Why Do You Need Electrolytes for Hydration?

< Full Episode

Transcript: Why Do You Need Electrolytes for Hydration?

Season 8, Episode 12  | June 4, 2024

[MUSIC]

Welcome to Life Time Talks, the podcast that’s aimed at helping you achieve your health, fitness, and life goals. I’m Jamie Martin, editor-in-chief of Experience Life, Life Time’s whole life health and fitness magazine. And I’m David Freeman, director of Alpha, one of Life Time’s signature group training programs.

We’re all in different places along our health and fitness journey, but no matter what we’re working toward, there are some essential things we can do to keep moving in the direction of a healthy purpose-driven life.

In each episode, we break down various elements of healthy living, including fitness and nutrition, mindset and community, and health issues. We’ll also share real, inspiring stories of transformation.

And we’ll be talking to experts from Life Time and beyond who share their insights and knowledge so you’ll have the tools and information you need to take charge of your next steps. Here we go.

[MUSIC]

Hey everyone, welcome to this mini episode of Life Time Talks. Today we are covering electrolytes and why we might need them for hydration. And back with us on the podcast, have Paul Kriegler. Paul is a registered dietician and personal trainer, and he serves as the director of nutritional product development for Life Time. Hi Paul, welcome back to the podcast.

Great to be back. Thanks, Jamie.

Paul, so it’s electric. Boogie, woogie, woogie. You know that song?

Yeah, it rings a bell.

The Electric Slide.

Well, we’re talking about electrolytes. I want to know, and I bet you our listeners want to know as well, what exactly are electrolytes?

Electrolytes are certain minerals that carry a charge in our body. And what they do for us in terms of hydration is they help direct water to where it needs to go. The electrolyte balances within our body, either inside of our cells or outside of our cells, and the electrical charges that they carry, some are positive, some are negative. They help water flow to where it needs to go to help us function, essentially. They also serve some roles in nerve conductivity. So the nerve impulses that ultimately trigger the muscle contractions to move our limbs. So electrolytes quite literally help carry electrical charges and currents throughout our body so that it can do what it needs to do.

And it’s plural too there. I mean, electrolytes, y’all hear the S on that. So Paul, where are the five major electrolytes?

Sodium, potassium, chloride, calcium, and magnesium are considered to be the five major electrolytes. Sodium and potassium are, I would say, the dominant two that we need to pay closest attention to.

And why is that, Paul?

So sodium and potassium, there’s all these little pumps on the surface of our cells called a sodium potassium pump that control, for lack of a better term, gateways or doors to let certain things in and out of cells. So, when there’s imbalances, the function of those channels or doors can be thrown off. Metabolic processes become less efficient. You know, if they’re very far out of balance, it can be life threatening.

We often hear about sodium, you know, as like this thing that you don’t want more sodium. We want to be careful about that. And I know you did a whole episode, Paul, on kind of salt and sodium and covered that. But let’s speak to that a little bit, because I know we want to just remind people like, obviously, sodium is an essential mineral that we need in our bodies. But we want to just be careful to not under-do that either, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, you know, there’s a variety of different recommended amounts from different governing bodies of health. You know, the one that people are probably most familiar with is the U.S. RDA or the American Heart Association recommendation of like no more than one teaspoon of salt per day, about 2300 milligrams of, of sodium per day. You know, there’s a long history there that we probably shouldn’t cover in this short podcast, but the gist of it is, the limits on sodium are made in good faith by those governing bodies because they think it has a large impact on blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. When in reality, that low amount of sodium for someone who doesn’t have blood pressure issues or doesn’t have insulin resistance and is active and exercises and sweats on a regular basis, that 2300 milligram limit or restriction is far too low for them to feel and function their best. The better target for a healthier, active person to kind of target is roughly twice that amount, between four and six grams of sodium per day.

What I wanted to talk about a little bit when we come to hydration, I think a lot of times people are just associating, I’m getting fluids in, I’m drinking a lot of water, but also understanding that the electrolytes and how electrolytes play a huge role in hydration. So can you kind of tell us? Drinking water is great, but understanding the purpose of the electrolytes and why you want that in your water versus you just drinking plain water.
Yeah, I think the biggest or the easiest way to envision this is, you know, if you go to the hospital or you need fluid replacement to stabilize your health for any reason, they don’t just put an IV in and give you water. That would actually kill you. Your cells would essentially blow up or shrivel up if you did that. What they give you is a liter of IV solution that has over 3000 milligrams of sodium and some other electrolytes in it per bag, right? So when we’re drinking water, taking in fluids orally, some of the same things apply. We need what’s considered a saline-based solution to optimize the fluid uptake and the actual hydration of our cells and our tissues and our body. The electrolytes help drive those fluid gradients. You know, first from it’s when you take in water or take in fluids into your digestive system, you want your body to maximize the rate and the efficiency of taking up that fluid into the bloodstream and delivering it to the tissues that need it. Because water is, you know, the water-based serums or fluids in our body are what deliver nutrients to ourselves and what take waste products away or dilute waste products and help us excrete those wastes out of our body. So we’re over 70 percent water by weight, but if you just drank plain water and didn’t include minerals in your diet or in your water, those mineral electrolytes specifically, you would essentially slow down all the electrocurrents in your body to a point where you feel flat, demotivated, weak. So, the electrolytes are actually what allow us to stay you know, vigorous and have kind of the spark that we need. We’re literally electrical currents, you know, we’re electrical beings and without electrolytes we can’t have that spark.

