

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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