Although no Lance Armstrong, Hartley Pond, vice president of technical sales, FutureCeuticals and Van Drunen Farms, Santa Rosa, CA, and recreational road and mountain biker, knows how it feels to bonk.
“When you bonk,” Pond explains, “your body recognizes that you’re getting dangerously low on glucose. To save what’s essential for your central nervous system and brain, the glucose is actually held back from your muscles.” The average person stores enough muscle glycogen to yield about 1,500 to 2,000 kcal of energy, and a brisk bike ride can burn upward of 600 to 800 kcal per hour. So two to three hours rolling around the Solano County hills near his home can leave Pond hitting the wall—with the fatigue, dizziness, and even hallucinations that result. “It’s an emergency siren going off to tell you to think about what you’re doing—and to eat.” Eat he does, sometimes pounding energy gels whose four parts maltodextrin to one part fructose load the body with quick, digestible carbohydrates. But he could just as easily replenish with a cheeseburger.
Stoking energy
As long as it supplies calories, any food qualifies as energy food. But with more consumers hungry for energy in easy-to-eat form, the market is ripe for these products.
“In the past few decades,” says Steve Wang, sales manager, Taiyo International, Inc., Minneapolis, “food-related research has exploded. We have a wealth of information about the specific functions of active components in foods and how each of these components reacts with the human body to produce a desired result, such as increasing metabolism, improving endurance or staying alert.”
