Genius marketing can convince you that you need something that you already have enough of. As awesome and essential as they are, you probably don’t need extra electrolytes, no matter how much your social media feed, gym buddies, and personalized ads are pressuring you to buy drinks and supplements.
Every time the weather gets hotter, electrolytes start dominating the discussion online. Recently, with so much extra focus on health, fitness, and aesthetics—from positive trends like proteinmaxxing and fibermaxxing to the toxicity of looksmaxxing and cosmeticorexia—electrolytes are being pushed even harder as the ultimate answer to maximum hydration.
Health trends come and go, hyped up by marketing-savvy companies and entrepreneurial influencers, convincing you to part ways with your hard-earned cash. It’s often hard to separate fact from fiction when you’re stuck in an echo chamber driving your fear of missing out. There are plenty of good products and pieces of health advice out there that can genuinely help you, but miracle shortcuts don’t exist. Anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you snake oil.
So, let’s get into why electrolytes are so important, how to adjust your diet to stay hydrated, how to tell if you are getting too little or too many electrolytes, and what my personal experience has been like.
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Life without electrolytes is impossible, as your body and mind are powered by electricity. Here’s what they do
Electrolytes aren’t difficult to understand even if they sound confusing at first glance.
At their core, they are substances that naturally have either a positive or negative electrical charge when they dissolve in water. As a result, this liquid can conduct electricity.
Electrolytes support some of the most essential functions in your body. In a nutshell, they help keep your body in balance. They conduct nerve impulses, regulate chemical reactions, keep you hydrated by maintaining the balance of fluids inside and outside your cells, maintain your internal pH levels, and contract your muscles.
You get electrolytes in two ways: from your food and drink. And there are two ways that you lose electrolytes. First of all, you lose them when you sweat. Secondly, your kidneys filter excess electrolytes into your urine.
Your body’s electrolytes include: sodium, potassium, chloride, calcium, magnesium, phosphate, and bicarbonate. You can’t overstate just how essential electrolytes are to your daily life. For example, sodium moving across nerve cell membranes generates signals that allow your nervous system to function.
Elsewhere in your body, calcium lets your muscle fibers shorten and contract, while magnesium allows them to relax.
Electrolytes, especially sodium, also help maintain a healthy fluid balance in your cells via osmosis. You want to avoid your cells shriveling from dehydration or bursting from being too full of fluid. What’s more, electrolytes help maintain your blood pH level at around 7.35 to 7.45.
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A severe electrolyte imbalance can be dangerous
Both too little and too many electrolytes can harm you. Mild imbalances are barely noticeable. However, a serious imbalance can lead to an irregular heartbeat, fatigue, muscle weakness or cramps, nausea, headaches, and confusion.
For instance, your body is at risk of electrolyte loss from dehydration caused by excessive exercise, heat exposure, vomiting, or diarrhea. You can also end up with an imbalance due to malnutrition, kidney disease, endocrine disorders, gastrointestinal conditions, lung conditions, and heart problems.
When you sweat for a long time due to exercise or heat, you lose not just water but also electrolytes. Sodium and chloride, found in salt, are the substances lost most commonly, and the amount you lose varies depending on your body, genetics, diet, lifestyle, and environment.
The average person living in the United States consumes around 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day, while the maximum recommended intake is 2,300 milligrams per day. In the United Kingdom, it is recommended that you eat a maximum of 6 grams, or one teaspoon of salt per day. So, if you live a regular lifestyle, you likely don’t need the extra sodium.
Too much sodium can raise your blood pressure. Meanwhile, too much potassium or magnesium can be dangerous, too.
The most common sources of sodium include things like rice, pasta, condiments, and pickled foods. Meanwhile, you can get both sodium and chloride from regular table salt. If you need more potassium, you can get it from fruits and veggies, like bananas (yum!), beans, broccoli, legumes, and parsnips. You can get your daily magnesium from nuts and spinach. Meanwhile, you’ll find calcium in dairy products and leafy vegetables.
Nutritionist Kerry Torrens notes that most people don’t need supplements if they include fruits, vegetables, dairy, nuts, seeds, and lean meats in their diet.
