It’s become common over recent decades for endurance athletes to consume gels etc during events.

Maybe those gels are themselves bad for you somehow (they are basically pure sugar), but also if you don’t eat while running and just eat a normal diet of 3 square meals a day then that naturally limits how much you can train.

Modern endurance athletes override the normal human digestion process by eating in a way that our ancestors wouldn’t have been able to do, therefore allowing them to train and race harder.

But to what end?