Okay here’s the pattern this air force major general describes:
He is big on running and runs a lot. When he runs a lot, he drinks a lot of artificially sweetened kool-aid.
He is running a lot in the summer heat in nevada, drinking a gallon of kool-aid a day, and develops a tremor.
The tremor goes away when he is stationed on a remote base.
He gets back into the regular swing of things and is running a lot and his tremor comes back, but stops when he sprains his ankle and stops running (and therefore drinking the kool-aid)
He is stationed in Australia, and someone sends him some crystal lite, and he is back to drinking a gallon of it a day and the tremor comes back. (No mention of if he was drinking something else during his runs before, or if he was drinking a gallon a day while not running in this case)
He is stationed in Florida, and has been regularly running and drinking sugar-free kool-aid, when he has a seizure.
His father points out a correlation between kool-aid and tremors, and two days later he is put on an anti-seizure medication. Since then he has not had any kool-aid and his tremors have not returned.
Would anyone like to guess the symptoms of hyponatremia, or would anyone like to hazard a guess as to why Gatorade is used as a recovery drink but kool-aid is not?
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Hyponatremia is what happens when your electrolyte balance is completely fucked up. It typically means you’ve got too much water and not enough salt in your body, and it can straight-up kill you. It’s sometimes called “water toxicity” and is why that lady died after drinking too much water for a radio contest. It *also* kills athletes who are significantly exerting themselves (this guy was describing 5-8 miles of running 4-5 days a week in addition to regular gym visits, including in Nevada in the summer) and not properly replenishing electrolytes. It’s why Gatorade was developed in the first place - it was a sports recovery drink for the Florida Gators football team, who are athletes exercising in a very humid environment that can cause significant depletion of electrolytes.
He even points out that he didn’t have any seizures or tremors after he was put on dylantin, but I’m guessing he also wasn’t *running five miles a day and rehydrating with just water* immediately after his seizure.
Anyway, it does appear that this guy was permanently grounded after a grand mal seizure that doctors believed might have been connected to prior head trauma from a car accident, and I’m sure that sucked, but it really seems like his tremors and muscle spasms were much more likely to have been related to an electrolyte imbalance (if you’re getting cramps, muscle spasms, and twitching one of the first things doctors/trainers/physical therapists will generally recommend is checking on your sodium/potassium/magnesium intake) than they were to consuming a chemical that literally millions of people (including tons of athletes working at high intensity and tons of people with demanding, precise jobs) consume daily without having seizures.
i get isotonic drinks when im really dehydrated cause of the salt thing, i didn’t realize a big part of it was alsi about replacing sugar.
how much salt do you need to be isotonic? google gives conflicting values. one says 0.9% so 9g per litre, but the isotonic drink i have has 1.3g per litre and the labelled one above seems to have even less.
It’s going to vary a lot based on your environment, your activity level, and a bunch of other stuff.
You should primarily be getting your electrolytes from food, but if you are an athlete (and even then only on days that you’re running/playing a sport, etc. Weight lifting, for example, doesn’t tend to require this kind of recovery because a decent weight routine typically causes less sweating and doesn’t take long enough to require this kind of electrolyte replacement, but running a marathon does) or if you’re doing high-energy work outside for long periods of time in the summer someplace that has hot summers (gardening, construction, etc.), you may need a sports drink.
But most people I know who go in for this kind of thing (mostly people who hike or backpack in the desert) are much more likely to go for salt sticks (electrolyte only) and skip the carb replacement.
But yeah like one of the things that I do a lot when I’m out with people in a hot environment is carry individual packets of pickles or olives. Unless you’re doing a LOT of high intensity exercise and losing a LOT of electrolytes, you probably don’t need to worry about it. But if you’re doing something like, say, walking around Vegas for several hours a day in the middle of the summer and you’re not used to that kind of weather (DefCon attendees - these are the people I would give bags of pickles to) you may want to have a salty snack and a liter of water instead of drinking a bottle of Gatorade.
However I know this can be really different between countries; when I was in London and my sister got sick we found blackcurrant rehydration sachets that were about a million miles away from what gatorade is like, and I’ve run into people who were very surprised that Americans drink what is essentially uncarbonated soda to recover from illness. Isotonic drinks isn’t a terminology we use here; we call them sports drinks and they are realistically a lot more sugar than they need to be for recovery and way more than the average person needs to stay hydrated, but actually pretty useful (if sugary) if you’ve been ill and need to rehydrate. But the bottle above is a 12oz bottle, so just over a third of a liter, so it’s about 500mg per liter I guess? In a liter bottle that’s about 25% of your RDV for sodium. I’m not sure what percentage that puts it at (160mg/340ml? I am, as we know, not great at numbers so I’m sure I’m going to get the percentage wrong). But I will say that the blackcurrant rehydration sachets tasted extremely salty compared to gatorade, so maybe the rest of the world just has higher standards for what counts as something that can be marketed for rehydration. (Gatorade is also specifically gatorADE, not gatorAID because that way nobody can claim they’re making medical claims, so that may be it).
Yeah, in my experience the main reason to electrolyte drinks have so much sugar in them is because electrolytes taste bad. Especially the medical grade stuff that they use for treating people who already have dehydration. My main experience was 15+ years ago, but I sure went through gatorade mix drink at a pretty high rate back during my backpacking days.
Ooh I think you’re talking about dioralyte! (Terrible name) That stuff’s fucking foul
In the states, the comparable product is Pedialyte. You can find it in the children’s section of most grocery stores and drug stores, next to the infant formula. It’s more expensive than gatorade, tastes worse, and has less sugar and more salts. (Not just sodium; also potassium and a couple other things.) It tends to also have some artificial sweetener to balance it out so it’s not super gross. (You can also get packets or bags of various electrolyte powders; I use a brand called Vitalyte but there are plenty of them.)
It’s absolutely fantastic for rehydrating. (I have serious and baffling hydration issues, so I’m very familiar.) It restores electrolytes, but it’s also balanced to maximize the speed at which it’s absorbed through the intestines, so you lose less of the liquid (especially important if you’re sick, but also just useful if you need to rehydrate dramatically).
Gatorade has more sugar for two reasons. One is because it tastes better that way, and we often use it as, like, a pseudo-soda. The other is that it was developed for athletes, and if you’ve just been playing intense competitive sports for an hour you probably need to perk up your blood sugar as well. But if you just need it for hydration you want a little sugar—sugar is an electrolyte!—but Gatorade has too much.
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