Breaking that down as far as hydration and drinking, you have a rule of thumb of, you should drink this amount of water in ounces, x of body weight. So, if you were to give an example, I weigh 200 pounds, how much water should I be drinking? And that water should probably have how much of those electrolytes that you were just mentioning within it?

Yeah, for sure. So, the general rule of thumb at a baseline is taking about a half an ounce of fluid per pound of body weight per day. Plus another 16 to 24 ounces per hour of exercise or per hour of sweating. Some people sweat a lot more than that, but that’s kind of a blanket recommendation. And then depending on how your diet supplies all the major mineral electrolytes or not is what helps you determine like, do you need a supplement with electrolytes? And in my experience, so like doing tons of blood analysis with members and know, quote unquote healthy individuals who sweat on a regular basis and eat better than the average American. What I can tell you is people are routinely showing up with deranged electrolyte levels at their baseline and possibly suboptimal hydration. So, what I mean by suboptimal hydration is they might be drinking enough fluid but that fluid isn’t getting to where it needs to go because they might be just essentially diluting their own electrolyte pools in their body when that happens. So, if you drink a ton of water every day and don’t salt your food and you avoid sodium and you avoid other electrolyte sources in your diet, your body tries to desperately find that sweet spot of electrolyte concentration in your bloodstream and in your tissues. So, it will offload all that water you just drank. You’ll pee it out. I’m sure some people listening have experienced this. When you increase your water intake, you just pee more. That means your body isn’t truly becoming hydrated from the fluid.

So, what might be some signs or symptoms that you don’t have proper fluid and electrolyte balance? You know, I know there’s, we’ve talked a little bit about poor digestion or other things, but let’s expand on that.

So, some things stimulate electrolyte losses, a lot of common things actually. So, if you sleep with your mouth open, you’re a mouth breather, you’re gonna lose a lot of fluid and a lot of electrolytes through that moisture loss. If you drink coffee, you stimulate sodium and other electrolytes to be flushed through the kidneys into the urine. Habitual alcohol use throws off electrolyte balance. If people have abnormal stools, so like loose stools or frequent diarrhea, you’re losing a lot of electrolytes through your bowels. So there’s a number of common things that people might experience or do on a regular basis that actually deplete those mineral electrolyte pools, and that’s even before you consider sweating. So, when someone sweats, sweat rates, they range pretty widely, like from person to person, based on size and intensity and all that, and acclimation to your environment. You know, routinely researchers have found like people are sweating one to three liters per hour. So that’s like 33 ounces or more per hour of fluid losses through sweat, that’s not accounting the breath fluid losses either. And in that sweat, there’s a huge range of each one of the major electrolytes being lost as well. So just to take sodium and potassium, for example, or sodium and chloride, you know, the typical sodium loss in a liter of sweat ranges from about 450 milligrams all the way up to close to 2000 milligrams in each liter of sweat. And again, that’s a huge range of individual variants, but if you compound that and say like a guy David’s size in Texas outside in the summertime, you might be sweating three liters an hour and losing, you know, close to four or five grams of sodium in that session, in that hour long session. So, unless you’re replenishing that through your diet, so not being afraid to eat salty foods or fresh wholesome foods that are then seasoned with salt liberally, you would probably need to replenish with electrolytes everyday to just stay caught up.

Paul, I think a lot of times over the years, people probably have steered clear of salt because they’ve heard of, hey, this is going to drive up my blood pressure. So, can you kind of speak to the mindset around that and why people probably have went away from salt and kind of just kind of debunked? But I don’t want to necessarily say it cannot do that, but you probably can speak a little bit more in detail of what it’s doing in that space.

