By Essential Provisions

Mile 18 of a marathon is not a subtle moment. The runner reaches for a gel, tears it open, and within minutes gets a jolt of energy that feels like exactly what the body asked for. Twenty minutes later, that same runner is crashing hard, reaching for another gel just to get back to baseline. That cycle is not a training failure. It is maltodextrin doing exactly what maltodextrin does.

Why Gels Spike So Fast

Maltodextrin, the primary carbohydrate in most energy gels, carries a glycemic index between 85 and 105, according to WebMD, which puts it on par with or higher than pure glucose. It is chosen specifically because it digests almost instantly, delivering fast fuel with minimal stomach distress during exercise. That speed is also the problem. A rapid glucose spike triggers a rapid insulin response, and that insulin response is what drives the crash on the other side of the spike.

There's a sourcing question underneath the blood sugar one too. Maltodextrin is typically derived from conventionally farmed corn grown under a standard glyphosate herbicide program, and that residue can carry through into the finished ingredient. Essential Provisions products are certified Glyphosate Residue Free by The Detox Project, an independent lab-based verification the company doesn't write for itself.

What Fat, Fiber, and Protein Do to the Curve

A study published in Nutrients, which tested meals containing carbohydrates alone against meals combining carbohydrates with protein, fat, and fiber, found that adding protein reduced the blood sugar spike by roughly 20 to 30%, fat reduced it by 20 to 40%, and fiber cut the response by up to 35%. Combining all three produced the flattest, most sustained glucose curve of any combination tested.

Separate research on higher-protein, higher-fiber breakfasts, published in a peer-reviewed nutrition journal and indexed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, found similar postprandial glucose control benefits when protein and fiber were added to a carbohydrate-containing meal rather than eating the carbohydrate in isolation. The mechanism in both cases comes down to gastric emptying speed. Fat and fiber physically slow how quickly stomach contents move into the small intestine, which spreads glucose absorption out over a longer window instead of dumping it all at once.

GI Distress Is the Other Half of the Story

Blood sugar isn't the only downside of a maltodextrin-heavy gel. Highly concentrated simple sugar taken without enough accompanying fluid can pull water into the intestine through osmosis, which is part of why so many endurance athletes report cramping or gastrointestinal distress from stacking multiple gels in a short window. The gut has a limited rate at which it can absorb concentrated sugar solutions, and pushing past that rate produces exactly the kind of stomach distress that can end a race faster than the fuel itself was meant to help one finish.

A blend built on real food ingredients, with fat and fiber already mixed in, beyond concentrated sugar alone, tends to be gentler on the stomach during sustained exertion for the same reason it produces a flatter glucose curve. It's simply asking less of the digestive system all at once.

What This Means Mid-Effort

A gel built on maltodextrin alone is optimized for one thing: getting glucose into the bloodstream as fast as physically possible. A blend built on coconut MCT oil, collagen protein, and chia seed fiber, like Sustain, is optimized for something different: a wider, flatter curve that avoids the crash entirely, even if the initial energy hit is less dramatic.

For short, high-intensity efforts under an hour, the fast spike from a gel might actually be the right tool. For anything longer, sustained energy without the crash tends to matter more than a quick jolt that runs out halfway through.

Caffeine Compounds the Crash in a Lot of Gels

Many energy gels add caffeine on top of the maltodextrin base specifically to boost the perceived energy hit, which layers a second stimulant crash on top of the glucose crash already described. Caffeine triggers its own drop in alertness once it wears off, and when that drop lines up with the insulin-driven glucose crash from the same gel, the two effects compound rather than staying separate, which is part of why the crash from a caffeinated gel often feels sharper than the crash from a plain one.

That's not an argument against caffeine during endurance efforts, since it has real, well-documented performance benefits on its own. It's a reason to be aware that stacking multiple caffeinated gels in a short window stacks two separate crash mechanisms on top of each other.

Worth being straightforward about here: Sustain itself isn't caffeine-free. It includes a small, deliberate amount from CoffeeBerry, whole coffee fruit rather than a concentrated stimulant dose. That's a meaningfully smaller amount than what's layered into a lot of caffeinated gels, and it's not the kind of dose that produces the stacked crash described above, but it's not zero, and it shouldn't be described as if it were.

How to Test Your Own Response

Anyone curious whether this actually plays out for their own body doesn't need a lab to check. A basic pattern to watch for during a long run or ride: note the time a gel or energy blend is consumed, then pay attention to energy levels roughly 30 to 45 minutes later. A sharp drop in that window, especially one that feels like sudden fatigue rather than gradual tiredness, is a fairly reliable sign of a glucose crash following the earlier spike.

Continuous glucose monitors, increasingly common outside of diabetes management for exactly this kind of self-experimentation, make the pattern even easier to see directly. Either way, the goal isn't to distrust every gel that's worked fine in the past. It's to notice whether the specific crash-then-refuel cycle described above matches personal experience, since that pattern is the clearest sign the fuel source itself, more than the effort, is driving the energy swings.

Essential Provisions builds nutrient-dense meals and sports nutrition for the people who don't get to phone in a bad day. Shop the full lineup at essentialprovisions.com.

Sources

WebMD: Maltodextrin and its glycemic index compared to table sugar and glucose: 

National Center for Biotechnology Information: Effects of Higher Dietary Protein and Fiber Intakes on Postprandial Glucose: