I will be going over the replies and put all the resource links up in my original post.
Even tho its hard to read - its a place to start 
thanks for sharing
N=1. Did an Ironman race drinking only water to thirsty on the run and crossed finish line straight to the medical tent with hyponatremia. Since then, I started focusing more on my sodium intake and stopped drinking water(only gatorade or whatever sports drink available) during races and never had the same issue again.
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When it comes to electrolyte drinks preventing cramps - I don’t think there is any evidence to support that conclusion.
I think for replacing fluids during exercise, especially during a long period of exercise like an iron man, there is not a lot of debate that they are better than just water.
A book on this issue:
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Tim(The author) gave an interview to “That Triathlon Show” podcast that I only heard after my ironman experience last year. It was like all dots becoming connected for that "A-ha"
moment
Thanks for the book recommendation, i’ll put it on my list.
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Good point. Hypoanatremia is a “thing” and if you’re not going to use some kind of sports drink, yes the tabs are probably useful. Narrowly I was referring to cramps, at least for me.
For good supplement related information the Australian Institute of Sport gives a good summary and puts various things into groups based on evidence.
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Even if you can access the research (I live in London & everything published in U.K. gets sent to the British Library) it is often disappointing. The numbers studied are tiny. The funding is dodgy. The participants are unlike me (& I’m Male - almost nothing studied in women). The intervals are usually far shorter than real life. And, they often get the statistics wrong. Take anything anyone says is science backed with a massive pinch of salt. Usually they are trying to make money from you.
Incidentally, the mathematics/statistics to show no effect & to fail to show an effect are completely different. You really need to know how well powered the study was to have any idea, which is never documented.
I don’t know whether the the benefit of science outweighs the harm done by people’s dishonestly using sciencey words to flog stuff. It’s close.
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I think we’re only fooling ourselves if we think there is an absolute answer to anything. You simply can’t answer these in a simplified catch-all absolute way. For me it is important to keep this in mind when discussing these. (And btw I think @Nate_Pearson @Jonathan and @chad are doing an excellent job on the podcast to always answer question within context).
How does it actually work when people seek scientific answers? You have a group of people and let them do perform some physical task, like a time to exhaustion workout. Then you give something to some of them and not to the others, but don’t tell anyone who gets what to minimize psychological effects. Then let them perform the task again and see how the groups differ in their performance. Usually you have 10 or 20 participants and usually the results are between nothing to a few percent of difference. That’s how close it is. And with that you try to answer the question. So it never actually is “Doing x will impact your performance by Y”, but more like “the evidence we’ve gathered under these circumstances suggest that there is high probability that doing X might influence you performance to some degree”.
Regarding electrolytes there might be evidence that it didn’t impact performance in a / some / all studies looking at “2 hours endurance tasks”. What does it mean? 2hr all out? Easy pace? Running? Cycling? What else was given? as it hot? How well were the participants stocked up on electrolytes coming into the test? How does it apply to 3 hour workouts? What about an ironman triathlon in the heat? How about a sub 3 marathon?
I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t search for an absolute truth, because there never is one. Learn what science says, to evidence and studies point to always in the context of how these results were obtained, Ask your own questions and do some experiments yourself (which is fun!).
Thanks for the Aussie guide link.
Folks should also remember that cohort studies, if done well, are valid for the cohort but may not indicate how you will respond. N = 1 studies are appropriate for some things but hard to perform on yourself because you can’t easily blind yourself to active v placebo. For long term tests you might not have control of the environment which can often have larger effects than the test agent. etc etc etc
Caffeine is an interesting one. Its generally accepted that caffeine is a performance enhancer. But it appears that there is a metabolism modifier which means some people get a big kick, some get nothing and some actually see a detriment to performance. So even while caffeine is generally neutral to helpful, for some people it may be detrimental. In these cases, the science isn’t bad but taking the group result and assuming it applies to YOU may not be the correct assumption.
Good news for most of these things is they are not too expensive or particularly toxic. If you try something and feel it gave you a benefit then keep on. Even if it’s placebo effect, if you perform better or feel better then a happy placebo effect is fine. Conversely, there are very few (legal) magic beans out there so focus on the big things like training and rest/recovery before worrying about if some supplement will give you a 0.01% FTP boost 
-Mark
I can answer that one, the benefits outweigh.
Fraudsters were scamming people for millennia with a different set of words, science has not increased this.
What an unscientific answer.
I think this point receives far too much attention from people reporting on science - if anything, the opposite approach has more validity.
Scientific studies are trying to find out how things work, and the human body does not significantly vary from one individual to another in how it works. People over emphasise their uniqueness vastly, and think they can tell if they are “responders” or not with any certainty, and without using any kind of scientific protocols.
All of this massively undermines scientific method which is the only appropriate way to understand the material universe, training included.
The only thing “science says” is “this is the evidence so far”.
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Strawman argument & an unsubstantiated assertion. Have a biscuit.
You post a red herring and defend it with accusations of strawman?
Okay, I’m out. Good luck with your training 
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You said that science hadn’t increased the total amount of scamming. No one said it had. As far as I’m aware that metric hasn’t ever been measured. As no one one made the point you argue against you are fighting with a strawman.
There is a famous saying about wrestling a pig in mud that applies here.
Please stay on topic.
Joe,
Love your passion but could not disagree more with your (a) discounting of heterogeneity, (b) your thinking around how the scientific method is undermined (seriously?) and (c) your excessive hyperbole which has derailed the thread. With that said, I wish you the best.
-Mark
Well there’s a big difference between a self-selected study and one which has been developed with true statistical power. Pharmaceuticals have this problem all the time if they don’t get a diverse enough population for their major studies.
So there are a lot of cohorts that do not apply to others. Also, there are so many other factors which are not controlled in the study or even recorded (diet, sleep, etc…)
What makes it science is we can question it, discuss, etc…
Absolutely agree. Which is why I focus on how things work. If the science is reflecting how things occur, rather than merely reflecting on what occurs, then there is something useful…eg that drinking tonnes of beetroot juice improves performance sometimes is interesting, that nitrates increase vasodilation* that enables greater processing of fuel in the muscles is useful.
*I can’t recall the precise effect, but for the point I’m making the relevance is not what happens but how it happens.