Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of IHeartRadio.

Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Volcombe here.

A stroll down the beverage aisle in any American supermarket will present you with a wall of veritably glowing sports drinks and a rainbow of colors and flavors, with options from major soft drink companies

like Pepsi and Coca-Cola jockeying for your attention, all promising to improve your performance

or quench your thirst in some superior way. It's an industry worth some $30 billion a year.

But how did all of this get started? And does your average exerciser

needs sports drinks to replenish during or after a workout? In the United States, Gatorade gets

credited as the first sports drink, but there was one on the market in the United Kingdom

decades before Gatorade got its start. It's now called leukazade.

A chemist named William Owen developed what would become glucose aid in 1927, and the initial

purpose of the glucose and water mixture was to provide an easy source of calories and energy

for people who were ill. Because of its inclusion of glucose, the drink was originally called

glucosate. Glucose is a form of sugar used by all living organisms that we know of to produce

adenosine trifosate, or ATP, which is what cells use as energy to get stuff done. Everything

that a cell does, it uses ATP to do. During the first

couple decades of the 1900s, researchers were learning about glucose and its link to energy in

our bodies. There were a bunch of Nobel prizes given about these discoveries, so it was a savvy

marketing move at the time.

The name of the drink switched over to Lucosate a couple decades later,

as the brand was sold to the pharma company, Beecham Group.

Through a number of mergers over the years,

that company became GlaxoSmith Klein,

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