– If electrolytes are salt, and salt makes you dehydrated, how do electrolytes help you retain water?
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Too much salt makes you dehydrated, you need salt to live, but not too much. Ocean water is too salty for humans to consume and will kill you you if you drink too much. Saline which is what you get at the hospital is the perfect amount of salt for your body and is used to keep people hydrated and rehydrate the dehydrated
It’s about maintaining a balance of salts on the inside and outside of your cell walls.
You tip the scales too far or one side or the other and either your cell walls get crushed inwards or you explode outwards.
When you take in something like salt or Electrolytes, your body craves fluids to displace the minerals that counter fluids. Thus, you’re body is more keen on retaining fluids.
Our bodies are naturally salty. We need salts for maintaining osmotic pressure as well as for proper electrical activity.
If we sweat a lot we need to replenish salts we lose. If we take in lots of water but no extra salt, we have an osmotic imbalance and we basically lose salt to try to make the not-salty water we just drank to be as salty as the rest of our body
Very salty food, or sea water, is much saltier than our normal amount of salt, so that draws water out of our cells as our systems try to maintain the correct balance of saltiness
Water goes where salt goes. So if you have salt in your body it keeps the water from being excreted out. Keep it mind that your body will reabsorb salt from your blood. So if you lose water (from vomiting, diarrhea) you will increase your salt contents.
Electrolytes are more than just one “salt”. There’s sodium (Na) which is found in common table salt and in sea water. Electrolytes also include potassium (K), magnesium (Mg) and Calcium (Ca). Your body will try to keep a nice balance between the sodium and potassium; and the calcium and magnesium, without the proper balance, your muscles won’t be able to contract and relax. This is why being low on eltectrolytes or having too many can cause heart problems.
Consuming salts without fluids will result in the salt taking fluids away from your body, to dissolve itself as it is a hygroscopic substance = water taking away from cellular activity. As we excrete salts to regulate our body salt concentration (isotonic), the salts will take this water away from your body, therefore net loss of water from body.
If you consume salts with fluids, “hydrated” salts then they do not need to take water away from your body to dissolve it, and rather the salt carries the consumed fluids with it to where it is needed. Considering that salts help absorb water more efficiently we end up with the idea that salts help rehydrate the body. These solutions are called isotonic solutions – you can read into these yourself.
Isotonic solutions will help you understand that the mixture of salt/fluid is important to optimize hydration.
* When you pour table salt into fresh water, the salt dissolves and spreads out throughout the water.
* Also, if you put a drop of fresh water in a glass of salty water, the fresh water “spreads out” and mixes with the salty water.
From these two facts, we know that salt and water like to spread out, and reach an even concentration everywhere. This is also true in your body – salt moves from more salty places to less salty places, and water moves from less salty places to more salty places.
When you eat some salt, water in your body is pulled towards that salt, making the rest of your body saltier too. That’s why eating too much salt makes you dehydrated, and in that case you need fresh water to help dilute that salt.
But sometimes you already have too much water in your body – for example, maybe you’ve sweated out a lot of salt and water during a run, and you have been drinking fresh water to replace the water. In that situation, adding salt is the right thing to do – it makes your body saltier, and gets your body back to the “sweet spot” of saltiness.
Electrolyte sports drinks are just water, salt, and a bunch of sugar to make it taste okay. The ratio of salt to water is the same as it is in your body, so that when when you drink it, you replace both the salt and the water that you lost through sweating.
Your body tries to maintain a balance at all times, otherwise you will die.
Sweat is salty, if you sweat a lot you will lose salt and water. Now your thirsty from your work out so you drink some water. You have replaced the water but not the salt, so you have too much water. To maintain balance your body will get rid of the excess water through urination.
If you drink a sports drink you replace both the water and the salt so you don’t need to pee and thus retained water.
It’s good to note that this is situational and electrolytes don’t always help you retain water. If you drink a sports drink without working out you get too much salt and your body will also try and get rid of it, having the opposite effect. This is harder for your body but we’re getting beyond eli5 range.
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