Sip or Skip? The Truth About Electrolytes

U. S. consumers spend more than $10 billion a year on sports drinks, according to Beverage Industry https://www.bevindustry.com/articles/96745-2024-state-of-the-beverage-industry-sports-drinks-embrace-everyday-wellness, a trade publication. And we can’t lie that sometimes a Gatorade or electrolyte tablet sounds really appealing in the quest to hydrate daily – especially since it’s been a very hot, long summer. But the question is: Are we even sweating enough to warrant all these sugary electrolyte-filled drinks? NPR health correspondent Pien Huang https://www.npr.org/people/729920828/pien-huang has been on the case, and she brings us answers she’s racked up in her reporting today. Read more https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5470190/electrolytes-sport-drinks-hydration-salt of Pien’s reporting on electrolytes and hydration. Interested in more consumer health or human biology stories? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] – we may feature it in an upcoming episode! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Speaker 01

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:24Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here with health correspondent, friend of the show, Ping Huang, to talk about sports drinks. Hey, Ping.

• 0:32Speaker 03

  Hey, Gina. Question for you. Do you drink sports drinks?

• 0:36Regina Barber?

  I do only when it's incredibly humid here in DC and I'm sweating a lot and I feel a little off and I think I need something more than water.

• 0:45Speaker 03

  OK, and let's be specific here. Like, when we're talking about sports drink, we mean those bottled drinks that you grab at the grocery store, the convenience store, Gatorade, Powerade, things that typically contain sugar, water, along with salts and other electrolytes.

• 0:59Regina Barber?

  Yes.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  And Gina, you're not alone. US consumers actually spend more than $10 billion a year on the sports drink market.

• 1:07Regina Barber?

  Wow.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  Now, I did not know what electrolytes were before I started looking into this. Do you?

• 1:13Regina Barber?

  I mean, I think there are salts and other things that come out when we sweat and we need that stuff to function. So maybe sports drinks can help us. I know that stuff is also in food.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yes, spot on.

• 1:27Regina Barber?

  Awesome.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  So it turns out that these are micronutrients, salt, potassium, other minerals. And they're called electrolytes because in your body, they dissolve into positive and negative charges, which help your cells function and communicate with each other.

• 1:41Regina Barber?

  So we do need them.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  We do need them. And you do lose some of them in your sweat. But they are micronutrients, and you need very little of them, which did make me wonder, are sports drinks worth it?

• 1:53Regina Barber?

  So today on the show, the hype behind sports drinks.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  Yes, you need electrolytes, but we'll dig into the physiology of how your body is helping you deal with them.

• 2:04Regina Barber?

  I'm Regina Barber.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  I'm Ping Huang.

• 2:06Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 2:21Speaker 00

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• 3:26Regina Barber?

  Okay, so electrolytes, we've established we need them, but where do we get them if not a sports drink?

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, marketing is telling us that sports drinks are an essential source of electrolytes, right?

• 3:37Regina Barber?

  Oh, yes.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  But the simple answer, Gina, like you said, is that you get them from eating a basic, somewhat balanced diet.

• 3:44Regina Barber?

  Okay.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  You know, fruits and vegetables contain magnesium, potassium, phosphate. Meat and dairy products contain calcium. And if you're eating these things, you're getting more than enough electrolytes you need to function. Like, a 20-ounce bottle of Gatorade contains 80mg of potassium. Powerade boasts that it has 50% more electrolytes than Gatorade. But Gina, a medium-sized banana has more than 400mg of potassium, which is 400% more than a bottle of Gatorade. Bananas just don't come with the labels boasting that.

• 4:15Regina Barber?

  I mean, I wish they would. I would eat more bananas.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Right. And in fact, most people get plenty of electrolytes through their food, like sodium. That's the one you lose most in your sweat.

• 4:24Regina Barber?

  Hmm. Which makes me wonder, can you like overdose on these electrolytes?

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Not very easily.

• 4:30Regina Barber?

  Okay, good.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  I mean, I spoke with Tamara Hugh Butler. She goes by Tammy and she's a sports scientist who's now retired from Wayne State University. Her main takeaway with sports drinks is...

• 4:39Speaker 04

  Will it hurt you? No. Will it help you? No. It's not gonna like make you exercise better or increase your performance, make you recover faster.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  So let's just parse the first part of that. Will it hurt you? No.

• 4:54Regina Barber?

  Good.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  So Tammy says that if you get extra electrolytes, generally speaking, your body will just pee them out. I mean, there's some exceptions.

• 5:01Regina Barber?

  Yeah, like, I mean, I've had too much sodium and it might have caused bloating, I think.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So that is one effect of sodium. And also, if you get too much sodium in the long term, it can contribute to high blood pressure, serious conditions like kidney disease and heart failure. But on the day to day, the body is designed to handle fluctuations in electrolytes.

• 5:23Regina Barber?

  Yeah, how does the body handle that?

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Okay, so Tammy told me that hormones play a big role here. So with sodium, for instance, if you've lost a lot of salt, there's a hormone in your body that will go up, telling your kidneys to shed some sodium back into your bloodstream.

• 5:37Regina Barber?

  Cool.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  But if you have too much sodium, like if you just ate a bunch of pretzels and chips, that hormone will go down and the channels that reabsorb sodium close off. So all that extra sodium you just ate that your body doesn't need, it gets flushed out in your urine.

• 5:51Regina Barber?