Yeah, when people are told like they have blood pressure issues and they need to cut back on salt, even when they restrict their sodium down to 2300 milligrams a day or even less. Some of the recommendations are like 1500 milligrams per day. So let’s say they successfully adjust their sodium intake. Their blood pressure only improves by like three or four points. So the improvement or the outcome of that intervention is terrible. Especially when you consider they’ll feel awful. They’ll feel flat, buggy brain, weak. They might get dizzy when they stand up too quickly. It’s actually a risk for older individuals to be too low in sodium, especially if they’re on blood pressure medications that cause you to lose sodium through the kidneys too. It’s a fall risk. It’s a serious safety risk. It’s pretty well established too. If you restrict sodium too far, you actually induce insulin resistance. You limit your body’s ability to process carbohydrates properly essentially can create like a diabetic state just by salt restriction. That’s how important sodium is to all these functions in our body. On the other hand, when you take a population of people and you tell them to restrict their sodium intake, only about half the people will respond to that restriction at all. So only about half the people will see their blood pressure move that three or four points down. And it tends to be the half of the people that have insulin resistance or pre-diabetes or they have diabetes, type 2 diabetes. The reason that is, is in that hyper insulin state of either insulin resistance or pre-diabetes or diabetes, the insulin tells your kidneys to hold on to excess fluid and sodium, which inflates your blood volume and that’s what’s producing the high blood pressure. So, if you take care of the insulin, sodium is not an issue. It’s a different white substance that’s causing the issue that we’re trying to address with a salt restriction, it’s sugar. So, sugar drives physiology that creates blood pressure issues. Salt is associated with it because it gets held by the kidneys when insulin is high. So people should be really scrutinizing the sugar in their diet and liberalizing the salt in their diet.

So to that end, how do we, whether it’s salt or another, how do we get electrolytes? Can you talk through some of the food sources that are good sources for that? And then also, obviously, we’re going to get into supplementation too.

It’s also important to talk about like in America, in North America, we get way too much sodium or a very low quality of sodium in our processed foods. And we don’t get nearly enough potassium. So if you kept someone’s sodium level high, but just gave them a little potassium, they would potentially have improvements to their electrolyte balance and blood pressure and all the other systemic functions that people care about for health reasons. So, you know, don’t just think about sodium in your diet. Think about getting rich sources of potassium too, which include like avocados, sweet potatoes, spinach, watermelon, beans, tomatoes, butternut squash, Swiss chard, beets, pomegranate, like brightly colored produce contains a lot of potassium. Sodium sources in the diet typically are like preserved sources. Sodium is not super high naturally in a lot of those foods. Those are potassium sources, like salty things like olives and pickles can be great sources of like dietary sodium. If you’re somebody who sweats regularly or you find yourself having like a salt craving regularly, just start including more of those salty foods in your diet that are low in sugars and higher in sodium and see what your response is like. The simplest way though, and the most controlled way is just find an electrolyte replacement product that you like that doesn’t have sugar in it. And do that first thing in the morning or right before, or the hour before or the hour after or during your exercise. Like the easiest way to help people replenish electrolytes or like start off the day on the right foot is first thing you consume in the day is electrolyte water. Before coffee, before anything else, just drink 12 to 16 ounces of water with electrolytes in it.

Well, to that end, I mean, obviously electrolyte supplementation is having a moment. Life Time has a product that is out right now. You know, let’s talk a little bit about the benefits of like our product. We have Hydrate, and how it differs from potentially other products that are out there.

Yeah, the main features of hydrate is we use Redmond Real Salt, so it’s an unrefined mineral sea salt from the ancient underground seabed. So, the source of the main salt in our product is probably the purest you can get. It’s from an underground mine in Utah. It contains several dozen trace minerals, not just the dominant electrolytes. So it’s super pure, very, very much unrefined source of salt, all these mineral salts. And then it’s flavored naturally with natural flavor extracts. We’ve got a blood orange and a peach mango flavor, and soon, probably by the time this podcast launches, lemon lime flavor as well. And then it’s sweetened with actually fermented sugar cane. So, it’s not stevia, it’s not sugar. It’s an extract from fermented sugar cane. So, it’s zero sugar, naturally sweet, naturally flavored. And that fermented sugar cane, the reason we chose it is it’s got a very even sweetness profile. It doesn’t peak in intensity. It doesn’t have a bitter aftertaste. And it uses about ten percent of the land and water resources as stevia. And it’s less than half the cost of monk fruit extract, which are other popular no-calorie sweetener. So, it’s a very smart sweetening system. In terms of potency of it too, it’s like we designed it around kind of the mid-range electrolyte level losses from those wide ranges I talked about earlier. So, the dosing is designed for someone who’s doing about an hour-long workout at the average sweat, sodium and electrolyte loss rates. So, I know there’s products out there that are way higher in sodium and chloride and maybe higher in potassium. I know there’s a lot of popular products that are way less potent than this. So, we kind of occupy this middle range where we think a lot of our members are probably living in this range. Like they work hard at the club, they sweat, they might sit in the sauna after their workout, might have a cup of coffee or two a day, maybe have a glass of wine at dinner. Like we know these people might be chronically slightly under hydrated and not optimizing their electrolyte pools. So that’s what the product is designed for.

