ArtisianWhat are electrolytes?
uniqueid198xEffectively, yes. “Electrolytes” is a collective term for the ions that help move stuff into and out of your cells. These are primarily sodium and potassium, although calcium also plays a role. Sodium is the most important of these for sports drinks, because it is the one you most lose through sweat.
Unfortunately, most sports drinks don’t really contain enough to balance out heavy sweating, because sodium salt (aka normal salt) tastes, unsurprisingly, salty. If a drink had the right balance of sodium, it would be noticeably salty. Gatorade has one line of drinks that do that, and Pedialyte is specially made for the correct balance. Sports drinks really jack up the sugar to help hide the salt taste.
Most sports drinks, rather than having the sodium you need to replace sweat, instead jack up the potassium (think Prime and it’s advertised 843mg of electrolytes, 700mg of which is potassium). This doesn’t really replace the electrolytes you need, but it also doesn’t make the drink nearly as salty.
When you see “electrolytes”, you should flip around to the nutrition label, which must list the actual amounts of sodium and potassium. This will tell you if it will actually help you recover from activity, or if it’s just more sugar water and advertising.
Sodium is also used for all the electrical activity of our body (such as thinking and moving and living…), and is fundamental in adsorption of nutritions in digestion. Sodium, potassium and calcium are so important that it is difficult to even list all processes they are involved
Yup, they are the basic electron donators for almost everything. In the context of sports drinks tho, hyponatremia is the #2 threat (after hypernayremia, funnily enough), so the rest of it was sort of overcomplicating
They don’t donate electrons. When metallic sodium or potassium donate electrons they burn, explosively. It doesn’t happen in our bodies. It happens by simple contact with water.
They are already in their ionic form in our body. They cross membranes as ions, creating a potential difference across the membranes. Allowing ion to diffuse along the gradient generates the electric signals of our brains, or trigger the muscle contraction.
Ah, thanks for the clarification
So you’re saying… they are the electrons. Woahhh.
They are actually positively charged. Electrical signals in our are actually not created by long migrations of electrons, but by short diffusion of positive charges across membranes, that temporarily reverse local polarization. This depolarization triggers nearby regions to do the same, creating depolarization waves: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depolarization
It’s very fascinating, also because controlling the cross membrane diffusion of ions allows for controlling the signal
I know man, I was just being silly. My first degree was in physiology and pharmacology so I’m very familiar with nerve signalling.