Let’s take for example sugar free Gatorade, or pedialyte. That in itself, is it effective at hydrating you?
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Those products contain vital salts which your body sweats out during exercise or vomits out during illness. The fluid itself won’t enter your cells as quickly as pure water, but maintaining homeostasis under duress is about more than that. If you just drink pure water during extreme exertion or illness, you could start having neurological problems as your nerves become unable to communicate, cellular processes which require salts could shut down, and you could even die. Which is what sports drinks and therapeutic hydration solutions like pedialyte are intended to prevent.
Most people won’t have this problem though. Unless you’re a professional athlete practicing in hot weather, doing hard labor under the sun for some reason, or have been vomiting everything up for over a day, none of these things are medically necessary.
The drinks you mentioned contain electrolytes, salts and sugars and are ment to replace those that you sweat out or loose to sickness (diarrhea / vomiting)
In the case of sugar free drinks they’re just replacing real sugar with artificial sweeteners.
Gatorade and similar drinks are you only meant for hardcore training where you sweat a lot and loosing salts and sugars.
The average person really doesn’t need to drink Gatorade after their workouts. Water is enough.
They don’t. They either do the opposite, poison you, or both. What makes water and water based drinks more effective at hydrating is the presence of electrolytes, which facilitate the uptake of the water into the body.
Any moderately clear, drinkable liquid is probably 90-95% water anyway, with the exception of high ABV spirits, but those don’t hydrate you well.
So it’s not that “Gatorade hydrates” it’s “water hydrates and Gatorade is mostly water”
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