Guess what, folks! It's summer! And it's gonna be a hot one, because they all are, recently :(
Did you know you can lose about a liter of water, a gram of sodium, and 300mg potassium in an hour of profuse sweating? If you're working outside in the heat, or even just existing in a very hot and humid environment, you're gonna want to replace the electrolytes you're losing, and you're gonna have to be purposeful about it.
But electrolyte drink mixes, while convenient, are surprisingly expensive for what they are. So I'm going to give you a top secret recipe that you can whip up for literal pennies that will replace what you're losing in sweat.
1 liter of water
1/2 tsp table salt (about 1g of sodium)
1/8 tsp potassium chloride salt substitute (about 350mg potassium. NuSalt is a popular brand, it's sold near the salt at the grocery store. If you don't have this, replace 6oz (180ml) of the water with orange juice or eat something high in potassium, like a banana, each hour you're sweating)
6-8 tsp of granulated sugar (you do actually need this and not a no calorie alternative- sugar helps speed up the absorption of electrolytes in the gut. You can omit if using orange juice for your potassium source, though!)
Lemon or lime juice for flavor, optional
Mix together and drink 1 liter for each hour you're profusely sweating. Adjust your intake so that your pee is light yellow.
If you want to make this mix ahead of time, put 1x the recipe of salt, sugar, and potassium, along with unsweetened Kool Aid powder or crystalized lemon or lime juice, in a small baggie. I do not recommend putting multiple servings worth in a baggie, as the ingredients settle differently and you might not get the right ratio.
NOTE: like any electrolyte drink, it works better if you sip it instead of chugging. If you chug it, you end up pooping out a lot of your electrolytes, even with the sugar.
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About a year ago, I started supplementing magnesium. It's been literally life changing. I've been working on a lot of issues with my health – asthma, migraines, fibromyalgia – but if I could only keep one fix I think it would be this one.
(I'm glad I don't have to actually pick. You can pry my migraine medications out of my cold, dead hands.)
I had previously tried supplementing magnesium as a migraine treatment. My doctor suggested I try Preventa, which contains 60mg magnesium. I took it for several months and didn't notice any improvement, so I discontinued it.
A year ago, my brother reported that he'd been supplementing magnesium and it had improved several issues that I also had. I give my family's health recommendations a lot of extra weight because they're very smart and because I figure their bodies are closer to mine so things that work for them are more likely to work for me. I asked him exactly what he was doing – taking 500mg every day for at least a few weeks – and copied it exactly.
Nothing happened for about a week and a half. Then, I woke up and discovered that my muscles were capable of relaxing. Exercise became pleasant. I stopped clenching my jaw. My blood pressure monitor stopped warning me that it had detected an arrhythmia that my doctors could never seem to find.
So here's what I've learned since:
Electrolytes include calcium, sodium, potassium, and magnesium. There are others. I don’t care about them right now. Your body uses calcium, sodium, and potassium to tense your muscles and magnesium to relax them.
You want 186-2300mg sodium per day. The average American gets about 3300mg. Side effects of insufficient sodium include nausea, headache, fatigue, seizures, muscle spasms, and coma. Side effects of too much sodium include muscle weakness, thirst, irritability, lethargy, and seizures. Table salt is a good source of sodium, containing 2400mg per teaspoon.
You want about 1000mg calcium per day. The average American gets about 1029mg. Side effects of insufficient calcium include osteoporosis, kidney stones, hypertension, stroke, and insulin resistance. Excess calcium is mostly dealt with by the kidneys (pages 2-4). Milk is a good source of calcium, containing 240mg per 400mL.
You want about 3000mg potassium per day. The average American gets about 2668mg. Your kidneys will mostly deal with excess potassium, but if they fail side effects include numbness, tingling, nausea, trouble breathing, chest pain, and heart palpitations. Side effects of insufficient potassium include constipation, fatigue, heart palpitations, muscle spasms, tingling, muscle cramps, low blood pressure, and thirst. I’m not totally sure about good sources of potassium? Like the best source on this list is dried apricots but you would need to eat like 2 cups of them to get enough potassium and that sounds like so many apricots. Bananas are pretty mediocre sources of potassium with 422mg per. Potassium supplements only provide about 99mg, or 3% of your recommended daily intake. Still, we seem to be getting pretty close somehow? Like add in that banana and you’re golden. I dunno. Moving on.
