Electrolytes, you may have noticed, are suddenly everywhere. Actually, these minerals have always been around – in our bodies and what we eat and drink. You may have bought a sachet of them if you have been dehydrated after a stomach upset or a marathon. But now they are being advertised on everyday food packaging, flagged in outsize numbers and shouted about in commercials. “Four hundred milligrams of electrolytes, my God!” the wrestler Logan Paul whoops in a promotional video that has been viewed more than 8m times on X. What he is selling, alongside fellow YouTubers MrBeast and KSI, is not a dietary supplement, but a new line of lunch products for children.
It’s not just online influencers who are getting excited. In 2022, the global demand for “flavoured and functional water” was valued at $50.3 billion, a number that is expected to increase to $112.6 billion by 2030. Liquid IV, an electrolyte mix company promising “faster hydration than water alone”, claims to offer improved sleep and gut health in a variety of flavours. W-Wellness – a company that provides bespoke supplement packages – has seen a 40 per cent spike in sales of electrolytes over the past year. And the upstart brand Oshun, which sells a pump-bottle concentrate designed to be added to regular water, recently sold out after a glowing review from the Insta‑influencer Trinny Woodall.
But has anything about our day-to-day existence changed to make any of this necessary? Is a sachet of powder or a quick squirt of concentrate really the true path to fitness and focus? Do we all need to be worrying about balancing our body’s mineral intake like elite endurance athletes just to get through our daily lives?
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If you sweat during a workout and it makes your T-shirt a bit white when it dries, you’re losing a lot of electrolytes
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To start with the basics, electrolytes are minerals that carry an electric charge when they are dissolved in certain fluids. The ones human bodies rely on are sodium, potassium, chloride, bicarbonate, calcium, magnesium and phosphate. Out of these, our bodies make bicarbonate on their own and it’s fairly easy to meet our phosphate and calcium needs through what we eat. Sodium chloride – or table salt – covers another two bases. So the electrolytes most commonly featured in drinks and supplements are potassium, magnesium ... and sodium again, for reasons we will get to shortly (clue: it’s cheap). As for why we need them, well, the list is extensive.
“Electrolytes are essential for many functions in the body, including assisting in maintaining fluid levels, helping heart and nerve function, and regulating blood pressure,” says Natalie Allen, a dietitian and associate professor in nutrition and dietetics at Missouri State University in the US.
Magnesium helps with everything from muscle and nerve function to bone health, while chloride aids fluid balance and digestion. Potassium helps to regulate your heartbeat, lower blood pressure and regulate kidney function, while muscles need calcium, sodium and potassium to contract.
Without electrolytes, your body runs into dire difficulties, fast. But are we in as much danger of running out of them as some companies would like us to believe?
Well, it depends on what you are doing. The main way we lose electrolytes is through body fluids, so for otherwise healthy people, the biggest risk comes from a bout of sickness or diarrhoea. Other, more chronic conditions can also cause problems. For instance, Sibo, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, can compromise nutrient absorption, making it tougher for your body to get the minerals it needs.
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For many of us, however, the biggest problem comes from our drinking habits. “If you’re drinking lots of alcohol, you are at risk of dehydration, which can throw your electrolyte levels out of balance,” says the nutritional therapist Laura Southern, who works with W-Wellness. “Long-term alcohol misuse can negatively impact kidney function, which makes it harder for the body to regulate fluid and electrolyte levels.”
In case you are wondering, electrolytes probably can reduce the symptoms of a hangover, by helping to rehydrate you after one too many – but they won’t reduce any of the serious health risks associated with alcohol.
Caffeine has a similar diuretic effect to alcohol, while there is also some evidence that it can reduce reabsorption of magnesium after you drink it, lowering the overall levels in your body. And if you are downing the americanos or pints to deal with a tough day at the office, think again: a review of studies suggests that stress can affect your electrolyte levels by increasing the amount of minerals you excrete through urine – although more research is needed.
Generally, though, the group most likely to benefit from an immediate infusion of electrolytes is hard-charging exercisers: for instance, endurance athletes putting in several sessions a week, or gym-goers who keep the intensity high.
It also matters how much fluid you are losing – and what is in it. “If you sweat a lot, that’s a real consideration,” says Southern. “If you’re doing a marathon in hot or humid conditions and drinking a lot of water, there can be some risk of hyponatremia, where that water flushes out sodium and causes its levels in the blood to become too low.”
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Regular gym-goers who are drinking water during and after their workout are unlikely to need to worry about any of this, she says, “but it’s something to be aware of if you’re really pushing yourself. Also, if you sweat and it makes your T-shirt or your sports clothes a bit white or crunchy when they dry, that’s a sign that you’re actually losing quite a lot of electrolytes”.
