What Ten Years of Testing Nutrition Products Taught Me

Nutrition product testing has gotten complicated with all the marketing claims flying around. As someone who’s tested hundreds of nutrition products since 2015, I learned everything there is to know about separating what works from what sells. Today, I’ll share what actually matters.

Most Products Work About the Same

Probably should have led with this section, honestly. A gel is a gel is a gel. The differences between brands are smaller than marketing suggests. Your stomach compatibility and taste preferences matter more than ingredient lists.

I stopped chasing the newest formulas years ago. Found products that work for me and stuck with them. The performance difference between a two dollar gel and a three dollar gel is essentially zero.

Ingredient Labels Tell Half the Story

Maltodextrin versus dextrose versus cluster dextrin. Manufacturers love promoting their particular sugar source. In practice, these differences matter far less than total carbohydrate content and your personal tolerance.

What does matter: caffeine content if you’re sensitive, sodium levels for heavy sweaters, and whether fructose content is high enough to cause gut issues for some people.

Price Does Not Equal Quality

Some expensive products are great. Some cheap products are great. Some expensive products are mediocre with better packaging. I’ve used twenty dollar boxes of boutique gels that performed worse than Costco bulk packs.

Test products by performance and stomach tolerance, not price point. Your body doesn’t care about branding.

The Maurten Question

Maurten charges premium prices for their hydrogel technology. Is it worth it? For some riders, absolutely. The encapsulated delivery reduces stomach issues for people who struggle with standard gels. For riders without gut problems, the benefit is minimal.

I recommend Maurten for athletes with documented GI issues during exercise. For everyone else, start with standard products and only upgrade if needed.

Homemade Versus Commercial

Rice cakes, date balls, and homemade drink mixes cost a fraction of commercial products. They also require prep time and care in storage. The economics favor homemade if you have time and ride frequently.

My approach: homemade for training rides where convenience matters less, commercial products for races where reliability and portability are worth the premium.

Drink Mixes Are Generally Better Value

Ounce for ounce of carbohydrate delivered, drink mixes beat gels on cost. You also get hydration built in. The main advantage of gels is portability and precise dosing during intense efforts.

For most training, I use drink mix as my primary fuel and carry a gel or two for emergencies. Races flip this: gels become primary because I can control intake more precisely.

Recovery Products Are Mostly Unnecessary

The recovery product category exists because it sells well, not because you need specialized formulas. A glass of chocolate milk provides similar macros to most recovery shakes at lower cost.

Real food beats recovery products almost always. A turkey sandwich with fruit hits your protein and carb needs without proprietary blends or artificial ingredients.

Bottom Line After Ten Years

That’s what makes this whole topic endearing to us cyclists who’ve been through the testing cycle — after ten years you realize that the most expensive nutrition plan is often not the best one, and the best plan is the one you can actually afford to execute on every ride. Find products your stomach tolerates. Buy in bulk when they’re on sale. Don’t believe the hype about revolutionary ingredients. The best nutrition plan is one you’ll actually follow — and that means products you can afford to use consistently.

Training Your Gut Is as Important as Training Your Legs

This took me an embarrassingly long time to learn. You can have the perfect nutrition plan on paper — 90 grams of carbs per hour, precise hydration targets, timed caffeine — and blow up at hour three because your stomach can’t handle it. The gut is trainable, and most cyclists never train it deliberately.

The research on carbohydrate oxidation rates shows that most untrained guts top out around 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour. That’s your ceiling if you haven’t put in the work to expand it. Push past that without gut training and you get bloating, nausea, and the specific misery of watching your power output collapse while your stomach revolts.

The multiple-transporter theory explains why you can get past 60g/hr: glucose and fructose use different intestinal transport channels. A 2:1 glucose-to-fructose ratio allows both transporters to run simultaneously, which is why the research shows trained athletes absorbing 90 grams per hour or more without GI distress. Most sports nutrition products now formulate around this, which is why you see maltodextrin-fructose blends in every serious racing gel.

The practical protocol is simple but requires patience. Start your long training rides at 60 grams per hour. Hold that for three or four weeks. Then move to 75 grams per hour. Then 90. Practice your exact race nutrition on your hardest training days — the two-hour tempo rides and long threshold efforts, not just easy endurance rides where your gut is barely stressed. If your race calls for 90 grams per hour and the hardest effort you’ve practiced that at is a three-hour easy ride, you haven’t actually trained your gut for race conditions.

I now treat nutrition practice as a mandatory part of every key training session. Whatever I’m planning to eat at an event, I eat that exact product at that exact dose during training. Not vaguely similar — exactly that.

Caffeine Works Better When You Use It Strategically, Not Constantly

If you drink three cups of coffee before every training ride, caffeine isn’t giving you a meaningful performance boost on race day. Habitual caffeine users develop tolerance, and while some research suggests the performance effect doesn’t fully disappear even with high daily intake, the practical effect is clearly diminished compared to someone who has reduced or eliminated caffeine in the days before a target event.

The performance data on caffeine is among the most robust in all of sports nutrition. Three to six milligrams per kilogram of body weight, taken 45 to 60 minutes before exercise, consistently improves time to exhaustion, time trial performance, and perceived effort ratings. For a 75-kilogram cyclist, that’s roughly 225 to 450 milligrams — somewhere between a strong cup of coffee and a high-dose caffeine supplement.

How I use it now: I reduce coffee to one cup per day in the four or five days before a target race. No pre-ride espresso shots during the taper. Then on race morning, 300 milligrams about an hour before the start. That’s my largest caffeine dose of the week, and the effect is noticeable in a way it never is when I’ve been loading caffeine every day.

Mid-race caffeine is where the strategic timing gets interesting. The half-life of caffeine is roughly five to six hours, meaning a morning dose still has meaningful effect deep into a long event. For efforts over three hours, I’ll sometimes take a caffeinated gel at the two-hour mark to keep blood caffeine elevated through the final hour. For events under two hours, the morning dose is usually sufficient if the timing is right.

The tolerance habituation issue is real and underappreciated. The cyclists I know who get the least from caffeine on race day are the ones who start every single ride with a double espresso. Strategic restriction before key events is simple and free. There’s no reason not to do it.

The Biggest Nutrition Mistake: Waiting Until You Notice

I’ve made this mistake. I’ve watched every cyclist I know make this mistake at least once. You feel fine, you’re riding well, you think you’ll eat at the next climb, and then somewhere around the two-hour mark the effort that felt sustainable ten minutes ago suddenly feels impossible. You’re already behind, and you cannot catch up from a deficit in motion.

Hunger and thirst are not early warning signals. They’re late signals. By the time you’re thirsty on a hot ride, you’ve typically already lost 1-2% of body weight to sweat. That level of dehydration starts measurably degrading endurance performance. By the time you feel hunger during a long effort, blood glucose has already dropped to a level where your body is working harder to maintain output.

The fix is mechanical and simple: eat and drink on a schedule, not on feel. I set a timer on my head unit for 20 minutes. Every 20 minutes I eat something. I drink at every minute that ends in zero. This isn’t complicated. It does require overriding the instinct to skip an intake because you feel fine, which is exactly when you should be eating — before you need to.

The 20-minute rhythm works out to roughly the right intake across an hour-long window. Two gels plus a few bites of something solid in an hour gets most cyclists close to their carbohydrate target without forcing them to do math while riding at threshold.

One additional thing the timed approach does: it prevents the psychological trap of bonking and then overcorrecting. When you’re already in a deficit, the natural instinct is to eat everything at once. That leads to GI distress on top of already compromised performance. Steady intake throughout the ride prevents both the deficit and the panic response to it.