Executives from PepsiCo have implied as much. According to PepsiCo executives in Ad Age, the approach is an attempt to reach the growing market of consumers who seek out the term. The company is responding to pressure from challengers like coconut water, “as consumers are focused more than ever on ingredients.”

A socially conscious cerebral cortex may be drawn to organically farmed sugar over inorganically farmed sugar, but a pancreas makes no such distinction. It releases insulin in both cases, spreading word throughout the body that this is a time of fantastic abundance. The insulin signals the body to save and pack these calories away in fat cells, for use when food is scarce. For most Americans, that scarcity never arrives. All that does is more food.

Gatorade Thirst Quencher is itself a flat, decaffeinated version of PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew. Gatorade Thirst Quencher has somewhat less sugar, and slightly more sodium than Mountain Dew, but for public-health purposes, the two could be considered one. These sugar drinks are among the leading causes of the global crisis of metabolic disease. In the U.S., two out of three adults are overweight or obese.

Gatorade Thirst Quencher is perennially among the best-selling sugar waters, claiming 70 percent of the “sports drink” market (which is itself a concept created by the marketing Gatorade).

The secret to the success of Gatorade seems to be that it has has always sold an idea much grander than sugar water. Since signing a long-term promotional contract with Michael Jordan in 1991, the drink has promised performance enhancement. A greater version of the self, under the guise that it will optimize rather than impair the functioning of our humble bodies. Gatorade didn’t have to offer a scientific argument, because Jordan was the implicit case in point. He would be succeeded by Derek Jeter, Peyton Manning, Serena Williams, and Usain Bolt, to name a few.

For serious athletes doing prolonged exercise—the sort that drains their blood sugar, and depletes their sodium stores as they soak themselves in sweat—adding some sugar and sodium back into the mix does help to keep a person moving. This is why Gatorade was useful to the University of Florida’s football players, who were succumbing to heat exhaustion after hours of summer practice, when the product came into existence in 1965.

Still, the sugar content in Gatorade Thirst Quencher today is much too high, and the sodium content much too low, to re-hydrate a truly dehydrated person. Properly balanced oral rehydration solutions do exist, but they don’t taste as good to most people as the much sweeter concoctions. (Last summer I tried every oral rehydration solution that’s commercially available, as well as the one that’s distributed by the World Health Organization. I get into them in detail elsewhere.)