Electrolyte Drinks Are Everywhere

Who are they for?

Walking the endless corridors at Natural Products Expo West last month, I was amazed at the number of exhibitors I saw flogging hydration drinks. There was Coco5, Leisure Hydration, Plink!, Local Weather, and WaterBoy — the last two of which had constructed big, splashy booths pumping out dance music. 

This is not the first time I’ve been invited to join the electrolytes party. I have friends who swear by a daily DripDrop or Nuun to stave off fatigue and brain fog. On my socials, dewy girls in athleisure keep popping up, stirring sachets of powder into their water bottles. Over in the manosphere, Andrew Huberman frequently expounds on the importance of LMNT (“Paleo-friendly hydration”) to his daily routine on his podcast, Huberman Lab, which the upstart hydration brand also sponsors. (Longevity guru Peter Attia is one of LMNT’s investors.) 

Humanity survived many millennia without precision hydration beverages, and then half a century with only Gatorade and Powerade. So what’s the deal with today’s proliferation of electrolyte drinks? Why are they suddenly everywhere? And will you benefit from one?

First, a grossly oversimplified backgrounder on hydration

Okay kids: The water that makes up two-thirds of the human body occurs in solution with electrolytes, which are minerals including sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. These are necessary for all our biological systems to tick along as they should, and we acquire them by eating fruits and vegetables (and, especially in the case of sodium, processed foods). The human body has exquisitely sophisticated mechanisms in place to maintain the proper electrolyte balance. But when we sweat, drink diuretics like coffee or alcohol, or suffer from a stomach bug, we lose fluids that contain both electrolytes and water. In extreme situations, drinking water alone might not be enough to stay hydrated. 

This has been a problem for humans since the beginning of time, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that the medical establishment finally developed an effective, evidence-based treatment to combat severe dehydration. (The subjects of concern were cholera patients, FYI, not people doing hot yoga.) The fix turned out to be electrolytes, sugar, and water combined in the right proportions; the sugar (glucose) is in the mix not just to replenish calories but also because glucose must be present for sodium to be transported effectively through the intestinal wall and into your bloodstream.  

Around the same time, in 1965, a medical researcher at the University of Florida invented a little something to help the school’s football players, who sweated profusely in the tropical sun, to rehydrate better. Yes: Gatorade. His breakthrough turned out to be perfectly timed for the explosion of fitness culture, from the running boom of the ’70s to Jane Fonda’s Workout, Jazzercise, and the NordicTrack, the last of which my fellow ’80s babies might remember functioning as a very expensive clothing rack in their parents’ bedrooms. 

Gatorade launched a “light” version in 1990, the brand’s first effort to consciously market the drink beyond serious athletes to that NordicTrack market — people who might not be exercising hard enough to need or want as much sugar in their hydration drink, but who did like to cosplay “fitness.” PepsiCo’s acquisition of Gatorade in 2001 began the neon beverage’s adoption as more of a lifestyle drink, something you might use for a hangover or grab from a convenience store on a really hot day. 

The seeds of the current electrolyte craze were planted in the early 2010s. That’s when Liquid I.V. launched, marketing a powdered drink mix that boasted a cleaner ingredient panel and, according to its founder, a more advanced hydration recipe than legacy sports drinks. Since then the category has exploded to include brands such as Nuun, LMNT, DripDrop, Only … the list is long.  

What’s behind this new proliferation of electrolyte drinks? 

There are a few reasons why consumers are suddenly being sold on the need for specialized hydration products. One is a growing belief that drinking electrolytes cures hangovers. Gatorade has long been a morning-after recovery staple, but beginning in the 2010s, sales of Pedialyte — a medical-grade hydration drink marketed for use in sick babies and toddlers — spiked as grownups started using it off-label as an even better way to recover from the night before. By 2018, the brand had a tent at Coachella.

This was one of the factors that led Unilever to acquire Liquid I.V., in 2020, and would-be wellness entrepreneurs to spy the potentially huge market for a post-party hydration product with branding specifically geared toward 20-somethings, not toddlers with the runs. Some of today’s electrolyte products, like WaterBoy and Minerals & Chill, are clearly targeting this market. 

Another factor is the rise of Paleo & Keto lifestyles. Anyone on a diet that’s mostly animal products with few or no fruits, vegetables, or processed foods doesn’t get a lot of electrolytes from their food. These folks also tend to do more intense exercise, leading to more fluid loss. A Paul Saladino or Andrew Huberman does likely benefit from a daily dose of additional electrolytes, and brands like LMNT and Buoy market themselves specifically to that audience.  

But the flood of hydration drinks is also part of a much larger explosion of beverage “innovation”— energy drinks, functional elixirs of every stripe, faux spirits, teas, bougie sodas, etc. The reason? The barriers to entry in this category are very low; you don’t have to have a background in food science to whip up a drink recipe, and the FDA provides virtually no oversight of their health claims. Upstart products can market themselves inexpensively on social media. And since electrolyte drinks are typically powders, not canned or bottled drinks, the product is light, compact, and doesn’t need refrigeration — ergo very cheap and easy to manufacture and distribute. 

