Keep It Fresh, Keep It Real: Tips to Avoid Flavor Fatigue in Endurance Fueling
March 11th, 2025
Why Flavor Fatigue is a Real Problem for Endurance Athletes
Fueling for long events can be tricky. Your body needs calories, hydration, and electrolytes, but your taste buds? They need a little variety.
If you’ve ever hit a point in a long ride, run, or race where the thought of one more sip of the same drink makes you gag, you’ve experienced flavor fatigue—and it can sabotage your performance.
Flavor fatigue happens when your taste buds and brain become desensitized to a certain flavor after prolonged exposure. It’s a well-documented phenomenon in food science, where sensory-specific satiety causes food and drink to become less appealing over time (1). When this happens during an endurance event, it can make you reluctant to keep fueling—leading to an energy crash, dehydration, or electrolyte imbalance.
to keep fueling—leading to an energy crash, dehydration, or electrolyte imbalance.Artificial flavors and excessive sweetness can make the problem worse. Research suggests that highly processed flavors—often found in artificial sports nutrition products—can lead to palatability issues, triggering nausea, digestive distress, and an aversion to fueling (2).
The good news? You can outsmart flavor fatigue and keep fueling fun, not a chore.
How to Dodge Flavor Fatigue and Stay Fueled
🎨 Mix It Up
Drinking or eating the same flavor for hours? Hard pass. Our brains love novelty, and switching flavors keeps things interesting. Studies show that rotating flavors can increase food intake over time (3)—which is exactly what you want during long efforts.
🟢 Pro Tip: If you’re going long, rotate between Skratch Sport Hydration flavors—like Lemon & Lime, Strawberry Lemonade, and Fruit Punch—to keep things fresh.
🍓 Keep It Real
Real ingredients = real flavor. Artificially flavored or “natural flavor”, overly sweetened products can become cloying, making it harder to keep fueling. Real food and real food ingredients, on the other hand, work with your palate, not against it.
Skratch Labs products are made with real fruit and natural ingredients—no mystery chemicals, no weird aftertastes.
🟢 Pro Tip: Try our Energy Chews, which use real fruit for a burst of flavor and natural energy—available in Raspberry, Orange, Matcha Green Tea & Lemon, Grape and caffeinated Sour Cherry.
🛠️ Switch Up Your Fuel Sources
Variety isn’t just for spice racks. Switching between drinks, chews, and bars can help prevent boredom and keep your gut happy by balancing different sources of carbohydrates. Research suggests that multi-texture fueling strategies improve both energy intake and gastric comfort (5).
🟢 Pro Tip: Depending on your activity mix and match – Pair Sport Hydration Drink Mix with Energy Bars or Energy Chews and Super High-Carb Drink Mix to cover all your bases without overloading on one texture or flavor.
Skratch Labs: The Anti-Flavor Fatigue Solution
With a variety of flavors across our hydration mixes, energy chews, bars, and recovery drinks, Skratch makes it easy to keep fueling fresh—so you can keep pushing forward.
👉 Shop our variety packs and mix it up for your next big ride, run, or race.
📚 Want to learn more about real ingredients and performance nutrition? Check out our other blog.
Sources
Rolls, E. T. (1986). Sensory-specific satiety. Nutrition Reviews, 44(3), 93–101.
Jeukendrup, A. E. (2017). Training the gut for athletes. Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition & Metabolic Care, 20(6), 427-432.
Hetherington, M. M. (1996). Sensory-specific satiety and its importance in meal termination. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 20(1), 113–117.
Chambers, L., & Yeomans, M. R. (2011). The role of texture and familiarity in the development of food preferences. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 94(2), 493-500.
Pfeiffer, B., Stellingwerff, T., Hodgson, A. B., et al. (2012). Nutritional intake and gastrointestinal problems during competitive endurance events. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 44(2), 344-351.
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