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You Probably Don't Need Electrolytes — Dr. Alan McCubbin

Alex posted something skeptical about electrolyte supplements and people lost their minds. So he went and found one of the leading researchers in the field. The answer was pretty much what he suspected.

What we get into:

Why the post-COVID boom in daily electrolyte supplementation is largely commercially driven — and how the "water doesn't hydrate you" marketing message gets built from a study done on people who were already fully hydrated and didn't need the water they were drinking in the first place.

Why milk scored higher than water on the beverage hydration index, and why that has almost nothing to do with electrolytes and almost everything to do with gastric emptying rate — and why adding solid food to the equation makes the type of drink you consume essentially irrelevant for fluid retention.

The actual threshold for when sodium supplementation starts to matter: more than four continuous hours of exercise, replacing at least 70% of fluid losses, with total sweat losses of around five liters or more. If that's not you, it's probably not your problem.

Why urine color and urine specific gravity are measures of what your kidneys are doing, not direct measures of hydration — and why they're particularly unreliable during or immediately after exercise.

The five-hour treadmill study — nine ultrarunners, either replacing 100% of sodium losses or zero, completely blinded. No difference whatsoever in temperature, heart rate, thirst, RPE, or fluid intake. They lost eight to nine percent of their total body sodium and nothing happened.

Why sweat testing technology is outpacing the research on what to actually do with the numbers it produces.

Season to taste — for anything under four hours, just pick what tastes good and helps you drink an appropriate amount of fluid.

Mentioned in this episode:

Waterlogged — Tim Noakes

This Is Your Mind on Plants — Michael Pollan

Beverage Hydration Index study, 2016

Lawrence Armstrong — assessing hydration status, the elusive gold standard, 2009

Lewis James, Loughborough University — placebo-controlled hydration research

Fueling Endurance — Alan's podcast for runners, cyclists, and triathletes

Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic

Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.