Should I consume jelly babies or purpose made sport products?

Firstly this is a great question.

There are so many mixed views on purpose made sports gels and chews as opposed to sweets like jelly babies or jelly beans.

From what I know Jelly babies are sugar, glucose syrup, water , gelatine and mixtures of fruit juice from concentrate which a lot of runners favour during events because 1, They taste great and 2, they taste great. Simple.

Although they will provide you with energy and a shoot boost during exercise, muscles draw sugar rapidly from your bloodstream. The energy for your brain comes almost exclusively from the sugar in your bloodstream. When blood sugar levels drop, so do brain levels and you feel tired and have difficulty coordinating your muscles.

Your liver has to release sugar into your bloodstream. But there is only enough sugar in your liver to last about twelve hours at rest and far less than that when you exercise. When muscles run out of their stored sugar supply, it hurts to exercise and the muscles become difficult to control.

Energy Gels again have a lot of mixed views. Some people swear by them and others just simply feel they have no effect on there energy levels.

Most energy gels are made from Maltodextrin which ( depending on the brand ) will provide you with around 25g of malotodextrin carbs which with be a much longer lasting energy source than straight up sugar.

Sugar will give you a quick insulin spike which will provide short terms energy before decreasing back down your energy starting point as where malotodextrin has a very similar effect but will have a longer lasting source of energy release.

A lot of people will agree there is no right or wrong answer here but more of a trial and error.

So try both and decide for yourself which you feel gives you the best results.

Firstly, studies show that people doing accustomed exercise generally don't experience better performance or endurance from consuming sports drinks, carbohydrates or other nutrients unless the exercise lasts longer than 1 hour.

The general answer to this question is that both of these "supplements" will work because they contain quickly-absorbed carbohydrates - sugar and possibly maltodextrin.

Ideally you want an intra-training (during training) supplement to deliver about 40 grams of sugar per hour and you want it to be mostly from glucose (aka dextrose, same as blood sugar), as this sugar is most readily taken up by muscles. You also want a small percentage - perhaps 10 to 30 percent fructose, as some research shows that by taking both sugars together you can deliver more total energy to the bloodstream but the downside is that fructose has a propensity to be taken up by the liver over the muscles.

Some of these supplements contain other sugars or maltodextrin. Most types of maltodextrin release glucose into the blood at almost the same rate and extent as glucose on a gram-for-gram basis. If you see "sugar" on the label, sugar is made up of glucose bound to fructose (in equal measures) and this won't work as well as glucose.

Therefore, the runners using the Jelly Babies may need to take in slightly more sugar/carbs than those taking a typical glucose- or maltodextrin-containing gel but I suspect that the overall performance-enhancing effect would be similar between the gel and Jelly Babies.