Why Your Electrolyte Drink Tastes Like Salt Water (It's Underdosed)

Why Your Electrolyte Drink Tastes Like Salt Water

Your electrolyte drink tastes like salt water because sodium is the cheapest ingredient in the bag. The two minerals most people are actually short on, potassium and magnesium, cost more, so they get underdosed while sodium fills the gap.

And so we've got a couple of weeks before the new Quench hydration drink comes out. As you guys know, you know, the LMNT, the Relight, you know, these electrolyte drinks are becoming increasingly popular, especially over the past few years.

I spent some time trying to figure out what the best formulation would be for optimal health when it comes to giving you guys a hydration drink.

Start with what these minerals do, because the marketing has flattened all of them into one word. Sodium holds water in the space outside your cells and drives how much fluid stays in your bloodstream. Potassium works inside the cell and sets the electrical gradient that lets muscle and nerve fire. Magnesium is a cofactor for hundreds of enzymatic reactions, including the ones that let a contracted muscle relax again.

So when a product gives you a lot of one and almost none of the other two, you have not hydrated. You have shifted your mineral balance in one direction.

What I found in doing my market research and comparing that with the science is that most of the time, these supplements are underdosed in the electrolytes that your body actually is deficient in, potassium and magnesium specifically, because those are more expensive, and they add more sodium to make it a filler.

This is basically why when you drink these things, no matter how much flavor they put into them, it tastes like salt water.

And if you're doing a typical hydration drink, you know, you're adding something like 200,000 kilograms of sodium per serving. Well, if we take that amount of sodium that you're adding with the hydration drink and you add it to, you know, the typical American diet, which is also very high in sodium, what you're doing is you're just now overloading your body with all the sodium that it doesn't need.

Sodium and potassium share transport and excretion pathways in the kidney, so the ratio between them matters more than either number alone. The PURE study, which followed over 100,000 adults across 18 countries, found that higher potassium excretion tracked with lower blood pressure and fewer cardiovascular events, and that the benefit showed up across sodium intake levels.

Most of these drinks move your ratio the wrong way.

I am not going to tell you sodium is the villain. If you drink enough water and you sweat heavily, you clear most of it. The problem is that the salt is doing all the work while the minerals that support muscle contraction, nerve signaling and vascular tone sit at trace amounts.

So with Quench I lowered the sodium and raised the potassium and magnesium.

The other thing I had to account for is that our pre-workout already carries electrolytes. This is part of the reason why when you take our pre-workout, despite the fact that it doesn't have all these stimulants, you get this great pump. Electrolytes pull water into muscle tissue, and a muscle holding more water under load feels fuller.

Which means stacking two fully dosed electrolyte products on the same day puts you right back where you started, just with a different mineral too high.

If you're taking our pre-workout, you only need to do one scoop of the quench, and that combination is going to give you the clinical amount of electrolytes that your body needs in order to perform.

If you're not doing the pre-workout, you can do two scoops of quench, and that's going to put you in a place where you're going to get that same clinical dose.

Turn the packet over and read the potassium and magnesium lines before you read anything else. Sodium tells you what the product costs to make. Potassium and magnesium tell you whether anyone was thinking about your physiology when they built it.

Research: O'Donnell et al., PURE study, New England Journal of Medicine, 2014.