Almost exactly one year ago, massive YouTubers
Logan Paul and KSI joined forces to launch Prime, a sports drink brand that's coming
after the likes of Gatorade and Powerade. And now, almost exactly one year later. This
stuff is everywhere. It's in stores. It's the official drink of the UFC. It's in
almost every YouTube short that I get recommended. This stuff even got itself a Super Bowl commercial.
Hold on. Rewind that back. Is that… Markiplier?! [Markiplier]: Oh that’s good Ah dammit. I guess they got to try it. Hello internet! Welcome to Food Theory, where
red hot drinks get cold, hard facts. And let me just cut right to the chase with this one.
Prime is massive and it's currently on track to be the most successful creator startup
brand ever. In its first year, it reportedly has earned
$250 million in revenue. Now, it's always important to remember that revenue is very
different from profits and that those sorts of numbers can be the result of a lot of different
factors. So take all of that with a grain of salt. But to give that $250 million some
context, Mr. Beast's feast doubles chocolate brand reportedly had $10 million in sales
its first year. Any way you slice it, the numbers here are
eye watering. Here's the thing, though. I don't buy it. Something's not right about
all this. Don't get me wrong, I'm normally eager to celebrate the success of any creator
led business. But Logan Paul? For some reason I just get a little suspicious of things that
he puts his name to. Not really sure why. Yeah, I can't quite put my finger on it. Just
a hunch, I guess. So today I wanted to take a closer look at Prime to see if it's really
the wonder product everyone's making it out to be. Is this the next major thing in sports
hydration? Or is it yet another Logan Paul get rich quick scheme? Spoiler alert, it's
a little bit of both, actually. So the thing that I've been seeing crop up
again and again have been videos like this, where Logan compares popular sports drinks
to prime: Prime versus Gatorade, Prime versus Red Bull, Prime versus Liquid Ivy. And every time it seems like it's a win for
Prime. Then again, I suppose if it weren't, the video wouldn't exist in the first place,
you know? So anyway, I wanted to zoom in on one of these stat battles to see if there’s
any truth to Logan's pitch. The one I want to focus on is against Prime's biggest rival,
Gatorade, the granddaddy of sports beverages. And immediately, without any words, even leaving
his mouth. There's a red flag. The bottle difference. Off the bat, Logan is using Prime's
500 milliliters bottle, and he's comparing it against Gatorade's larger 591 milliliter
bottle. So when he says things like this: Sure, it might be true. That's also talking
about a bigger serving size. It's something that Logan even calls out later in the video. But then doesn't correct the math for. So
you know what? I'm going to do exactly that. I'm going to compare the two drinks milliliter
for milliliter rather than bottle for bottle like he does.
He starts off with sugar, so we're going to do that too. 36 grams for Gatorade versus
2 for Prime. That be 60 milligrams per milliliter for Gatorade and 0.4 milligrams per milliliter
for prime. Victory for prime, right? Well, don't call this one just yet because he's
not making a truthful comparison here. For the Gatorade the 36 grams he's pulling is
from the total carbohydrate number on the nutrition label. But for Prime, he's pulling
the total sugars amount, a lower subset of the total carbs number. If he were truly comparing
the two drinks fairly and correcting for the volume of liquid, it'd be 28.7 grams of total
sugar in Gatorade versus 2 in Prime. Still a win for Prime and still by a wide margin.
But at least the numbers are accurate and fair rather than artificially skewed. Next
up, calories. Yeah, this is accurate. The higher sugar content
is really propping up gatorade's number here. Comparing per milliliter, Gatorade is looking
at 0.25 calories per ml versus Prime's 0.05. Prime is literally a fifth of the calories
once you normalize the data. Last but certainly not least, the biggie, the stat that seems
to bury Gatorade. That is a massive difference, literally a
2x difference! But 2x of what exactly? What are those numbers actually mean? Like Gatorade
has been the go-to sports drink for decades. How could this newcomer just swoop in and
dominate so completely? This too, set off a lot of red flags for me. Too good to be
true, right? Clearly, something's got to be wrong here.
Well, let's start with the basics. The first thing that Logan says, they're both electrolyte
drinks. What's that mean? Well, a sports drink, otherwise known as an electrolyte drink, is
legally defined as any nonalcoholic beverage containing electrolytes or glucose that's
intended to be consumed in order to replenish electrolytes that are lost during exercise.
Quote, unquote “Sports drinks” don't require FDA approval, and so they won't include any
kind of special labeling unless they have caffeine.
