Valuable, and precisely the point I came here to make today. I’m trying to use Skratch Superfuel for some rides, and there are times when I need 5 scoops. Or 5.5 scoops. A serving is 7 scoops, so neither half nor full servings are useful. I’d love to see the option of scoops AND grams for such products.
Also, I could use some guidance on how to determine whether I’m a light, medium or heavy sweater, or whether my sweat on X day will be a 3 or 4 or 8. 
Yes, to the best of our abilities, we plan to do that.
Disclaimer: It’s made impossible to fully calculate it by companies who don’t disclose their ratios and whos ingredients lists and nutrition facts don’t allow for deductive reasoning to narrow the answer to something exact. But, thankfully, many companies are starting to disclose their ratios as a point of marketing and we’re staying on top of that and may share more here in the future.
But yes to in-app calculations being done for you, to the extend that product manufactures make it possible. Thankfully, now that we’re launched, many of them have been reaching out and being very helpful to us 
Glad to hear it. Coming asap! (“asap” in developer terms is “sometimes months because coding is expensive and hard. Tell your friends to subscribe and we can get it done sooner!”)
Great question. Use your intuition! If you take 2-5 seconds to consider it, based on the weather we show you (or your indoor climate), and thoughtfully choose based on your gut feeling, it’ll work out pretty well for you. Haven’t had someone for whom that wasn’t yet true, though some Texans have reported “you need an 11.”
Think of 9 as “I’m sweating as heavily as I ever have” and 1 as “I can’t tell that I’m sweating at all, and might even be a little cold.”
FWIW, I’m a heavy sweater (lots of photos show my blue jerseys as gray after a summer ride).
So I’m set to heavy in my preferences.
What works for me is to use the “feels like” temperature and align it to the slider.
So if it’s 30 degrees F out, then I move the slider to 3. If it’s 70 or 75 degrees out, I move it to 7.
So far, this has worked up to 75 degrees or so. I’m very interested to see how it works this summer!!
I actually just asked Gatorade what their ratio is and got this response from them, in case anyone else is interested:
"Thank you for contacting us regarding our Gatorade products. The glucose to fructose ratio in our products is proprietary; however, we do have some information to share.
We do use different carbohydrate sources across our products. But there is a common denominator to those carbohydrate sources, that is, delivery of glucose and fructose. This is extremely important because there is a wealth of scientific information that shows:
fluid absorption from a carbohydrate containing beverage is faster when glucose and fructose are part of the formula
There is less chance for GI upset from a beverage consumed during exercise when glucose and fructose are ingested in combination versus either alone
Carbohydrate oxidation (i.e., burning of carbohydrate fuel) is greater with combined ingestion of glucose and fructose than with either alone (that’s a good thing)
Endurance exercise performance is better with combined ingestion of glucose and fructose than with either alone.
Thank you again for your interest in our products."
For the user setting, I see your confusion! We’ve got the FAQ text displaying as the info popup text on the “light/med/heavy” sweater settings page. I’ll get that fixed in the next update to provide better clarity how to select one.
It should look something like this when we update the app next.
Thank you. If I want to start buying bulk products like maltodextrin in order to make my own fuel using the app, and I plan to gradually increase fueling per hour up to about 90 or 100 g/hr, what should I buy? Just malto and table sugar (sucrose)? Anything else? Use simple salt for sodium?
And how do you include electrolytes in there? Nuun tablets are great and I love 'em, but the effervescence makes it really impractical to put them in my drink mix on the bike.
Our newsletter coming out tomorrow will have some good discussion on this, actually.
Short answer is: you’re right on.
Thanks for that link. I can’t find a newsletter to subscribe to…?
Based on what I think I’ve understood so far, I should basically be fine with sugar plus salt, only using malto as needed for two reasons:
to reduce sweetness (what kind of crazy person wants LESS sweetness???)
and/or reduce GI distress at high concentrations
Is that right? If so, and if the max absorption rate for each carb type is about 60g/hour, then to get 100g/hour (for example) the ideal mix would be 80% sugar (40g glucose, 40g fructose) and 20% malto (20g glucose)? Am I thinking roughly in the right way here?
Lastly, that 80sugar/20malto mix (plus 2g sodium) is roughly equivalent to 100g of Skratch Hydration Mix, right? So my cost drops from $4.16/hr (Skratch) to $1.08/hr (homemade), and I save roughly $20/week but now I need to somehow flavor my homemade mix? Again, am I roughly in the right ballpark? (P.S. I love the Skratch Hydration Mix lemon flavor at 60g/hr, even 70g/hr, could drink it all day).
Just trying to make sure that I understand how things should work before I go buying bags of stuff!
Surprisingly a lot. I’m not generally one of them. My wife prefers “kick me in the teeth level” flavors.
