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Damn, Summer: Let's Learn What Electrolytes Actually Do

Something you don’t hear very often is that you need salt to live. Your body even needs kind of a lot of it... Without salt, all you have is plain water in and around your cells, with no dissolved medium to conduct/generate electricity. Sodium, specifically, is in part responsible for maintaining even fluid distributions around the body. If too much water (featuring sodium in solution) collects in one place, the cell will naturally expel the excess as it expels the sodium ions in an effort to maintain a proper electrical balance (more water and more sodium means more charge).

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Electrolytes and Human Health

Every living being is composed of cells. To sustain life, each cell depends upon a steady, adequate intake of two elements: water and nutrients, especially electrolytes. Electrolytes refer to essential minerals critical to health in a number of ways. Acting independently and cohesively, each these minerals called electrolytes – specifically magnesium, calcium, chloride, sodium and potassium – work with water in maintaining fluid and electrolyte homeostasis, in generating and conducting electrical impulses across cell membranes, in nerve transmission, muscle function and cognition.

Electrolytes — What Are They? What Happens If You Don't Have Enough?

Fluids and electrolytes are both essential for our cells, organs and body systems to work properly. Electrolytes are electrically charged minerals and compounds that help your body do much of its work — producing energy and contracting your muscles, for example.

Everything You Need to Know About Electrolytes — Including the Best Electrolyte Sources

You've probably heard you need to refuel with electrolytes post-workout — but why? Here, learn more about the benefits of electrolyte.

Head-to-Toe Benefits of Electrolytes

Electrolytes are minerals that produce ions when dissolved in a solution like blood, sweat, or urine. They’re called “electro”-lytes because they produce either a positive or negative electrical charge. Whatever you do, don’t let your electrolytes get out of balance---your entire body and brain can get thrown out of whack!

Health check: what’s the deal with electrolytes?

Sodium is the most important electrolyte because it plays a key role in normal muscle and nerve function and preventing cramps, as well as in stimulating thirst, improving fluid absorption in the small intestine and helping fluid retention. Other electrolytes also play key roles in normal physiological function. Calcium, for instance, helps co-ordinate muscle contraction. Low levels of potassium and magnesium are implicated in muscle cramps. Chloride, bicarbonate, phosphate and sulphate all contribute to maintaining pH balance and regulating fluid in and out of cells.

Symptoms of Electrolyte Imbalance, Plus How to Solve It

Because electrolytes have so many different roles within the body, an imbalance normally causes noticeable changes in how you feel pretty quickly.

The body keeps a tight rein on electrolytes in most situations

The most important electrolytes in the body are sodium, potassium, chloride, bicarbonate (the ionized form of carbon dioxide, dissolved in the water), magnesium, calcium and phosphate. These are regulated by the body very carefully through wonderfully complex systems, and are kept in perfect balance most of the time. We get the overwhelming majority of our electrolytes from food.

What Are Electrolytes and Why Are They so Good for You?

At their simplest, electrolytes are essential minerals like sodium, calcium, and potassium that produce an electrical charge when you consume them. These electric currents power your body’s metabolic processes.

What Are the Benefits of Electrolytes, and Where Can You Get Them?

Anyone who has ever seen a sports drink ad will likely have heard of them, but they aren’t just for exercise. We all need electrolytes to function, so everyone should know what they are, why we need them, and where we can get them.