So in general, this category is pretty darn broad. As far as I can tell. There doesn't
seem to be any sort of minimum requirements for electrolytes, calories, no calories, sugar,
vitamins, anything else. The definition is largely marketing based, which is why when
you walk down the sports drinks section of the grocery store, there's a huge range of
options with vastly different ingredients. Based on the loose definition that does exist
though, it’s safe to say that Prime qualifies as a sports drink and that having electrolytes
has a lot to do with it. But that then begs the question: what is an
electrolyte? When I first started writing this episode, I thought I had a rough idea,
but I wasn't totally sure. It's just one of those words that gets tossed around a lot
when you see the imagery of a sweaty Michael Jordan guzzling down a Gatorade or a football
coach getting the whole water cooler dumped on him.
But chemically, what are they and why do you need them when you're playing sports? Well,
at the basic level, electrolytes have the word electro in them, which is exactly what
it sounds like. Electricity. Electrolytes are charged molecules, meaning they can either
have a positive or negative charge. And as a result, they play a big role in transporting
things around your body. There are only eight* electrolytes that are
typically listed in food: sodium, potassium chloride, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium and
bicarbonate. Most of which probably sounds somewhat familiar because you've been hearing
about them since the nineties when they tried to make SpaghettiOs look healthy. In general,
electrolytes are responsible for helping your brain fire off messages between neurons, helping
your cells produce energy, and regulating the amount of fluids in your body.
When it comes to exercise. They also help regulate the contraction of all your muscles,
meaning that if you lose too many electrolytes, your body physically can't send off the electrical
charges. It needs to flex your muscles anymore. And it turns out that when you exercise a
lot, you'll lose a lot of electrolytes in your sweat. You see, since a large percentage
of your body is water and electrolytes are polar charged molecules, they move around
really easily in your watery bloodstream. And they end up getting squeezed out the other
end of your pores when you're getting sweaty with your best bros. The idea of drinking
a sports drink instead of just water is that when you're exercising intensely for long
periods of time, you're losing so much water that you're actually washing the electrolytes
straight out of your system and you're going to start feeling tired and sluggish without
those things. But how much are you really losing here? If
you drop the Gatorade on the brow isn't going to be needing a 20 ounce Gatorade and hundreds
of milligrams of electrolytes, right? Well, not so fast. Of course, all exercise and water
loss is going to be totally dependent on your body, your exercise routine, your environment.
But in the case of serious athletes, we're not talking about a little sprinkle. In Carl
Gisolfi’s article: Water Requirements During Exercise in the Heat.
He notes that while exercising in the heat, the body can lose as much as 3 to 4 liters
of water every hour. That is almost a gallon. You can lose more than that over the course
of several hours. A gallon of water lost is over 8lb of body weight that you just sweated
right out of your system, which if it sounds like a lot, it is. This is why you see boxers
trying to sweat off the pounds before a weigh in, because water weight actually makes a
massive difference. Unfortunately, you just can't sweat it out
forever. As soon as you start to lose more than 2% of your total body weight in water,
you actively start to experience symptoms of dehydration; including headaches, nausea,
cramping and fatigue. Because your body is shutting down without the ability to regulate
and contract your muscles. For a 150lb person, this means that losing more than 3lb of water,
or just over one liter, can cause your whole game to suffer.
And thus you can really start to see why the sports drink market is such a thriving business.
People working hard jobs all day are losing water and electrolytes constantly, and those
things need to be replaced. On the flip side, if you're like me and just popping into the
gym to hit the old stride machine for 20 to 30 minutes a couple of days a week, chances
are you don't need to be refueling with sports beverages because you're not losing enough
water and electrolytes. You can stick to the water, save some money,
just stop being posers about it. Knowing all of this, do Logan's stats here
line up? Yeah, kind of. If anything, he's underselling Prime in this category, which
seems incredibly sussy for a guy like him. He says Prime has 825 milligrams of electrolytes,
but according to my calculation, it should be 835: 700 milligrams of potassium, 124 magnesium
and ten of sodium or salt. Gatorade, meanwhile, is exactly what he says
it is: 270 milligrams of sodium and 80 of potassium for a grand total of 350. To recap.
While yes, some of the comparisons were biased in Logan's favor. When I normalize the data,
Prime still won. Am I… am I going to have to give the W to Logan? *shudder* no, not
yet. Maybe the difference isn't nutritional here.
Maybe it's all taste based. Maybe the flavor of these things sucks. To know for sure, I
bought every flavor of Prime and then I bought every other sports drink on the market with
similar flavors. In total, we had 52 drinks spanning Prime’s seven core flavors. Though,
to be fair, some categories were more contested than others.
