Spring Energy - Nutrition Integrity and Transparency

[@lasted_leather]

this is tragic for all the athletes and race directors who relied on this product. I personally had my biggest bonk ever using Spring energy at a Spring energy sponsored Tahoe 200.

[@MukimukiRunner]

From an ethical standpoint coaches should not accept sponsorships so that their athletes can be confident there is no financial bias behind the coach's recommendations.

[@smirnowski]

In hindsight, their claim that SpringEnergy does not cause GI distress strikes me as quite perfidious. Yes, of course you won't have any GI issues if you only consume 10g of carbs per gel.

[@hanscamps4]

Hi Koops. Has the OG issue with SpringEnergy been resolved? Are there updates … or have you updated anything in your podcasts? Cheers. Nigel.

[@robking5096]

Need to do this with bpn

[@michaelpuett6358]

Thank you Jason for putting this out! Very informative and I agree - worth being a big issue especially if youre an elite athlete!

[@jtk534]

thanks for covering this. very interesting episode. 40% less than stated value is absurd and negligent if it's the case for a substantial amount of their product.

[@RickKanesGhost]

I’ll just buy and consume three times as many Spring Energy Gels now. Thank you for the research!

[@jonmackay_TSD]

Koop, what you gonna use at Mogollon? I’ll be out there with you.

[@JaySizz]

I've got to wonder how Spring's pro athletes didn't realize the deficiencies of the product. I mean, they have extensive experience with other products, without a doubt... and extensive understanding of how their bodies react to each. They must have realized it was a bunk product and intake had to be almost doubled from the nutritional facts in order to meet requirements... I'm a bit surprised some of them stuck with it and represented them for so long.

[@JaySizz]

I guess I'll be more direct; I'm mostly referring to Sage. He has promoted the product both as an athlete and then as a coach, simply through representation. I'm having a hard time understanding how he didn't realize something was way off.

[@toddpdroneworks563]

@@JaySizz Sage has blown up during many of his longer ultras too and like Koop said they never considered it was the product and had to be a training issue. Also if Spring is willing to be so off on their batches we dont know if they also made full strength batches for people like Sage.

[@JuliusAdorf]

Very informative episode, thank you. It's surprising me that the company statement tries to explain the error away as variation (noise), rather than bias. Even IF that were true (I don't think it is, for reasons explained in the discussion) and the carb content were thus on average close to the nutrition label, error in the form of variation might well be worse than bias. You could adjust for bias (once you identified the bias) by eating an additional gel per hour. With higher variation, things are less predictable: eat two gels in an hour; you could end up getting much less carb than you need, or more carbs than you can stomach. Compare with: "If two felons who both should be sentenced to five years in prison receive sentences of three years and seven years, justice has not, on average, been done. In noisy systems, errors do not cancel out. They add up." ('Noise' by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein.)

[@KTravRuNEr]

I wish the Instagram release was as professional as this pod. This is what people need to hear. It matters when people lie about products. It matters when coaches and athletes pretend to know more than they do to promote themselves or a product. Hopefully everyone can calm down emotions (because they didn’t like how the message was communicated), and see what the real issues are here.

[@JustJohnnyIV]

I'm pissed off...I DNFd my first 50k tied down with spring energy gels.

[@joshgoudelock9524]

Maybe it would be good for all the supplement companies to release lab results just for transparency.

[@java6727]

Didn;t these athletes train with the product???

[@wk633]

This seems related to the "Bike shed" principle. The idea is that it's easier to get approval for a nuclear reactor than a bike shed. Everyone figures if you're building a nuclear then you must have done your research and planned it, and what do we know about building a nuclear reactor? But a bike shed? EVERYONE has an opinion on how to build something simple like a bike shed, so everyone weighs in. That is, calorie content is such a big deal, we don't bother to question it. Someone must have confirmed it, right?

[@oliverblock8666]

This situation brings many questions to the forefront of my mind and I’ll list them here. First, when and who (which lab) certified the 1st Spring nutrition label? Second, how often does a product need to be re-certified? I assume processes and ingredients, if not suppliers of ingredients, change so it would make sense that the certification should be reassessed periodically, right? I would like Spring to answer at least what they have done (certification and the lab). If it was a lab error, Spring is arguably innocent, right? I saw an earlier comment which I also thought, didn’t the athletes train with the products they will race with? So if they didn’t get their carbs in training wouldn’t they have sensed something wrong well before the race Koop? You can answer to that at least. My final question which is big, if Spring is so off, let’s test other nutritional gels because maybe this is an industry-wide practice whether consciously or not. Koop, please test other brands products and let us know what those results are as well. Spring might be the lightning rod but maybe they are no different from every other brands’ products in terms of of faulty nutritional labeling.

[@evabelt2646]

So why did you send the products in the first place??? Did you just start to question the product???

[@toddpdroneworks563]

He goes over that several times in the podcast.