A sports drink so popular in the United Kingdom that grocery stores have had to ration it is now available in Canada, but nutrition experts say the social media hype surrounding it is just that.
Prime Hydration is a line of fruit-flavoured sports drinks fortified with vitamins and minerals. In Canada, it retails online for $10 per 500 ml bottle or $38.55 for five bottles, and it’s also available for purchase in some Circle K stores.
There's no added sugar, so the drinks are sweetened with aspartame, like many sugar-free soft drinks.
Aside from the absence of added sugar and the addition of "10 per cent coconut water," Prime Hydration appears to be similar to products already on the market, such as Gatorade and Glaceau's Vitamin Water. One thing that does differentiate it from those other brands, though, is its influencer origins.
Prime Hydration was launched by rapper and boxer KSI and YouTube content creator Logan Paul in January 2022, and both founders have leveraged their platforms and large social media followings to promote it.
"Our goal was to create a fantastic hydration drink that can fuel any lifestyle," reads a joint statement by KSI and Paul on the Prime Hydration website.
"Over the past year, we’ve worked countless hours to formulate the product from scratch, lock in deals with the largest retailers in the world, and build a multi-hundred person team to get our products to the shelves."
With its social media clout, vibrant packaging and range of seven flavours – blue raspberry, ice pop, and something called "meta moon" – the drink has garnered a lot of interest, including making advertising inroads with NASCAR as the official sponsor of Timmy Hill's #13 car. Arsenal Football Club, the London-based Premier League team, also announced a joint marketing agreement with the brand in July this year.
It has flown off shelves in the U.K., according to TikTok posts bearing the hashtags #primedrinkuk and #primehydration that show shoppers fruitlessly searching the shelves of British supermarket chain Asda for the sold-out product. On Prime Hydration's U.S. website, every flavour of the drink is marked as sold out.
KSI addressed the apparent scarcity of the drink during an interview for The Fellas podcast, saying it wasn't due to a lack of effort on the company's part.
"It's not like we're not supplying enough," he said on an episode of the podcast published on Aug. 19. "We're supplying loads!"
Instead, he accused Asda employees of hoarding the product and selling it on the side.
"Asda employees aren't even putting it on the shelves anymore," he said. "They're like, 'What's the point? I put it on the shelf, it's gone instantly…I'm just going to sell it on the black market myself.'"
When asked to comment on KSI’s allegation, Asda's senior press officer Elliott Lancaster said the company has not seen "any evidence of that."
"It is a very popular product and we are receiving regular deliveries to stores which are stocking it," Lancaster said in an email to CTVNews.ca on Wednesday.
As a result of the drink's popularity, the chain limited sales of the drink to three bottles per customer this fall. Lancaster confirmed that limit is still in place.
Elsewhere in the U.K., social media users say the product has sparked a black market in schools. On social news aggregation website Reddit.com, users who identify themselves as teachers based in the U.K. have described scenes of students obsessively buying, selling and trading bottles of the drink in class and on the school yard.
"It seems to have taken over my whole school over this last week, and the incessant chatter about it and attempts to negotiate deals in lesson time is becoming increasingly disruptive," Reddit user OGU_Lenios wrote on the site in October.
"I'm just south of Glasgow and I had an 11 year old come in bragging about how they got a bottle for £5 from one of my other pupils. A 14 year old is going to Asda and buying 10 bottles first thing in the morning to sell them on in school," added user Jenniferh9309.
For all the drink's popularity, experts say it doesn't offer any benefits that regular food and water can't provide. In more than moderate amounts, the drink even risks displacing foods that offer actual nutritional value, warns Anisha Mahajan, a registered dietitian and a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph.
“If we were consuming a lot of products with artificial sweeteners, there could be a chance that we're filling up on those and we're not taking the good nutritive foods," Mahajan told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview on Monday.
"So I would rather that the kids get those foods first, otherwise there's displacement of these good nutrients for artificial sweeteners."
The label of a Prime Hydration drink advertised on the company's American website shows nutrition information and ingredients. (Prime Hydration website)
Mahajan said there's limited data about the long-term health effects of aspartame consumption. Therefore, she said artificially sweetened drinks like Prime Hydration should always be consumed in moderation.
"There's an absence of long-term impacts of overconsumption of artificial sweeteners in children. So like things like, long term, do these cause cancer? Or how does it affect the gut microbiome?" she said. "But if somebody was having this as an occasional drink, that's fine."
The drinks do boast high concentrations of vitamins C, B12, B3, A and E, but Jean-Philippe Chaput said that vitamin content is a double-edged sword. Chaput is a professor in the department of pediatrics, at the University of Ottawa and a senior scientist at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario's Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group.
He pointed out that vitamins C and B12 are water soluble, meaning any amount consumed beyond a body's daily requirement is expelled through urine. In other words, it's no more beneficial to receive 200 per cent of the recommended daily intake of vitamin C from a bottle of Prime than to receive 100 per cent from a couple of clementines.
Vitamins A and E, he said, are fat soluble, which means the body can store them for later use. The risk is that any fat-soluble vitamin or mineral can become toxic when stored in the body in large amounts, putting strain on the liver. In order to avoid consuming an excessive amount of vitamin A, for example, a person would need to decide between eating carrots or drinking a bottle of Prime.
"With just one (bottle) you're at the max for your vitamin A. So you shouldn't eat carrots or other stuff because you're maxed," Chaput said during a telephone interview with CTVNews.ca on Wednesday.
"If you drink three, four (bottles) of that, you will be in excess of vitamin A and vitamin D."
Like Mahajan, Chaput advises consuming the drink in moderation or, to avoid sticker shock, opting for a tried and tested alternative.
"I think the best drink is water," he said, "and water costs $0."
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