Ah yes, the wonderful world of chemistry. You all new that the pictures above were glucose on the left, and fructose on the right. Ha ha ha, chortle, chortle, chortle....oh course you knew that.

When I was a kid and living along the Texas gulf coast, chemical plants were a common site. One of the major manufacturers used to have a tag line, "Better living through chemistry", and we used to believe it.

Well, chemistry can be useful, especially when you start thinking about how your body uses fuel.

Let's say you are planning for your first big run, and by big, I mean over an hour long. DO you use or not? Conventional wisdom is that if you plan to run for more than 75 minutes, you should consume some kind of carbohydrates, about 60 grams worth, every hour.

In this article in Running Times, a new study suggests that more can be consumed by mixing the carbohydrates in a 2:1 ratio of glucose and fructose, increasing perfromance by as much as 8 percent over glucose alone. 8 percent for a 3 hour marathoner is 14 minutes, which is HUGE.

It appears that PowerBar is the first to jump on this finding, but I bet more will also take a closer look at this.

If you are into the details of such studies, its an interesting article: http://runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=14753