, in your 4K TV-watching face.

Electrolytes are the single most successful and widespread marketing scheme in our world today. They are an entirely fictional concept, propagated via plastic bottles, nationally televised football, and, if I had to guess, probably even plastic footballs. Even in trying to find explanations of how electrolytes function within the body, my efforts have been fruitless. Perhaps I’m just low on electrolytes.

In fact, the Gatorade brainwashers have demonstrated such prowess in incepting the necessity of this made-up body chemical into people’s minds that they seem to have narrowly bypassed any explanation of the relationship between the need for water and Gatorade.

I wonder if this is how global warming skeptics felt when scientists illuminated how our fossil fuel-indulgent lifestyle is demonstrably destructive with facts-based evidence. I bet they, too, were low on electrolytes.

Saying that people need electrolytes is like saying that all men who want to be viewed as professionals should apply cream to and drag blades across their faces every morning. Or that people should pay other people to cut their dead skin cells off in order to make a superficial fashion statement.

Gatorade is the Church of Scientology in a bottle. Astrology in liquid form. The sports drink equivalent of a Hallmark holiday.

Hopefully, we will one day live in a world where Gatorade, like cigarette companies, is forced to include disclaimers about their duplicitous advertising.

Hopefully, children aren’t conditioned to drink a sugary (yet, somehow, delicious) drink by their idolized football players.

Hopefully, people will view Gatorade as the guilty pleasure refreshment it is.

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