Do electrolytes help retain water or do they help absorb water? Also what even is an electrolyte?
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An electrolyte is just an ionic compound that dissolves in water. This causes osmotic pressure, which our bodies try to keep at a stable level. The key thing to remember is that osmotic pressure depends on the concentration of electrolytes (moles of electrolytes/liter of water)
If you have too much electrolytes in your body, then pressure gets too high, so your kidneys dump the excess electrolytes out in your urine. On the other hand, if you have not enough electrolytes in your body, then pressure gets too low, so your kidneys dump excess water out in your urine. This increases the concentration of electrolytes which then increases osmotic pressure.
When you sweat a lot, you lose both water and electrolytes. If you simply drink water, then you get your ‘liters of water’ back to normal but your ‘moles of electrolytes’ is too low. This causes your body to pee out water until the liters of water goes low enough to get the concentration back to normal. This peeing dehydrates you. Drinking an electrolyte drink like gatorade or pedialyte gets both ‘liters of water’ and ‘moles of electrolytes’ back to normal.
So why don’t we normally drink gatorade all the time? Because most people barely sweat, and eat a lot of salty food, so their concentration of electrolytes is too high. This causes their body to urinate out the excess electrolytes to get down to the correct concentration. Why is this a problem? Well your kidneys are not 100% efficient so you lose some water when you do this, so you get dehydrated a little. Drinking pure water will get your concentration back to balanced, which prevents this.
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