Drinks With Electrolytes: Do They Really Work?

Did you know you could be experiencing dehydration in your day-to-day life without realizing it? Every day, electrolytes leave your body through sweat and urine. In most cases, water alone is insufficient to keep your electrolytes replenished and keep you adequately hydrated. 

That’s where electrolyte-enhanced beverages come into play. The amount of electrolytes that you lose should equal the amount you consume; it’s a simple math equation! When something upsets this balance, you become dehydrated. Signs of insufficient electrolytes in your system include fatigue, headaches, or a general lack of focus.

Electrolyte-infused drinks are an effective, low-calorie way to replenish electrolytes and improve your everyday wellness. Incorporating these drinks into your daily wellness routine has many benefits that we’ll get into later. In the meantime, these are examples of when your body may need a boost of electrolytes:

• The start of your day
• Pre/post-workout 
• Late afternoon haze
• After a late night of drinking
• Recovering from sickness 
• Spending time in the heat

Our pledge is to create products that use premium and organic ingredients and are scientifically proven to be effective. Our Daily Electrolyte Mix provides optimal hydration with plant-based, premium electrolytes including potassium and glucose from organic coconut water and sodium from premium pink Himalayan salt.

What are Electrolytes?

Electrolytes are exactly what they sound like—they’re electric! Specifically, electrolytes are minerals that carry an electrical charge. Electrolytes spark cell function throughout the body and are vital for your health and survival. They assist hydration and help the body create energy; which is why electrolyte drinks are most beneficial when you’re feeling weak. 

Electrolytes are also responsible for stimulating muscle contractions, including those that keep your heart beating—pretty important if you ask us! Some of the most important functions of electrolytes include: 

• Regulating your blood pressure
• Controlling your fluid balance
• Balancing your body's acid/base (pH) level
• Transferring nutrients into your cells & waste out of your cells
• Ensuring that your nerves, muscles, heart, and brain work the way they should.

Most forms of bottled water and tap water contain trace amounts of electrolytes such as sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. However, the volume of these trace electrolytes is so low that bottled water and tap water don’t have any nutritional value. Electrolytes can be found in the foods you eat, too! But again, these sources of electrolytes can be insufficient to maintain proper hydration and energy levels. 

Most electrolyte-enhanced beverages have negligible amounts of electrolytes. Looking closely, you’ll see that these beverages note that they include “electrolytes for taste.” This is because the tiny amounts of electrolytes in these beverages don’t have any functional benefits. 

Thankfully, our products are specifically designed to assist with hydration and mineral replacement and contain perfectly balanced electrolytes. 

When Water Isn’t Enough

Water is never enough on its own because it does not replenish essential electrolytes.  Electrolyte beverages are recommended over plain water to replace fluids and electrolytes, especially if you tend to sweat a lot, exercise longer than one hour, or live in a hot environment. People who are at risk for dehydration, like people with a high fever or who are experiencing diarrhea and/or vomiting, can also benefit from drinking electrolyte beverages.

When you get dehydrated, you lose electrolytes. Symptoms of dehydration include dark-colored urine, extreme thirst, fatigue, dizziness, confusion, and infrequent urination. 

Electrolyte beverages are a great way for you to quickly replace electrolytes that you lost during extreme activity. The plant-based electrolytes in our products help you rebalance and hydrate more effectively than water alone. There are times when your body may be desperate for electrolyte drinks to help you rehydrate and replenish your electrolytes:

• Being in the heat
• Doing an intense workout
• Vomiting
• Diarrhea
• Drinking too much alcohol

Benefits of Electrolyte Drinks

Let’s break down the specific benefits and purposes of incorporating electrolyte drinks into your everyday life. 

Everyday Hydration and Wellness

For some, it can be a difficult task to drink the necessary amount of water that is required to replenish electrolytes. Many people forget to hydrate throughout the day because of busy schedules and packed to-do lists. 

That’s why it’s a helpful and proactive step to incorporate electrolyte-enhanced beverages into your daily routine to avoid dehydration. 

Other people struggle to drink enough water and replenish their electrolytes because they simply don’t enjoy the bland flavor of water and prefer to drink beverages such as juice, tea, or carbonated soda. We agree—why not make hydration fun? That’s why we offer fun flavors of our daily electrolyte mix such as berry pomegranate, lemon, watermelon, grapefruit, and ginger turmeric! 

With a lack of electrolytes in your system, you may be experiencing fatigue, headaches, and a lack of focus. 

On the flip side, incorporating an increased amount of electrolytes into your daily wellness routine can provide health benefits such as clear/glowy skin, boost in energy, and even assist in weight loss. Let’s discuss these benefits!

Clears Skin

Hydration can give your skin a “glowing” complexion. In addition, it helps the body to flush out toxins and cultivates healthier skin. Hydration and adequate amounts of electrolytes can increase blood flow to the skin which gives it a more even tone.

