Potato milk sports drink launches

Nautilus Mineral Waters of America plans to produce and market a TATORADE line of potato-based milk beverages. The new probiotic electrolyte-rich sports beverages are made from the juice of raw Idaho-grown potatoes.

Idaho spud’s are loaded with important vitamins and minerals that benefit your body and most importantly is catalase, the naturally occurring enzyme in potatoes that helps boost athletic performance, said the company. TATORADE is an electrolyte-rich sports milk that is bottled by a family owned USDA certified organic raw milk dairy farm near Moscow, Idaho.

“The natural potato enzymes found in TATORADE Sports Milk acts as a super-catalyst for the conversion of hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen. The raw potato juice derived catalase is a particularly efficient enzyme,” said Richard H. Davis, president/CEO of Beverage Marketing USA and Nautilus Mineral Waters of America.

A study with similar findings titled, “Potato ingestion is as effective as carbohydrate gels to support prolonged cycling performance” was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology. For the study, researchers recruited 12 participants, all of whom were dedicated to their sport and who averaged 165 miles (267 kilometers) per week on their bicycles. All the participants had been training in their sport for years and to qualify for the trials, the cyclists had to reach a specific threshold for aerobic fitness and complete a 120-minute cycling challenge followed by a time trial.

The participants were asked to randomly do any of these three things during the exercise: only drink water, consume a commercially available carbohydrate gel or an equivalent amount of carbohydrates obtained from potatoes. The study showed that potato ingestion during prolonged cycling is as effective as carbohydrate gels to support exercise performance in trained athletes.