Short Wave - Sip or Skip? The Truth About Electrolytes

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

U.S. consumers spend more than $10 billion a year on sports drinks, according to Beverage Industry, 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 has been on the case, and she brings us answers she’s racked up in her reporting today.Read more of Pien’s reporting on electrolytes and hydration.Interested in more consumer health or human biology stories? Email us your question at [e-mail] – 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.See 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

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Short Waver, is Regina Barber here with health correspondent, friend of the show, Ping Wong, to talk about sports drinks. Hey, Ping. Hey, Gina. Question for you. Do you drink sports drinks? I do only when it's, like, incredibly humid here in D.C. And I'm like sweating a lot, and I feel a little off.

And I think I need something more than water. Okay. And let's be specific here. Like, when we're talking about sports drink, we mean, those like bottled drinks that you grab at the grocery store, the convenience store, Gatorade, powerade, things that typically contain sugar, water, along with salt and other electrolytes. Yes. And Gina, you're not alone.

U.S. consumers actually spend more than $10 billion a year on the sports drink market. Wow. Now, I did not know what electrolytes were before I started looking into this. Do you? I mean, I think there's salts and like other things that come out when we sweat and we need. and we need that stuff to function, so maybe sports streaks can help us. I know that stuff is also in food. Exactly. Yes, spot on.

Awesome. 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. So we do need them. We do need them. And you do lose some of them in your sweat. But they are micronutrients, and you need very little of those.

which did make me wonder, are sports drinks worth it? So today on the show, the hype behind sports drinks. Yes, you need electrolytes, but we'll dig into the physiology of how your body is helping you deal with them. I'm Regina Barber. I'm Ping Huang. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, so electrolytes, we've established we need them, but where do we get them, if not a sports drink? Right.

I mean, marketing is telling us that sports drinks are an essential source of electrolites. electrolytes, right? But the simple answer, Gina, like you said, is that you get them from eating a basic, somewhat balanced diet. 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 80 milligrams of potassium, powerade boasts that it has 50% more electrolytes than Gatorade. But Gina, a medium-sized banana has more than 400 milligrams of potassium, which is 400% more than a bottle of Gatorade. Bananas just don't come with the labels boasting that.

I mean, I wish they would. I would eat more bananas. 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. Which makes me wonder, can you like overdose on these electrolytes? Not very easily. Okay, good. 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, will it hurt you? No. Will it help you? No. It's not going to like make you exercise better or increase your performance. It make you recover faster. So let's just parse the first part of that. Will it hurt you? No. Good. So Tammy says that if you get extra electrolytes, generally speaking, your body will just pee them out. I mean, there's some exceptions. Yeah. Like, I mean, I've had too much sodium and it might have. caused bloating, I think. 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

and electrolytes. Yeah, how does the body handle that? 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. 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 reabsorbs sodium close off. So all that extra sodium you just ate that your body doesn't need, it gets flushed out in your urine. This is really cool. 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. 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. What? These can also get unlocked by hormones when our body notices that it's running low on them.

Okay, so we have plenty of electrolytes from like the foods we eat for the most part. Can sports streaks actually be helpful, though, to anyone? 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. 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. And I also wanted to say they are really useful for people who are seriously medically dehydrated. 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. 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.

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 U.S. are facing when they're going to grab a sports drink. Okay, so a person can be both like dehydrated and short on electrolytes, and it takes a lot to get there. 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. Yes. 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. But in most cases, if you are dehydrated, you can just drink water and your body will adjust the rest. 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. Amazing. I love that for you. 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. It's called voluntary dehydration, where you're able to go, you know, eight, ten, twelve hours without rehydrating. to the level you necessarily need to, and then you're able to rehydrate later. He says that that adaptation was important in human evolution because it made it possible for people to go hunt and forge 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.

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. And if you are dehydrated, your body's going to 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. Wow. And if you ignore those signs and don't hydrate, you could get in real trouble. Yeah. I think the moral, the story here is like listen to your body. 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 puts them 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. Soups the big one. Soups, yeah. Soups are delicious. I love soup.

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. Thank you. Thank you, Ping, for bringing us this story. You're welcome. All right, Shorewavers.

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 shortwave at npr.org. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by Shorrenner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones and Ping Wong checked the facts. Quasi Lee was the audio engineer. Bet Zonovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.