Boosts Energy

Dehydration can cause fatigue because it affects the flow of oxygen to the brain, causing you to feel tired and less alert. When you stay hydrated you stay energized. Even a mild case of dehydration can drain your energy and make you tired.

Assists Weight Loss

Hydration keeps your bowels moving, aids in digestion, and can prevent/relieve constipation. Additionally, water is a natural appetite suppressant. Drinking more water helps take up space in the stomach, leading to a feeling of fullness and reducing hunger. 

In some cases, you may think that you’re hungry when in reality you are just thirsty. Drinking water before eating a snack may help limit unnecessary eating.

Helps You During and After Workouts

If you exercise in hot weather, sweat a lot, or engage in an intense workout, you might benefit from consuming electrolyte beverages before, during, and after your workout. 

Here’s the deal: Electrolytes, sodium in particular, (the element that makes your sweat taste so salty) perform a critical role in the regulation of your body’s water balance during exercise. On average, you lose around one gram of sodium with every liter of sweat. If you’d like to see how much water weight you lose after a workout, it would be a good idea to weigh yourself before and after exercising. This can help you determine how much sodium you’ll need to replenish your body with. 

Failing to consume sufficient amounts of electrolytes can upset the balance of electrolytes in your bloodstream, and oftentimes, water is insufficient in accomplishing this.

Therefore, keeping your electrolytes balanced is critical for both performance and health. Have you ever noticed in a marathon (or similar endurance events) there are volunteers at drink stations offering electrolyte-infused drinks every 1 mile or so? That’s the reason they do that!

When the electrolytes in your body dip too low, you can develop:

• Dizziness
• Cramps
• Disorientation
• Irregular heartbeat

The most common sign of low electrolytes during a workout (or any form of exercise) is muscle cramping, which can be debilitating and excruciating. It can be extremely beneficial to drink electrolyte beverages before, during, and after your workout in order to avoid these symptoms. 

Helps You Recover from Sickness

When you experience diarrhea and vomiting, your body is even more susceptible to dehydration, especially in young children. 

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends drinking electrolyte-enhanced beverages at the first signs of illness to prevent dehydration. Although electrolyte beverages are an excellent preventative measure and can speed up recovery, they may not be sufficient for treating severe dehydration. 

Helps You Recover from Hangover

For a lot of people, a night of drinking can result in a miserable next morning. The dreaded symptoms of a hangover can include fatigue, vertigo, weakness, thirst, headache, muscle aches, stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, vertigo, sensitivity to light and sound, anxiety, or sweating. 

Electrolyte-enhanced beverages are extremely effective when it comes to speeding up the recovery process of a hangover. It helps your body replenish the much-needed electrolytes that will help relieve weakness, thirst, nausea, or headache. 

If you spend the night partying a little too hard, sipping an electrolyte-packed drink the next morning is the thing to do. It replenishes your body with fluid and much-needed electrolytes can only help your symptoms improve. 

Cure Hydration vs. Other Sports Drinks

Although electrolyte drinks are effective in keeping you hydrated, it is important to be cautious of which electrolyte drinks you are consuming. For example, many of the fluorescent-colored sports drinks you see on the shelves at the grocery store are high in added sugars like cane sugar or dextrose and full of artificial flavoring and synthetic minerals like Potassium Citrate or Sodium Citrate. These drinks are not healthy in large amounts and are not recommended for infants and young children, as they may worsen symptoms such as diarrhea.

Our products, on the other hand, have been formulated for effective hydration without all the junk. 

Cure has 4x the electrolytes of leading sports drinks and is made with real ingredients like organic coconut water, pink Himalayan salt, and lemon juice. Our products have no added sugar or anything artificial - just the ingredients your body needs for optimal daily hydration. 

Our pledge is to create products that are as clean and as minimally processed as possible and that are scientifically proven to be effective.

The Main Thing

Yes, electrolyte-infused drinks work! They are enhanced with minerals your body needs to function optimally, such as sodium and potassium. They are an effective, low-calorie way to replenish electrolytes and improve your everyday health. 

Our products in particular have zero added sugar and zero artificial sweeteners. In addition, we are lower in calories and lower in sugar than other leading brands! Electrolyte-enhanced beverages are most beneficial to your body during prolonged periods of physical excretion, in hot environments, or if you’re not feeling the best overall. 

Sources:

Fluid and Electrolyte Balance | Medline Plus 

Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada, and the American College of Sports Medicine: Nutrition and Athletic Performance | NCBI 

Practice parameter: the management of acute gastroenteritis in young children | NCBI 

Sweating Rate and Sweat Sodium Concentration in Athletes: A Review of Methodology and Intra/Interindividual Variability | NCBI