We then set up a series of blind taste tests to see which brand would come out on top. All right, Josiah, thanks for joining me here
on Food Theory. We have a selection of basically every sports beverage that I could find at,
like the three local grocery stores. And I need you to go down the line and just tell
me which is your favorite and what is your least favorite? Please. Okay. Wow!
That one tasted a bit saltier, actually, than these other two. My top was B, and my least
favorite was D. C was my second favorite. Woah. Okay, you just pick Prime. Here we go. Ooh, ooh. That one has a good
aftertaste that's really fruity. Ooh, actually, aftertaste sucks. This one's
bad! That one’s about the same, but a little
fruitier. C’s the best one. As a true American, I need my high fructose corn syrup.
You, sir, just picked Prime. That's weird.
[Matt]: What's that reaction? That's like… That feels, like, salty. Immediately
salty. Again. Ooh, that's wildly different. That
is. I wouldn't have said that was orange if I didn't know that was orange.
I can tell you my worst two D and F [Matt]: D and F. Okay. Your worse two.
Yeah, absolutely. Best A and C I think would be my top two.
Okay. The one that you said is wildly different from the others and really flavorful.
Yeah. E. That is Prime.
Okay, because it's like, it wasn't bad. Like, I think F and D were worse from a flavor perspective,
but it was just really odd. So I want to get on the action as an extra
test subject so I'm not involved with any of these from here on out. Ooh, much stronger. OK, this is what I would typically assume
is like a lemon lime sports beverage; a little bit salty, it kind of sticks in the back of
your teeth a little bit. Haha, that's Prime. Ha! I can almost guarantee.
Based on how these flavor profiles have broken down, the thing that always has the densest,
strongest flavor seems like it's always Prime. My favorite is F I knew it! I knew it! Oh, I like this one. Oh, yuck. Oh, yuck! Okay, so this is like, if you just took a
really sweet flat drink and then you added oregano to it. So there's a slightly herbal
flavor on the back. And I don't mean herbal, like, like something nice that you'd want
to drink. I mean, like, something that you would add to spaghetti sauce. It was close
for the one that I hated the most. I think I've got to go with G. It is a unique moment
when I feel like I'm drinking part of, like, maybe my own stomach acid in a sports drink.
So we're going to peg that one as the worst followed closely by I to be honest. Interestingly, no sugar flavors tended to
rank higher than any fully sugared brands, with Powerade Zero being the overall winner
with the consistently highest rankings across the board. That said, no one brand dominated
every flavor category. And while Prime didn't win everything, it certainly did win a few
with an especially strong performance in tropical punch. In general, it was consistently
well received. The only problem was that it was just much
sweeter than any other sports drink brand. The other drinks tended to have flavors that
felt thinner a bit closer to water. Prime, meanwhile, was a lot like Kool-Aid or Pedialyte,
a stronger, denser, more syrupy flavor, which in turn made it feel, at least to me, heavier.
Because of how dummy thicc the flavor was. It wasn't really something that I or the rest
of the team would actively reach for to recover from a workout. But just as a flavored water
to drink around the house? Yeah, it'd be great for that. Even after the taste tests, there
was something that it couldn't quite kick. All the other sports beverages did taste fundamentally
different from Prime. They all had a slightly muted flavor, even sometimes the salty flavor.
And yet here was Prime tasting like a melted lollipop. How? How was the one drink with
the least sugar content, the one that tasted so much more sugary than the rest? And why
did it have a fundamentally different flavor than all the other sports drinks? Again, something
felt off about this. Something keeps feeling off about this stuff. What is it? So I went
back to the nutrition label again and that's when it hit me. Look again at the comparison
of the electrolytes. Sure, Gatorade has 300 milligrams and prime has over 800, but the
way they get to those numbers is vastly different. Prime has ten milligrams of sodium, 124 of
magnesium, and a whopping 700 milligrams of potassium.
Gatorade, meanwhile, has 80 milligrams of potassium and 270 milligrams of sodium. The
ratio here is almost completely reversed. That is why you're getting a salty flavor
from all these other sports beverages. Logan's Prime has 70 times as much potassium as sodium.
Gatorade, meanwhile, has a ton of sodium and a teeny tiny amount of potassium. Powerade?
same ratios as Gatorade. So I had to keep looking. Bodyarmor, another
top contender in our taste test, is closer to prime BioSteel, the one with the juice
boxes, came in with a completely different ratio than all the others with equal amounts
of potassium and sodium. So that then brings us to what's probably the biggest question
in all of this. What is the proper ratio for all these electrolytes?