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Healthy habits and simple products are a much better investment than expensive trends
Overall, if you have a balanced diet, you don’t need to supplement electrolytes with sports drinks or rehydration sachets. However, you might need the extra help if you have been seriously ill, live in a very hot and humid environment, have been exercising heavily for a prolonged period of time, or are known to be a ‘salty sweater.’ For instance, if your clothes have salty sweat marks after you exercise, you’re losing a lot of sodium.
A good rule of thumb is to look at the length of your exercise session. Broadly speaking, if it is shorter than an hour, you’ll be fine with just water. If it’s longer than an hour, you might want to get an electrolyte. Meanwhile, if your workout lasts longer than an hour and a half, you might want to consider getting some carbs, too. Glucose, a carb, helps you absorb sodium and water, and is often found in sports drinks.
There are instances when, for example, endurance athletes who have been exercising for hours can make things worse if they opt for plain water. They have already lost a lot of sodium through their sweat, and drinking water further dilutes the amount of sodium in their blood, hurting them.
Consumers are obsessed with rehydration no matter their lifestyle or activity levels. However, according to recent research conducted in the United Kingdom, over the past year, Sainsbury’s saw a 333% rise in searches for rehydration sachets. Furthermore, Waitrose saw a 171% spike in searches for electrolytes and Tesco has expanded its electrolyte range a whopping four times.
Electrolyte drinks, sachets, and tablets are being promoted in ads and on social media, too, as influencers push them on their followers.
According to dietitian Nichola Ludlam-Raine, water is “perfectly adequate” to keep you hydrated. “Electrolyte drinks are not inherently more hydrating than water for the average person,” she explained to the BBC.
There are myths that electrolytes can supposedly cure hangovers, are necessary support when breastfeeding, and can control your cravings for sugar. None of these things have been proven. Eating a balanced diet, drinking water, and getting adequate sleep will help you out more in the long run than any health products touted as shortcuts that you’re being advertised. Tap or filtered water can contain some electrolytes, depending on the source, though these aren’t enough to meet your needs.
The fact is, you can easily make your own sports drink at home. For example, you can mix water with the same amount of unsweetened fruit juice, add in a quarter teaspoon of salt, and mix it all up.
Or you can simply opt for something as common as orange juice, chocolate milk, or coconut water to stay hydrated and regain your energy levels after an exhausting workout.
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Increasingly hot weather is changing how you should exercise, hydrate, and stay cool
With the world heating up and temperatures becoming more extreme, staying cool becomes a whole new challenge. Dehydration can lead to huge problems like a loss of concentration, worse energy levels, and poor fitness performance. In severe circumstances, it can lead to heat illness and kidney damage, warns applied sport scientist Jonathan Robinson. Untreated, heat exhaustion can lead to heatstroke, loss of consciousness, confusion, or seizures.
Hot weather makes you sweat more, leading to greater fluid loss. Your go-to approach should be to drink more water and eat foods high in water content, like fruits and salads.
If you want to exercise in hot weather, however, you’ll need to adjust even further. Stay in the shade, splash yourself with cool water, and try to stay as hydrated as possible. One way that you can do this is to drink extra electrolytes or to opt for skimmed milk or orange juice. Though the best cure is prevention: avoid straining yourself physically when it’s hot.
Another thing you can do is train your body to cope with heatwaves better. For example, by regularly going ot the sauna. “This is well established in sports physiology, where athletes deliberately use repeated heat exposure to improve heat tolerance before competing in hot environments,” cardiologist Professor Jari Laukkanen at the University of Eastern Finland noted about heat exposure.
“Indeed, quite similar physiological adaptations may also occur with passive heat exposure, such as sauna bathing and hot water immersion.”
Essentially, heat adaptation results in better body temperature regulation: more efficient sweating, improved skin blood flow, expansion of plasma volume, and reduced cardiovascular strain.
According to Dr Jessica Mee, of the University of Worcester, heat exposure changes how hot people felt, as well as how they behaved. “People who are accustomed to heat pace themselves more sensibly, hydrate more consistently and recognize their own warning signs earlier.”
