Over the past year coconut water has exploded into the commercial market. Marketed for being potassium rich and an energy boosting natural means of hydration, coconut water has quickly become available in most convenience stores. It has carved out market share as a refreshing recovery drink alternative and I’m always looking for a healthy choice to replace sugary drinks like gatorade. However, I remember falling for the Naked Juice craze only to find out PepsiCo bought it and turned it into another one of their sugar saturated beverages. So before we all waste our money on this overpriced water, lets take a look and see if coconut water is all its cracked up to be.
My favorite brand of coconut water is Vita Coco. I don’t have a reason for that other than that it is more widely available than most other brands. Nice work Vita Coco. If you look at the nutrition facts of Vita Coco’s plain coconut water, two things will stand out; each serving contains 100% of your daily vitamin C requirement and 470mg of potassium. Thats a lot of vitamin C and potassium considering that there are 2 servings in each standard 500ml container. According to the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State, Vitamin C can treat and prevent UV- induced photo damage and its antioxidant properties make it crucial to skin health when it comes to preventing wrinkles. Additionally, on the same website is a page on potassium that discusses how crucial it is to the human body. It elaborates on how potassium is a crucial electrolyte in the human body and “normal body function depends on tight regulation of potassium concentrations both inside and outside of cells.”
With 920mg of potassium and 200% of your daily vitamin C requirements, things are looking pretty good for coconut water. One the other hand, is coconut water really that much better?
Jennifer Koslo wrote an article for Kaplan University’s health and wellness website exploring how coconut water compares to traditional sports drinks when it comes to rehyration. In her article she cites how coconut water directly from the nut has more sodium in it than the commercialized versions we buy in store. This becomes important when you compare coconut water to traditional sports drinks which have lower levels of potassium and higher levels of sodium. Koslo found that the formulas uses by sports drinks companies have optimal levels of sodium for absorption and retention of fluids.
“Through years of research, sports drinks are specifically formulated for athletes with the amount of electrolytes and carbohydrates at the levels found to promote optimal hydration.”
-Jennifer Koslo
Koslo concludes that coconut water taken directly from the coconut is just as effective as the traditional sports drinks when it comes to rehydration. So unless you plan on harvesting some coconuts anytime soon, it seems Gatorade is still king when it comes to recovery drinks.
Koslo’s study was one of few academic inquiries to the health benefits of coconut water. The dearth of scientific research and content on coconut water suggests to me that there needs to be more studies done to really assess the nutritional aspects of coconut water. A controlled and unbiased (not paid for by Vita Coco or O.N.E) study that compares coconut water to other beverages is needed to be conclusive. I would suggest that it includes athletes and normal people randomly distributed between two groups.
Coconut water is surely very healthy and if you can afford pay around $2.59 for one of them, it is clearly a better alternative to Mountain Dew or a Red Bull. But at the end of the day, you can’t go wrong with water!