Is this the thing that's been nagging me about Prime all along? Well, it's important to note
that each electrolyte is responsible for something different. Sodium, which we get mostly from
common table salt, is the most prevalent. And it basically exists in all the species
outside and around your cells to help you regulate blood PH and your overall water levels.
How much you’re peeing out, how much your kidneys are filtering out, things like that.
Potassium, on the other hand, works inside your cells to help produce ATP, the little
energy molecules that help power your body, potassium also works in your heart to make
sure it's pumping normally. Too much or too little potassium and you could start having
heart problems and irregular rhythms. Calcium and magnesium play smaller but still important
roles in your muscle contraction and brain function, keeping you mentally and physically
sharp. So at the end of the day, it kind of seems
like they're all important in their own right. So which ratio is the one we're aiming for
in a sports drink? Well, remember the whole premise of a sports drink? It's to replace
the electrolytes that you lose during exercise. That means that we don't need to worry about
every electrolyte in the body, we only need to focus on the ones that we're losing during
said exercise. And we're not losing them all at the same rate here either. The average
person's sweat ratio of electrolytes is 220 milligrams of sodium for every 63 grams of
potassium, 16 of calcium and 8 of magnesium. That means that you're losing nearly three
and a half times more sodium at any given time than any other electrolytes.
And if you're doing the type of exercise that needs a sports drink, you need to find one
that replaces sodium before worrying about anything else. Looking back at the ratios
that we found across our sports drinks, it now comes down to which formula replenishes
your electrolytes at the ratio closest to the sweat that you're losing. Knowing that,
let's look at Prime. Sure, it has a ton of electrolytes, but none
of them are the ones that you need to be replacing. Prime is given you a ton of potassium, this
thing is practically a banana, but you don't really need potassium in the middle of strenuous
exercise. At least you don't need it nearly as much as you need sodium. In your sweat
you lose sodium to potassium at a ratio of 3.5 to 1, but with Prime, you're giving your
body 0.014 milligrams of sodium to 1 milligram of potassium. You are essentially completely
missing the one electrolyte that your body needs the most while sporting. What about
the other sports drinks on the block? Well, BodyArmors ratio is 0.05. It's actually very
similar to Prime. BioSteel is at least a 1 to 1 ratio with the same sodium and potassium
content. I suspect that they're all sacrificing the sodium because it keeps these drinks tasting
sweeter. More sodium means a saltier flavor, like the traditional sports beverage of Gatorade.
Speaking of Gatorade, Gatorade and Powerade both have astonishingly different ratios than
these newer competitors, with Gatorade at a ratio of 3.4 sodium to potassium and Powerade
at the very top of the scale with 4.1 milligrams of sodium to potassium, both coming in shockingly
close to the actual ratios of real life sweat. This, in turn, makes them infinitely more
effective than the other three options at actually doing what they say they're doing.
Replacing what your body loses during exercise. Don't get me wrong, feel free to sprinkle
your coconut water on whatever you want. It’s great that a lot of these new sports beverages
don't have the dyes and preservatives and all the added sugars.
But at the end of the day, the reason they’re tasting so much sweeter than the Gatorades
of the world is that they're missing the main ingredients that sports drinks need to be
having, salt in the form of electrolytes. For really bottling and feeding you back your
own sweat, Gatorade has made their drinks taste remarkably good over the years. But
the thing is, at some point if you're sweating salt, the only way to get it back into your
body is to drink it, not paper over it with a bunch of other filler electrolytes that
you don't need. What's the conclusion here? Honestly, that
the definition of sports drinks and rehydration beverages are just too broad and ill defined.
If you're looking to replace sweat in your body you need something with more sodium,
something that Prime does not deliver on. That said, it's not like Logan is pulling
a scam here or anything, he is delivering on exactly what he says he is: a drink full
of electrolytes, more than any other sports drink in the space. But electrolytes aren't
equivalent. They don't function the same. The formulation of Prime is fundamentally
delivering a different product than the Gatorades and Powerades of the world, which in turn
allows it to taste less salty while still competing in the same broad category. My personal
concern is that other brands, seeing the threat to its consumers, might change their more
scientifically accurate formulations to better compete with the increasing threat and better
taste of Prime, something that I suspect will end up being a net negative for the entire
sports drink market. You know what, Logan? For the first time I
think we can actually agree. But hey, that's just a theory. A FOOD THEORY! Bottoms up. And hey, if you're thirsty for more content,
crack open the video on the left where we show you how you can tell the temperature
of water just by listening to it. Or if you're looking for more sporty content, chug our
Style Theory on the right, where I talk about these crazy oversized sports hats and how
they're the next big thing in fashion.
Well logan lying, who wud hv expected that?
Any publicity is good publicity