In the light of our response to Dr Murray and our suggestion that there should be greater transparency about the nature (if any) of the financial interactions among Gatorade, the Gatorade Sports Science Institute (GSSI) and leading exercise scientists and sports physicians, we find it interesting that Dr Roberts, a former President of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), should feel it necessary to stress that he draws no personal financial benefit from the sports drink industry (other than a single moment of weakness). Dr Roberts’ credentials are indeed impeccable; he is an honourable and independent sports physician who has made substantive contributions to the understanding of, especially, exercise-associated collapse.¹ But his reference to the fractured fairy tale is misguided.

Like Dr Murray, Dr Roberts accuses us of misrepresenting the ACSM guidelines by selectively quoting from those guidelines. The point, as made in our response to Dr Murray, is that when the GSSI began to advertise the ACSM guidelines, it conveniently forgot to include some of the qualifications included in those guidelines and that might have reduced the extent to which athletes in the USA began to overdrink in the 1990s.

Thus, the message that the sporting public received was not that athletes should “consume the maximal amount of fluids during exercise that can be tolerated … or up to a rate equal to that lost in sweat”, but that they should simply drink “as much as tolerable”. Or, in the text of the Gatorade advertisement published in the New York Runner in January/February 2002, “at least [our emphasis] 40 oz of fluid every hour (ie, 1200 ml/h) or your performance could suffer”.

Had the same …