Heat training involves between 40 and 60 minutes of heat exposure each day, for at least 4 to 6 days. The benefits last around a week. However, longer training leads to longer-lasting effects.
Image credits: John Arano / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
In practice, electrolytes aren’t magical, but they’re an important part of the puzzle. Here’s my experience
However, all of the above is theory. What does electrolyte use actually look like in practice, and how effective is it? As it happens, I personally have some experience with electrolyte supplements. I have used electrolyte and sports drinks, as well as electrolyte sachets, in a variety of contexts. What’s more, I have recently been trying out some pro-grade performance electrolytes on the recommendation of an athlete friend. Here’s what I learned from subjective, hands-on experience.
For context, my workouts at the gym and jogging sessions typically tend to last between 60 and 90 minutes. What’s more, I’m a big fan of longer hikes in nature that last several hours—a great way to stay active, get some fresh air, and an excuse to meet up with my friends. I’m not averse to hiking or jogging in hot weather, either, though I try to avoid strenuous activities during the hottest part of the day. In terms of hydration, I drink around 2 liters of water and a few cups of coffee per day. Supplement-wise, I regularly take creatine, glutamine, and Vitamin D. That’s my baseline.
What I have found is that on days when I exercise heavily and for longer periods, buying an electrolyte drink or making one myself at home has improved my recovery time. What’s more, I have noticed a significant improvement in my sleep quality, thinking speed, and resilience to stress. The upside of certain electrolyte sachets is that they sometimes don’t have the added sugar that you’ll find in most mass-produced sports drinks.
On regular days when I’m not as physically active and have far more downtime, sports drinks don’t really do much of anything for me. I do enjoy the taste (it’s an alternative to a can of soda in my mind), but it’s easy to forget that because of their sugar content, they aren’t the healthiest choice if you’re not exercising. They provide extra calories that your body doesn’t need. That being said, the same sugar is hugely beneficial for refueling your body during an intense workout.
When I have been seriously ill and dehydrated, however, rehydration sachets have been a real lifesaver. You could argue about how quickly they speed up recovery, but from a subjective standpoint, they have made the process quicker, smoother, and more bearable.
Another thing to note is that taking electrolyte supplements during periods of greater-than-average stress has helped mitigate some of its negative effects. What’s more, during these periods, extra electrolytes have improved my sleep, leading to higher quality rest. It’s only when you wake up genuinely well-rested and full of energy that you even recognize that you had trouble sleeping before. It’s troubling how easy it is to ignore a health issue when you’re so used to it that it doesn’t even register as a problem anymore, just the norm.
The electrolyte products I’ve been testing
Focus on incrementally changing your lifestyle to be more balanced, instead of buying trendy supplements
Real hydration requires rebalancing your lifestyle, proper nutrition, and a holistic approach to fitness. To sum up, electrolyte drinks are not some magical health or mana potions that you can gulp down and instantly solve all of your body’s problems. They shouldn’t become an alternative to soft drinks that you drink every day. Nor are you going to become an athlete by buying sports drinks every day. However, under the right circumstances, they can be one way to take extra care of your body.
When you time them right, electrolytes can give you a much-needed boost. You just have to be honest with yourself about whether you actually need them, though. Look at how much you exercise, what your diet is currently like, and assess whether you’re not spending money on something you don’t actually need.
Sometimes, you have to be honest with yourself and admit that you’re fine with what you’re doing right now, and that no single health hack is going to solve all of your (real or imagined) issues. If you’re particularly worried about your electrolyte levels, talk to your doctor about running some tests.
If you’re feeling just a bit thirsty, a glass of water or some unsweetened juice is probably enough to keep you hydrated and your nerve cells and muscles functioning, and you don’t need an electrolyte or sports drink like an athlete would. It’s not the supplements you buy, but the overall lifestyle you build, that makes you (un)healthy.
If you’re still not sure if you should up your electrolyte consumption, here’s one of the best explainers we’ve found online
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