Chocolate Milk – The Ultimate Sports Recovery Drink?

What we eat and drink in the hours after exercise plays a crucial role in how we recover, adapt and continue to perform. There are countless products available on supermarket and sports supplement store shelves that claim to help support post-exercise recovery. But a recent systematic review from Monash University suggests that Chocolate milk isn’t simply as good as any other recovery drink, it might be better.

Type ‘recovery drink’ into Google and you’ll be faced with 340,000,000+ hits – the recovery supplement business is well and truly booming. Whether you identify as a weekend warrior, gym junkie or elite athlete, optimising your recovery between sessions and competition is a high priority. This industry is founded on the understanding that what we eat and drink in the hours after exercise plays a crucial role in how we recover, adapt and continue to perform. Post-exercise recovery products and supplements as well as current nutrition guidelines, focus on the ‘three Rs of recovery; muscle repair, energy refuelling and rehydration’ [1]. While these are unequivocally key aspects of post exercise recovery, two additional aspects have received little to no attention with regards to recovery nutrition: immune function and the gastrointestinal tract.

Leading Sports Dietitian from the Monash University Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food, Dr Ricardo Costa explained that ‘eating and drinking to support our immune system during recovery is important - we know that following a single bout of strenuous exercise that there is a drop in immune function, which may lead to increased susceptibility to illness [2]’. Recent research has also shown that strenuous exercise can damage the gut, which in turn can impact on the absorption of nutrients [3, 4, 5]. Ricardo explained that ‘this means that not everything that is consumed after exercise is actually being utilised by the body’.

Ricardo and his team have begun to look at recovery nutrition strategies within the context of ‘recovery optimisation’. Here he explained that this refers to nutritional strategies that aim to maximise desired, and minimise detrimental, outcomes within the complex and interrelated physiological and metabolic homeostatic systems. In other words, what recovery nutrition strategies will enhance all aspects of recovery, not just one. This includes the three R’s of recovery, as well as immune function and gastrointestinal integrity. Therefore, sports recovery nutrition now considers the 5 R's: Repair, re-energise, rehydrate, restore immune function and regulate nutrient availability that will cater for the first 3 R's.

Dairy milk, in particular chocolate flavoured dairy milk, has the potential to be the ‘gold standard’ recovery drink, since it has similar nutritional properties to current exercise recovery nutrition guidelines [6]. The research team have recently published a systematic review which examined the effect of dairy milk recovery drinks on recovery optimisation. ‘We found that dairy milk supports the three R’s of recovery just as well as, and possibly even better than other commercially available recovery drinks’ commented Ricardo. He went on to explain that they also found that dairy milk recovery drinks may improve repeated performance compared to sports drinks that are matched for energy. He did tell us that dairy milk resulted in higher levels of bloating and fullness than other recovery drinks, but that this did not appear to cause any abdominal discomfort in any of the studies they examined.

Findings from this study show that dairy milk recovery drinks may be ideal for recovery optimisation from prolonged, strenuous exercise. There has been a movement in the sports nutrition industry towards focusing on whole foods and minimally processed options when it comes to enhancing sports performance and recovery. The use of dairy milk provides yet another opportunity to move away from highly processed and expensive supplements towards a whole food which has undergone less processing. It also provides a solution for athletes to ensure that their supplements have not been contaminated with other substances that may be banned.

What we do need to see is further research examining how immune and gastrointestinal function can be supported by recovery nutrition. Trials are currently underway with the Sports Dietetics and Extremes Physiology Research and Consultancy Team team researching the 5 R's -repair, re-energise, rehydration, restore (immune) and regulate (GI tract).

More Information

Dr Ricardo Costa is an Advanced Accredited Sports Dietitian and researcher at the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food at Monash University. Ricardo’s research and practice focuses on Sports Medicine, Exercise Physiology, Sports Dietetics with a specific focus on exercise gastroenterology pathophysiology, methodology, and translational practice. Click here to access Ricardo’s research profile.

Isabella Russo is a PhD student investigating nutrition interventions for recovery optimisation following strenuous endurance exercise.

You can follow Monash Nutrition on Twitter via @MonashNutrition and the Monash Nutrition and Exercise Clinic via @MonashNutrExer.

Image: dimaz-fakhruddin on Unsplash.

*The current SLR was supported by Lion Dairy & Drink Australia Pty Ltd. The funder had no involvement in the development of the search strategy, data extraction, synthesis or interpretation of results. No restrictions were placed on the reporting of SLR findings.

References

1.  Thomas, D.T., Erdman, K.A., and Burke, L.M., 2016, American College of Sports Medicine Joint Position Statement. Nutrition and athletic performance. Med. Sci. Sports Exerc., 48(3), 543-568

2.  Walsh N.P., Gleeson M., Shephard R.J., Gleeson M., Woods J.A., Bishop N., 2011, Position statement part one: immune function and exercise. Exerc. Immunol. Rev., 17, 6-63.

3.  van Wijck K., Pennings B., van Bijnen A.A., Senden J.M.G., Buurman W.A., Dejong C.H.C., 2013, Dietary protein digestion and absorption are impaired during acute postexercise recovery in young men. Am. J. Physiol. Regul. Integr. Comp. Physiol., 304(5), R356-R361.

4.  Lang J.A., Gisolfi C.V., Lambert G.P., 2006, Effect of exercise intensity on active and passive glucose absorption. Int. J. Sport Nutr. Exerc. Metab., 16(5), 485-493.

5.   Costa R.J.S., Miall A., Khoo A., Rauch C., Snipe R., Camões-Costa V., 2017, Gut-training: the impact of two weeks repetitive gut-challenge during exercise on gastrointestinal status, glucose availability, fuel kinetics, and running performance. Appl. Physiol. Nutr. Metab., 42(5), 547-557

6.   Russo, I., Camões-Costa, V., Gaskell, S.K., Porter, J., Burke, L.M., Costa, R.J.S., (2019). Systematic literature review: the effect of dairy milk on markers of recovery optimisation in response to endurance exercise. Int.J.Sports Sci., 9(4): 69-85.