I love that. It’s kind of thinking about who can this help the most, right? Like a really wide range of people, hopefully.

Paul, what I was going to throw at you is amount. I mean, I obviously probably hit about three Hydrates a day. So, with that, is there such thing as just doing it too much? And I know you said obviously whatever you might be doing your day-to-day food as well, but I do it first thing in the morning. I definitely do it after or during a workout. And I do it again at night just because I don’t want to ingest high sugar drinks or anything like that. And I love the flavor of it. So is that OK just to do it, just to be doing it, even if I’m not working out?

Absolutely. know, especially you have to look at like your workout frequency and intensity is high enough that you’re probably, there’s never not a good time to add a little bit of electrolytes to your fluid or to your diet. Our body has a pretty sensitive salt thermostat or like taste thermostat for salt. If you have too much salt or sodium coming in and your body can’t process it fast enough, kind of like deal with that salt load, your taste buds adjust and it’ll let you know. Very, very accurate. Contrast that with sugar. We do not have an accurate off switch innately in our system to shut off taste buds or like tell us something that is becoming too much for our body to helpfully handle. So, in that regard, like if you start not enjoying it or like tastes too salty to you, that’s a clear sign like, you’ve gotten a balance.

Is there anyone, I mean, from what you said, obviously, like the product we have has been made to hit a wide range of people. Is electrolyte supplementation for everyone? And is there anyone who should avoid it or just be careful about it?

Yeah, I think if you’re actively managing, you know, a complex medical condition, or you’re like, if you have unstable diabetes control, or you’re actively trying to get your insulin to be lower, then I would be cautious. would talk to, you know, certainly if you have any medical conditions before taking any supplement, you need to talk to your doctor. Because if you’re making any health choices, anything changing with your health, diet, exercise choices, talk to your doctor more frequently, not less frequently. We see this all the time too, like when people start eating more helpfully and exercising a little bit and they’re on, you know, a handful of medications. Those medications need to be adjusted downward most likely. I’m thinking like blood pressure medications, possibly diabetes medications, maybe some cholesterol medications. They need to be adjusted as you get healthier. And that’s a good thing. So anyone who’s dealing with any chronic health conditions, check with your doctor first. I’m not a doctor, I’m not your doctor. So just be cautious about what you’re introducing, but know that it’s probably not the salt that’s been causing your woes and could very well be part of your path back to feeling your best at the right time.

Paul, is there anything that we need to tap into that we might have missed? Because I know we covered quite a bit and I know we can go on and on within this episode. I want to, you know, our listeners that have high level benefits, the ins and outs, of what it is that we provide within our own supplementation, but just overall what electrolytes are and how that fits within hydration — is there anything that we might have missed that you want to throw in there that we should add?

You know, I think some of the some of the things that people might experience regularly — poor digestion flat energy or an afternoon slump Poor recovery or muscle cramps if people have frequent or intense sugar cravings. Those are very clear signs that your body is lacking electrolyte balance. By all means, if you’re dealing with any of those things, talk to your doctor first, but the solution might not be a medication. It might just be an adjustment to your electrolyte intake, whether that’s your diet or a supplement like Hydrate.

Well, Paul, we always learn a ton whenever you’re on. So, thank you for taking the time again. If people want to follow you or connect with you, where can they find you?

Easy way to go to experiencelife.lifetime.life and type in my name, Paul Kriegler. I’m not very active on social media. I have an Instagram @_cafepk_. And I have a Facebook profile too, but I’m hardly ever on there.

So really we want you to go read Paul’s articles at Experience Life and also listen to his podcast that he did on sodium and salt that we have here in our archives. We’ll be sure to link to all of those in the show notes. So Paul, thank you once again for coming on.

Thanks, Jamie. Thanks, David. Hydrate well.

[MUSIC]

Thanks for joining us for this episode. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts on our conversation today and how you approach this aspect of healthy living in your own life. What works for you? Where do you run into challenges? Where do you need help? And if you have topics for future episodes, you can share those with us too. Email us lttalks@lt.life or reach out to us on Instagram @lifetime.life, @jamiemartinel, or @freezy30 and use the hashtag #LifeTimeTalks.

You can also learn more about the podcast at experiencelife.lifetime.life/podcast.

And if you’re enjoying Life Time Talks, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you like what you’re hearing, we invite you to rate and review the podcast and share it on your social channels too.
Thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you next time on Life Time Talks.

Life Time Talks is a production of Life Time Healthy Way of Life. It is produced by Molly Kopischke and Sara Ellingsworth with audio engineering by Peter Perkins, video production and editing by Kevin Dixon, sound and video consulting by Coy Larson, and support from George Norman and the rest of the team at Life Time Motion. A big thank you to everyone who helps create each episode and provides feedback.

[MUSIC]