Kind of. Close enough for success for sure. There’s not much evidence in any direction that malto is more or less useful at any concentration. And I can make really sound arguments in just about any direction. Your 60:40 mix of glucose fructose from 80:20 sucrose:maltodextrin is 3:2 glucose:fructose. A great and perfectly acceptable ratio for most use cases.
Upper limits of glucose for some people appears to be closer to 70-90g. Some folks it’s 50-ish. Play with it. Same-ish, for fructose, with a small subset of the population with particular gut sensitivity to it, but this is not like “hmm… 35 was too much when 30 fructose was fine.” More like “I had 15g fructose and was disastrously uncomfortable with GI issues.”
OK. I’m finishing my last bag of Superfuel, but I still have a bunch of Hydration Mix and I won’t give it up until I can get a similar lemon flavor in my homemade mix.
But I’ve just ordered my first bags of bulk malto, sodium citrate, and caffeine tablets and will start experimenting. Absolutely must ensure that I’m properly fueled for GFNY in less than 3 weeks (a 3x bigger ride than anything I’ve ever done).
I don’t suppose recovery nutrition after an 8-hour race will be in the app before the 21st? Asking for a friend… 
I wish! Why does software development have to be so painfully slow!?
I’ll go rile up our dev team. I hear developers like lots of interruptions while they work. 
In all seriousness, I so appreciate your patience and understanding.
Today I was told to mix up 5.2L of water, 6500mg sodium, and 320g carbs. I couldn’t carry that much water, and I figured I’d catch the additional liter with my recovery drink and some water at home. So I started with 4L of water, then added 2 servings of Skratch Superfuel (200g) and 6 servings of Skratch Hydration Mix (120g). I was a little surprised to find that water plus dissolved solids had expanded to ~4.5L of total volume.
Two more questions then, out of curiosity but mostly because I think it helps the app be clearer and give better guidance to a wider audience:
What, in theory, is the “right” way to mix fuel? Start with your 5.2L of water, then add all the fuel, knowing that I’ll end up with around 5.8L total? Or do I want to start with (for example) 4L of water, add the fuel, then top off the water so that I’m ending up exactly at 5.2L?
For a day like today, when I want to use less water than the app recommends, how do I calculate the concentration (osmolarity?) in order to ensure that I haven’t made my mix so concentrated that my gut has trouble absorbing it? I recall reading that you can only put X amount into water, because the gut needs water to transport the carbs past the intestinal membrane.
Maybe the app can/should offer a minimum water amount, and a recommended water amount? Not sure if this is a good idea… just thinking that in nearly every case so far, I’ve ended up drinking less water than what the app tells me to drink. And though I’ll try to drink more, I wonder how little is too little.
This feature is in development.
It’s usually less about osmolarity and just about “how hydrated are you” and “what is the hourly intake rate of carbs?” If you consume 20% less water than the app recommends, you’ll probably be okay, but might not. If you consume 40% less water than it recommends, you’re risking GI issues for sure. At 50% less water than it recommends, you’re probably guaranteeing yourself some level of GI upset towards the tail end of the ride.
Interesting idea! We’re considering color coded alerts that would have a similar function
Yup. It was my first time with the 4L tank, and I couldn’t see the contents of it while riding, AND I probably subconsciously didn’t want to drink too fast and therefore overfuel (risking GI distress, and probably one of the reasons why many people separate their water from their fuel), so I ended up drinking roughly half of what it recommended: I had intended to drink 4L instead of 5.2L, but I ended up drinking roughly 2.5L total, and did have a bit of a reaction when I got home. Next time I’ll make a concerted effort to drink more often and more fully from the tank.
Love it. That would be a great guidance item!
I use a commercial product for flavour. Adding around 10% commercial product to 90% table sugar gives you a very similar flavour to full-strength commercial product and makes the bag last for ages (for example I’m typically adding 5g of mix to 45g sugar per bottle!). I have added a 5g dose of my preferred commercial mix to the “Custom” tab in the Saturday app - quick and easy to get prep instructions.
I’ll try that… although I’m currently happy with the flavor of 60g (three full servings) of Skratch Hydration Mix in just 600ml of water, the equivalent of 100g per liter. I like my flavors more intense, and I doubt that adding a small dose will really help me. But I’ll try it!
@Dr_Alex_Harrison have you experienced with pectine or algenate like in the Maurten mixes. It is really not that expensive but is it worth the extra hassle when preparing homemade mixes?
Not worth the hassle unless you have swallowing issues and want a slightly thicker beverage. It does not appear to help with absorption rate or gut tolerance when compared to sodium citrate. More research will be useful, but as of right now, the findings are pretty clear on that front.
