First it was the fallacy of chemical imbalances in the brain. Apparently now hydration is less important to exercise than they would have us believe:

One of the principles of selling a product, and if it’s a medical product and you make medical claims, is that you must maximize your market. In my view, those 1996 guidelines, what they do is they maximize the markets for sports drinks. What they are essentially saying is that it’s dangerous to lose any weight during exercise. In other words, it doesn’t matter what exercise you’re doing, you must drink at the same rate that you are sweating. And you mustn’t wait to become thirsty. What that means is that if you go to a gym and start exercising for 10 minutes, you must start drinking before you start, and within 10 minutes you must have drunk a certain amount. That increases the market size for your product, from just marathon runners to everyone who exercises. So when you go onto the street and you see runners jogging along for a couple of miles, they are carrying water with them. They become a target user for your product. They managed to change drinking behavior out of competitive sport for runners and cyclists and triathletes to gym exercisers as well. The consequence of that is that the sale of their product just rocketed thereafter. They had to demonize hydration and make it a disease.

Basically, listen to your body. Marketing departments demonize our body’s natural regulatory mechanisms (thirst) in order to sell us stuff we don’t need (Gatorade).

I’m late to this party. I’m no endurance athlete. This has been discussed all across the internet and you don’t hear of people dying from marathon running anymore. But this stuff is important.

I feel like I should be better than this, but I am continually astounded at the depth and creativity of the lies they feed us. Once you think, “Okay I got this, now I can go out and live a real life” you find about 6 more layers of crap that you have to dig through.

The most horrifying part, to me, is that most of this seems to be somewhat organic. Sure, there are pockets of conspiracies (in the sense of a loosely connected group of people working together, like citation rings), but on the whole it seems like a bunch of opportunistic, disconnect people working in their own best interest.

I don’t doubt that they are egged on by forces bigger than ourselves, but this isn’t the case of some scientists plotting together in a dark room to dehydrate a bunch of endurance athletes. This is short-sighted human idiocy at its finest.

What happens when we decouple ourselves from risk and skin in the game and the eternal.

Consider Don Draper, the idolized con man. We love him in Mad Men but we go apoplectic when he becomes our president.

We love the idea of being seduced, even when the seduction is a bit sleazy.

Every single time we’re astounded to find ourselves alone the next morning.

Perhaps I’m just projecting, dear reader.

Does this stuff still surprise you?