Episode 93 - Can menthol improve my performance in the heat? | Dr Erica Gavel-Pinos

We’ve all experienced that cool mint sensation from toothpaste, mouthwash, or mint flavoured foods before. So when you’re racing in a hot environment, can this cooling sensation change how hot you feel, or even help you perform better? And is there any downside to this? Or like a lot of things in science, is it maybe not that simple?

 

Podcast Guest:

• Dr Erica Gavel-Pinos - University of Alberta, Canada.

 

Erica's online presence:

• • X: @EricaGavel
  • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/erica-gavel/
  • Instagram: @gavelerica

 

Papers mentioned:

• Meta-analysis of menthol mouth rinsing: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-024-00679-8
• Erica's study of menthol in thermoneutral conditions: https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16071016
• Erica's study of menthol in female athletes: https://doi.org/10.1123/ijspp.2020-0414

 

AI in sports nutrition paper mentioned:

• Solomon T & Laye M. (2025). The sports nutrition knowledge of large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots: An assessment of accuracy, completeness, clarity, quality of evidence, and test-retest reliability. PLoS One. 20(6):e0325982. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0325982

 

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