  This is really cool.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  It's really fascinating, right? And our body regulates other electrolytes too. So Tammy also said that in our bones, in addition to storing calcium, we also store minerals like more sodium and also magnesium, which helps regulate your muscles, nerves, blood sugar, and phosphate, which helps build your teeth and bones.

• 6:11Speaker 04

  So again, we do also have a storage of these minerals that can turn into electrolytes that are held within our skeleton that can be liberated in times of need.

• 6:22Regina Barber?

  What?

• 6:23Speaker 03

  These can also get unlocked by hormones when our body notices that it's running low on them.

• 6:28Regina Barber?

  Okay, so we have plenty of electrolytes from like the foods we eat for the most part. Can sports drinks actually be helpful, though, to anyone?

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Sure. I mean, they are convenient and they can be useful for people who are sweating a lot. So that includes athletes. Yeah, exactly. You know, if you're out there sweating a lot, if you are doing endurance sports, if you're running, cycling, playing soccer for a long time, if you're a laborer that's working outside.

• 6:54Regina Barber?

  Okay.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  That's because what we are sweating out is mostly water and salt, along with additional electrolytes, potassium, magnesium, and also small quantities of other things like glucose, ethanol, and hormones. A rule of thumb from a sports dietitian I spoke with is that sports drinks can be useful for those who are active for more than an hour. Others told me it's even more like many hours before you might really need to start replenishing those electrolytes.

• 7:18Regina Barber?

  Hmm.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  And I also wanted to say they are really useful for people who are seriously medically dehydrated.

• 7:24Regina Barber?

  Right.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  Asher Rosinger, director of the Water Health and Nutrition Lab at Penn State, told me that a simple packet of sugar, salt, and potassium mixed into clean water has been a lifesaver.

• 7:34Speaker 05

  ORS, or oral rehydration salts, were one of the biggest achievements in public health to treat and deal with diarrheal diseases, which have saved millions of lives around the world.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  He researches water issues globally, and he says these have been especially helpful for kids in places with poor water access who get sick from diarrhea and then get really sick from dehydration. But that's not the situation that most people in the US are facing when they grab a sports drink.

• 8:01Regina Barber?

  Okay, so a person can be both like dehydrated and short on electrolytes, and it takes, but, but it takes a lot to get there.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah. And being dehydrated in the sense of not having enough water is also different from having a shortage of electrolytes, though they can be related. You know, if you're losing a lot of electrolytes rapidly through your sweat, or if you're sick and losing a lot of liquids in other ways.

• 8:24Regina Barber?

  Yes.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  And even so, sports drinks are just one way you can get some of those electrolytes back. You know, milk, soup, Asher says that these kinds of liquids can be even more hydrating than sports drinks, depending on what's in them.

• 8:37Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  But in most cases, if you are dehydrated, you can just drink water and your body will adjust the rest.

• 8:43Regina Barber?

  That's wonderful for me to hear because like I love drinking green tea, which is basically water and I have a cup next to me all day, every day, basically.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Amazing. I love that for you.

• 8:54Regina Barber?

  There's one right here.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  I also love tea and I'm also obsessed with hydration. You know, I'm the friend who's telling everyone to drink water all the time. I'm telling my mom constantly to drink more water. But here is something else that I also learned that I also found very interesting. So Asher told me that human bodies can actually power through periods of dehydration, that we can perform well for a while, even if we're at a water deficit.

• 9:19Speaker 05

  It's called voluntary dehydration, where you're able to go, you know, eight, 10, 12 hours without rehydrating to the level you necessarily need to, and then you're able to rehydrate later.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  He says that that adaptation was important in human evolution because it made it possible for people to go hunt and forage all day without having to be super close to a water source. He also says that our body's hydration level is in flux like all day long.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  So as you consume water or food, you become slightly more hydrated. And as you go for a run or you go about your day, you're respirating, you're losing water. So you can think of it as the sinusoidal wave of your body kind of adapting to your water inputs and your water outputs.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  And if you are dehydrated, your body's gonna tell you, you know, you'll get cranky, your body will complain, you might feel thirsty, get a headache, you might feel kind of out of it. You might even feel your heartbeat a little faster if you're going up the stairs.

• 10:23Regina Barber?

  Wow.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  And if you ignore those signs and don't hydrate, you could get in real trouble.

• 10:27Regina Barber?

  Yeah, I think the moral of the story here is like, listen to your body.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. I mean, we're losing water all the time through breathing, coughing, me talking to you, you know, just regular sweating, all kinds of ways. So if you're losing a lot of water, just put some more in. And, you know, like we've been emphasizing, it doesn't have to be just drinking water. You can get water and electrolytes from fruits and vegetables, smoothies, soups.

• 10:53Regina Barber?

  Soup's the big one.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Soups, yeah, soups are delicious. I love soup.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  And you can also get them from sports drinks. You know, everyone that I talked to when I was reporting the story said, if you like how they taste, go ahead and drink them. It's not going to hurt you to have a few servings a day, at least from an electrolyte standpoint. But also, for most people, in most cases, it's not going to help you any more than drinking water.

• 11:17Regina Barber?

  Thank you. Thank you, Ping, for bringing us this story.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  You're welcome.

• 11:22Regina Barber?

  All right, short waivers. If you liked this episode, consider following us on the NPR app or whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on. That way, you'll never miss another episode. And if you have a science question, let us know. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones and Ping Huang checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Zunivan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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