New Studyy Finds That Swishing With Sugary Mouth Rinse May Improve Athletic Performance

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A recent study by researchers at the University of Georgia found that endurance athletes who rinsed their mouth with a sucrose solution several times during a time trial but did not swallow, appear to have significantly increased running times compared to athletes who swished with only water.

The findings of this study point to the importance of swishing with a mouth rinse that contains a little sugar to endurance athletes, in terms of improving their times. In the study, the sucrose solution, which tasted sweet and also booth the energy of athletes, is said to boost endurance performance of the athletes by stimulating reward areas related to motor control in the brain.

During the times when the athletes swished with sucrose, the researchers noticed an average of up to 5 percent improvement in time when compared to those who swished with the unsweetened control used in the study - water, according to Science Daily.

"It was surprising to us how drastic the improvement in times was. These were endurance-trained individuals, so to see a 5 percent improvement in performance - almost three minutes on average - was huge," associate professor in the department of foods and nutrition in the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences, Jamie Cooper said.

The study was conducted on 16 endurance athletes - nine men, seven women - who were between the ages of 18 and 45. The participant completed a 12.8-kilometer, approximately 7.9-mile time trial on an indoor track. The participant swished eight times with the solution and then spat out during the run.

The athletes completed four-time trials using a different mouth rinse each time. These rinses are sucrose or table sugar solution, low-intensity sucralose - artificial sweetener with no energy supplement but taste sweet, high-intensity sucralose and water.

The researchers found that including energy supplement in the mouth rinse appeared to be efficient in improving time as this sucralose was found not to have improved performance any more than water alone did. The researchers stated that sweet taste only had little effect but the energy seems to have a significant effect on the energy boost of athletes, according to UGA

Jamie Cooper, who is herself an avid runner and the author of "The Complete Nutrition Guide for Triathletes," noted that studies involving mouth rinses as a technique to improve athletic performance have become very popular in recent years. However, further study is necessary to test the different types of energy sources, amounts and sweetness intensities necessary to create an ideal solution for better results.