Don't take our word for it.

Your gut has two separate pathways for absorbing sugar. One handles glucose (called SGLT1). One handles fructose (called GLUT5). Glucose alone maxes out at about 60 grams per hour — that's a hard ceiling, no matter how much you eat.

But add fructose through the second pathway and your body can absorb up to 90 grams per hour. The ratio between those two sugars determines how efficiently you use both pathways.

Every brand in endurance nutrition cites the 0.8:1 fructose:glucose ratio. Most of them get it wrong. Here's why.

The landmark trials by Rowlands and O'Brien didn't test fructose against pure glucose. They tested fructose against maltodextrin — a glucose polymer made of long chains of glucose molecules bonded together. When they reported a "0.8:1 fructose-to-maltodextrin ratio," they meant 0.8 grams of fructose for every 1 gram of maltodextrin, measured by weight before digestion.

Here's the problem: maltodextrin isn't glucose yet. When your gut breaks down maltodextrin, water molecules get added across each broken bond. One gram of maltodextrin becomes roughly 1.10 grams of free glucose at the intestinal wall. So the ratio that actually arrived at the transporter in those trials wasn't 0.8:1 — it was closer to 0.73:1 fructose:glucose on a hydrolyzed monosaccharide basis.

Why does this matter? Because if you're formulating with ingredients that aren't maltodextrin — honey, tapioca syrup, rice syrup, anything — you can't just mix them at 0.8:1 by weight and call it right. You have to convert everything to what it becomes after digestion, then match the ratio at the transporter level.

That's what we did. We broke down every sugar in our formulation — the free fructose and glucose in honey, the maltose and longer chains in tapioca syrup, even the sucrose that splits into both — computed what each one becomes after hydrolysis, and targeted the ratio that actually performed best in the trials: approximately 0.73:1 fructose:glucose at the intestinal wall.

Honey isn't pure fructose. Tapioca syrup isn't pure glucose. Both contain a mix of sugars — free monosaccharides, disaccharides like maltose and sucrose, and longer chains that break down differently during digestion.

We mapped the full sugar profile of each ingredient, computed what each sugar becomes after hydrolysis (maltose → 2 glucose molecules, sucrose → 1 glucose + 1 fructose, and so on), and solved for the weight ratio of honey to tapioca syrup that lands at 0.73:1 fructose:glucose at the transporter level.

The result: our formulation is roughly 92% honey by carb weight, with a small addition of tapioca syrup to supply the glucose side. The math is published in our open-source formulation documents. You can check it.

A systematic review found that honey performs comparably to conventional sport gels for endurance performance. Similar blood glucose maintenance, comparable gut tolerance. Honey isn't a compromise — it's a legitimate fuel source with a sugar profile that naturally contains both fructose and glucose in useful proportions.

The SGLT1 transporter — the primary glucose pathway — is sodium-dependent. It literally needs sodium ions to move glucose across the intestinal wall. Sea salt in the formulation does two jobs: electrolyte replacement and enhanced glucose absorption. Two functions, one ingredient.