I know gator-aid and its like advertise that they have lots of them. And I know sometimes I feel bad if I sweat a lot and just drink water. But are they just advertising… salt? Are there different kinds of electrolytes, and if so are they interchangable?
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Effectively, yes. “Electrolytes” is a collective term for the ions that help move stuff into and out of your cells. These are primarily sodium and potassium, although calcium also plays a role. Sodium is the most important of these for sports drinks, because it is the one you most lose through sweat.
Unfortunately, most sports drinks don’t really contain enough to balance out heavy sweating, because sodium salt (aka normal salt) tastes, unsurprisingly, salty. If a drink had the right balance of sodium, it would be noticeably salty. Gatorade has one line of drinks that do that, and Pedialyte is specially made for the correct balance. Sports drinks really jack up the sugar to help hide the salt taste.
Most sports drinks, rather than having the sodium you need to replace sweat, instead jack up the potassium (think Prime and it’s advertised 843mg of electrolytes, 700mg of which is potassium). This doesn’t really replace the electrolytes you need, but it also doesn’t make the drink nearly as salty.
When you see “electrolytes”, you should flip around to the nutrition label, which must list the actual amounts of sodium and potassium. This will tell you if it will actually help you recover from activity, or if it’s just more sugar water and advertising.
Edited to add:
why is sodium so important? Because your cells use a mechanism called “osmosis” to move water back and forth. Water molecules naturally move from areas of high concentration to areas of lower concentration. In the cell, this means that water will go in to the cell if the inside of the cell has more sodium than the outside, and leave the cell when the outside has more than the inside.
When you sweat, two things happen: you lose water and you lose sodium you lose more water than sodium, so your blood becomes saltier. Water moves from inside your cells to your blood; this is what it means to be “dehydrated”. To counter it, you need to dilute your blood and increase the amount of sodium in your cells. Hence, drinking water with sodium can help replenish both and speed recovery from dehydration.
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Salts. Sodium, potassium, and magnesium. Edit: Not interchangeable. All three are essential.
Gatorade is a bad source of electrolytes. It’s loaded with sodium but that’s about it. You’re better off drinking coconut water and taking a magnesium citrate suppliment for hydration. Stay away from Gatorade. It’s sugar water.
EDIT: Yes there are others too. Chloride, Calcium, Phosphates, and Bicarbonate. I only mentioned the major ones. Apologies for that.
Unfortunately, coconut water is not good for tree nut allergies.
Avocados it is, then. (Those don’t count as tree nuts, right?) Regardless, you need to find a good source of potassium. Most people are deficient.
I’d rather take vitamins. Avocados are gross af.
Of course someone who uses an instance based in the midwest would say something like that, LMAO. You just think you have Avocados cause you’ve never had real Mexican food before. I’ve visited over 30 states so I can confidently say that you can only get decent Mexican in border states. The guacamole here is *unreal *.
I guess Texas isn’t a border state and that people who are literally born and raised in Mexico and in currently living in the US aren’t Mexican enough to make real Mexican food. Good to know.