Weight and body composition also play a part. “Muscle stores more water than fat does,” says Southern. “So someone carrying less body fat and more muscle will have more water content in their body than someone who’s carrying more weight and less muscle. If you’re in the latter group, electrolytes can help you to stay hydrated throughout the day.”
What about people who aren’t hitting the treadmill? “It’s very dependent on who the person is, their life stage and diet,” says Southern. “As we age, for instance, muscle mass tends to go down while fat can go up, which causes our total body water to be decreased and can increase the risk for electrolyte imbalance.”
But it also depends on which electrolyte you are talking about. The one that most of us have more than enough of, she says, is sodium, “because, obviously, that’s salt, and that can be a huge risk factor in things like hypertension and high blood pressure”. She adds: “Magnesium is one that many of my clients are often quite deficient in – which is something they’ll first notice from [symptoms] like stress, poor sleep and muscle cramps.”
To make things a bit more confusing, electrolytes also interact with each other. Having excess sodium in your system can increase excretion of potassium, as your body attempts to stabilise its overall electrolyte levels. This isn’t ideal. Most people would benefit from reducing their sodium intake, which at least one large meta-analysis suggests can lower blood pressure, and increasing their potassium intake, which helps to keep blood pressure within normal levels. Diet is another consideration: low-carb diets tend to keep your blood-sugar levels low, which has a knock-on effect on your insulin levels and can lead to your body excreting more sodium.
Green leafy vegetables, nuts, seeds, dark chocolate and whole grains are all excellent sources of magnesium.
So how much do you actually need to worry about your electrolyte intake? If you are already eating a balanced diet (and not sweating too much, too often), maybe not a lot.
“Maintaining a healthy diet with a variety of foods – including fruits, vegetables, dairy and high-quality protein – can help most people meet their electrolyte needs,” says Jill Hussels, a dietician from Vermont. “There are also foods that are overlooked as hydrating, which offer a natural and balanced source of electrolytes – yoghurt, for instance, is a great source of potassium and magnesium.”
Green leafy vegetables, nuts, seeds, dark chocolate and whole grains are all excellent sources of magnesium, while bananas, avocado and coconut water will help you top up on potassium.
Water can also help, depending on where it comes from: tap water typically contains a small amount of calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium, while mineral water naturally contains more, with some brands containing enough calcium, magnesium and potassium to make a decent contribution to your daily needs. The amount in bottled (non‑mineral) water varies, depending on where it comes from.
But this brings us to one of the biggest problems regarding claims about electrolyte content: when a food or supplement manufacturer says that their product simply has “more” electrolytes than the competition, that is not a particularly helpful metric.
Sodium, for instance, is easy and cheap to add to almost anything, but you are almost certainly getting enough of it already. Technically, you could claim that a McDonald’s triple cheeseburger is loaded with electrolytes – when, really, it’s just pretty heavy on the salt (3.3g, or more than half of the WHO’s recommended daily allowance, if you are counting). If you do need to add salt to your diet – maybe you are training for a triathlon, say – adding a pinch of salt to your water can be enough, without much need for fancier formulations.
Similarly, glucose can help with electrolyte absorption – but most of us just don’t need it. “Look at what’s on the label,” says Melanie Betz, a dietitian and specialist in kidney health. “Electrolyte drinks tend to have quite a bit of sodium, and often sugar, because they’re easy and cheap to source – but people in the west are already eating much more sodium and sugar than they need, so adding an electrolyte drink on top of this just makes it worse.”
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So why the sudden focus? “Partly, I think people are often more active now and more aware of the benefits of hydration,” says Southern. “But, also, I think they’re quite a nice, easy thing to put into your daily life without too much effort. People feel like they’re doing something good for themselves without it feeling too expensive or complicated, which can be an issue with some supplements.”
“I consider it to be a similar thing to the protein movement we saw in 2016,” says Joe Welstead, the founder of the electrolyte retailer Oshun. “Suddenly, people had a much greater awareness of the benefits of getting enough protein in their diet and realised that the benefits go beyond what sportspeople need.
“It’s a similar story with electrolytes: if you can get past going for caffeine first thing in the morning and focus on being properly hydrated instead, you’re going to feel so much better. And I think there are a lot of downstream benefits to being properly hydrated. You’re better able to focus, but you’re also less likely to crave snacks and salt throughout the day.”
The takeaway, then? If you are already eating fruit, nuts, leafy greens and protein every day, drinking plenty of water and not sweating too much, you can probably go about your life without worrying too much about extra electrolytes. If you are sweating a lot – and, let’s face it, you probably should be, at least occasionally – they are worth thinking about, even if all that means is picking mineral water over tap. And if you are stressed, unable to focus or feeling the 3pm brain fog, electrolytes are one of the cheapest health interventions you can try – and the quickest to take effect. Just remember to check the nutritional information: you can probably get enough salt in your diet without Logan Paul ever being involved. – Guardian