When I ask my middle school students to think about what they want to do, be, see and achieve throughout their lives, athletics are often a large part of their goals for the immediate future. But at this age, many tweens and teens also see athletics (especially professional sport and extreme sports) as a career path. As such, tweens and teens are eager to boost their performance and likely to follow athletes on social media, many of whom are sponsored by brands like Red Bull, repping brands like Prime or advertising performance enhancing supplements. 

Viral Tik Tok videos and You Tubers can have a large influence on young teens. One need not look further than Logan Paul & KSI, who used their huge following combined with scarcity marketing to create an insatiable need among teens for Prime. Prime is a sports drink similar to Gatorade & Powerade, that’s added some hyped up ingredients like coconut water, antioxidants and BCAAs. Congo Brands, who owns Prime Hydration, brilliantly teamed up with Logan Paul & KSI, who launched the brand to their nearly 100 million followers in January of 2022. 

The effect was almost immediate. Prime bottles started showing up on nearly every young boy’s desk in my classroom. Students competed to collect and save a rainbow of empty bottles; and backpack sales of the drink were banned by our principal over the announcements within weeks of its release.  

My students had been duped into believing that Prime was more effective than its older predecessors and were surprised to learn that sports drinks have no actual benefit for the majority of them. And I was surprised that students didn’t recognize the difference between the plastic bottles of Prime Hydration and the aluminum cans of Prime Energy. 

Here’s what I wanted them (and their parents) to know: 

• The hydrating benefits of sports drinks are only realized during intense bouts of exercise lasting for more than one hour; not while sitting in classes at school or gaming at home. 
• While Prime boasts that it has less sugar than its traditional counterparts, it does use artificial sweeteners like acesulfame and sucralose. These sweeteners can upset the gut microbiome. 
• Finally, energy drinks and sports drinks are NOT the same things. Most pediatricians recommend that young teens avoid energy drinks. Sports drinks can help with hydration, while energy drinks may cause dehydration, abdominal cramping, diarrhea, anxiety, irregular heartbeats and can interfere with healthy sleep patterns.

As a parent of a middle school student, I found myself commenting on friend’s Facebook posts who were desperately trying to find Prime to buy for their teens. “Don’t buy the hype or the Prime. They don’t need sports drinks at school.” Despite my best efforts, I regularly see Prime bottles in the pockets of students’ backpacks or sitting on their desks; although I’m happy to report that the obsessive collecting and black-market backpack sales seem to have tapered off.

Different from their middle-aged counterparts, adolescent boys are often in the pursuit of weight gain as opposed to weight loss; seeking to put on muscle mass and eyeing up celebrities like Vin Diesel from The Fast and the Furious or Chris Hemsworth from Thor. It’s in this pursuit that teens experiment with things like dry scooping; a phenomenon I was completely unaware of until one of my 7^th grade students asked if dry scooping could cause kidney stones. 

In yet another Tik Tok challenge gone viral, teens had been drawn to eating a scoop of dry pre-workout powder, tricked into believing that this is a quicker way to achieve muscle growth. What’s even more concerning is that my students were dry scooping powder and skipping the workout entirely, not realizing that muscle growth is more the result of what they DO than what they EAT. 

Students had developed the unrealistic expectation that a supplement would help them build muscle as pubescent teens. As I sat and talked with a group of athletes, I wanted them to know that: 

• Teens can build muscle by strength training, but their young bodies aren’t likely to “bulk up” the way they had anticipated. 
• Many pre-workout powders contain creatine and caffeine, both of which pediatricians recommend teens avoid. 
• It’s best to discuss dietary supplements with your doctor before using them to avoid wasting money on products that won’t “work” or worse yet, would cause negative health consequences. 

Seeing students be swept up by Prime’s hype or a viral Tik Tok challenge proves that skills-based health is the way to go. My students were begging their parents to buy Prime because they had been influenced by Logan Paul and KSI or subsequently by their followers. They coughed up and choked down dry scoops of pre-workout powder because of what they saw on social media. 

What we must accept as health educators is that “knowing” is not the same as “doing.” Our students would clearly benefit from learning how to analyze influences, access valid information and set reasonable goals for themselves. And we need to keep this in mind when planning health education curriculum. Do students really need to know how many kcals are in a gram of carbohydrates or the function of each individual vitamin? I would argue it would be more useful for them to analyze what influences their food choices and to access information that would help them create plans to achieve reasonable goals for themselves. 

Want to be an amazing athlete? Let’s find out what you can do to become one. We can let their goals be the motivation for their learning.  

• What food will give me enough energy so I don’t “bonk” during my game? 
• What food will help me recover from a tough workout? 
• What workouts will help me jump higher, run faster, or tackle harder? 

• How much sleep do I need to perform at my best? 
• How can I curb my screen time so I get the rest I need? 
• What mental health practices can I adopt to keep my head in the game?
• Who would be healthy role models for me to follow on social media?

It’s prime time to make the switch to skills-based health. If you need help making the transition, check out the 5 Steps to Transition to Skills-Based Health.

This microblog post was a featured post in #slowchathealth’s #microblogmonth event. You can search for all of the featured posts here. Please do follow each of the outstanding contributors on social media (including Jen Mead, the author of this post) and consider writing a microblog post of your own to be shared with the global audience of slowchathealth.com

You can also visit Jen’s website.

Pair this blog post with the following:

Building Your Health Curriculum by Amy Prior

Three Ways to Accelerate Assessment by Jen Mead

Assessment – Let’s Change the Stigma by Amy Falls

Create, Curate, or Cart It? by Jen Mead

Have you read the latest Book of the Month recommendation?