You want about 400mg magnesium per day. The average American gets “only approximately 50% of that.” Side effects of insufficient magnesium include hypertension, arrhythmias, heart disease, and diabetes (pages 5-6). Side effects of too much magnesium include diarrhea – which gets framed as a positive (“reduces constipation”) as often as not and is presumably not severe – and that’s about it unless you have kidney problems. Peanut butter and black beans are frequently recommended sources of magnesium, containing 49mg per 2Tbsp and 60mg per half cup, respectively.
To put it another way, you would need to eat about 16Tbsp of peanut butter a day to get enough magnesium. That's a lot of peanut butter.
Your drinking water can provide up to 30% of your magnesium intake – and, historically, often has. When tap water has a lot of minerals, we call it “hard water.” We don’t generally like hard water, so we soften it, which takes out the magnesium (and calcium).
You're probably magnesium deficient.
If you want to repair this deficiency, you will probably need to supplement steadily for a few weeks before you notice a difference. I recommend magnesium citrate, which dissolves in water and has a pretty subtle taste. Not that you have to dissolve it in water. I've mixed it in smoothies and taken it in capsules and added it to my water bottle – whatever is most convenient for the day I have planned. It all works fine.
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So, another thing I realize is that people do not understand why "drinking too much" is actually a danger. And mind you, I am not a nephrologist or cardiologist. I just got screamed at by a cardiologist for having drunken too much once.
So, basically there is two aspects to "drinking too much". One is that, indeed, you can drink so much that your kidneys cannot keep up with it. And what happens in that case is that basically a bunch of important osmosis stuff in your body gets unbalanced because it is diluted too much, and that is bad. Though admittedly: if you are a healthy adult, it is indeed quite hard to drink too much. It is possible. But under normal conditions it is very hard.
The bigger danger is exercise associated hyponatremia.
For this you gotta understand a big thing about exercise: when you exercise and use your muscles and everything, your body basically enters exercise mode. Which means it knows you will expend a bunch of energy, and also will likely heat up a bit, meaning that your body knows it will have to cool you down. So it basically says: "for the moment sweating is our priority". Which also means that it kinda lowers the energy put into the kidneys for the moment, because you need that water to sweat.
Only that... this obviously means the water does not get excreted as much. And due to the misinformation largely spread by gatorade as part of their marketing campaign, people often drink too much while working out, creating hyponatremia.
As you might notice: hyponatremia means you are low on sodium (natrium). But is not because you did not take enough sodium in many cases, but because you took in too much water. In almost all hyponatremia cases in healthy adults it is due to them drinking too much while working out and their electrolytes becoming unbalanced. And yes, that even happens when you drink the sports drinks that usually put sodium into your system.
They did a study on several marathons. And in many cases 20-30% of the runners were hyponatremic due to having ingested too much fluids.
So, yes. You can drink too much.
I really cannot stress it enough: drink when you are thirsty. If you drink when you are thirsty until you are not thirsty anymore, then you have drunken enough. With, again, the caveat obviously being that is you are on somehow disregulating medications (which can include a bunch of psychoactive medications) that might shift your sense of thirst, hunger, and other base instincts.
And yes, this also means this "this is the right amount to drink" stuff is... unreliable at best. If you actually look into the research into the topic of "how much should someone drink", you will often find a citation chain that goes like this "this study got it from that study, and that study got it from this 70s study, and the 70s study got it from this 50s study, and that 50s studies got it from some military medic in WWII who just claimed that was the right amount to drink with no citation given". Generally medicine is somewhat certain that those "you need to drink at least 3 liters a day" things are not true. It might be true for some people, but not for the vast majority of people. If your body is working normally, you know when you are thirsty. Just listen to your body. Your body is a very finely calibrated instrument. Make sure you have access to safe drinks all the time if you can, and drink when you are thirsty. I swear to you, you will be fine.