Wait, more water also makes you beautiful, right?

Though this focus on electrolytes is relatively new, our cultural obsession with hydration is not. The women’s magazines like Cosmo and Seventeen that I mainlined in the ’90’s reminded me obsessively to drink more water –– at least 8 cups per day, which would apparently cure my dull skin, moodiness, hunger, fatigue, and much more. As Mindy Kaling put it in her book Why Not Me?: “One of the great things about women’s magazines is that they accept that drinking water and sitting quietly will make your breasts huge and lips plump up to the size of two bratwursts.” (As a side note: I was never, on any day, able to drink all that water, which I viewed at the time as basically a moral failing, and a plausible explanation for why I did not look like a Delia’s model.) 

We now know that the eight cups a day thing — a comically rigid guideline when you think about how it fails to account for climate, activity level, body weight, or overall diet — has been widely discredited. The consensus now is that most people will stay properly hydrated simply by listening to their thirst cues. 

And yet the hydration paranoia continues. 

The reason, I think, is that when we talk about hydration, there’s an aesthetic rationale at work. To be well-hydrated is to be plump, pert, and juicy, attributes linked to youth and vitality. Water conjures visions of renewal, purity, fertility, and abundance. The fountain of youth. The water cure.  

Now that buying bottled water has become passé, and everyone has acquired their totemic $50 reusable Hydro Flask or Yeti, the marketplace must push us to the next hydration fad. Electrolyte supplements hook right into today’s culture of relentless optimization, letting us plus-up plain old water in an easy, affordable little way that — just think — might have been the missing ingredient to perfect wellness this whole time.  

So who should drink electrolytes?

Okay, so the reasons behind the electrolyte drink boom might be as much cultural and economic as scientific. But the fact remains that electrolytes are necessary for human health, and there are some populations, at least, who benefit from consuming drinks that contain them. Welcome to the advice portion of this article; the indispensable, sensible guidance you pay us for!

To answer this burning question, I spoke to two experts: Michael Easter, a health and science journalist who has written extensively about hydration and electrolytes on his fantastic substack, Two Percent; and Dr. Ranulf Crooke, a general practitioner with a speciality in sports and exercise medicine, who focuses on the applied science of longevity, performance, and physiology at the concierge medical practice WellFounded Heath. Both Easter and Crooke are steeped in the literature on performance and longevity, and spend all day, every day, thinking about how to tweak peoples’ diets and lifestyles to give them an edge. 

Their answers to the electrolyte question were absolutely consistent with each other: Short of suffering a dehydration event — think stomach bug, marathon training, long-distance bike ride — electrolyte drinks are not necessary or even advisable

“Most people in developed countries don't get dehydrated, but some people do exercise intensely and electrolytes can make sense, especially on hot days,” Easter told me, using a 90-minute run in the heat as an example. “But for the average person — and even the average exerciser —we get enough electrolytes from food.”

From Crooke: “For 80 to 90 percent of people, water is all you need.”

What about hangovers, though? Crooke says it’s true that alcohol is a diuretic, and when we pee, we lose electrolytes. But again, assuming you’re continuing to eat, you’ll be replenishing electrolytes that way. Most of the pickup you feel when drinking Gatorade after a bender is likely from the water it contains — plus, the sugar. Alcohol lowers blood sugar, which is the cause of some common hangover symptoms.

Okay, so what if you don’t care what the experts say — you feel like hydration drinks give you a boost? What if you don’t want to be just hydrated enough but, you know, really fucking hydrated! To the max! 

In that case, there are some downsides to electrolyte drinks that you should take into consideration before you chug your next DripDrop. The biggie is the high level of sodium. Sodium increases blood pressure, and in some people it increases it quite a lot; this is a big cardiovascular risk factor, ergo the decades of public health messaging pushing people to reduce sodium intake. About half of the country is hypertensive, and high blood pressure is consider by some measures to be the number one risk factor for death worldwide. If you’re already getting a good amount of sodium in your diet, adding an electrolyte drink might be a net negative for your health. 

This is an especially key thing to keep in mind when it comes to the newer wave of hydration products on the market, some of which have sky-high levels of sodium. LMNT, for example, serves up 1,000 mg of sodium, more than 40 percent of the daily recommended allowance — great if you’re competing in the Marathon Des Sables, not so great if you’re drinking it at a pilates class. “That's fine if you're a legit athlete exercising hard outdoors,” said Easter. “But salt consumption impacts hypertension, and reducing salt intake rather reliably lowers blood pressure/hypertension.” 

My addition: Most of these electrolyte drinks are either sweetened with sugar or with artificial sweeteners, like Stevia. Artificial sweeteners are not great for you. In the absence of intense exercise, neither are sugar-sweetened beverages. 

Readers: Knowing all this, do you still want us to get into the nitty gritty of different electrolyte brands for a Buying Guide? Let us know in the comments.