Why does sodium-heavy liquids like pickle juice, chicken noodle soup, or saline hydrate you better than regular water when you’re dehydrated, but salt water dehydrates you?

Question

Why does sodium-heavy liquids like pickle juice, chicken noodle soup, or saline hydrate you better than regular water when you’re dehydrated, but salt water dehydrates you?

In: 925

Answer 1

So borrowing my own answer about sports drinks.

Having spent a lot of time in environments where hydration is of life saving importance, water is good, but sometimes it can be better. 1/2 water with 1/2 gatorade was a common drink in the field on long hikes.

Small amounts of sugar help aid in both drinking(flavor) and absorption.
You also lose electrolytes like magnesium, potassium, and sodium when sweating. Sports drinks generally have mixtures of electrolytes(why they taste salty), and sugars since this both aids absorption and replenishes lost electrolytes to sweat.

This is due to research suggesting that the body absorbs glucose and electrolytes through a different channel than the large intestine like most liquid so it can be absorbed faster.

Gatorade, powerade, Liquid IV, bodyarmor, etc all have the same idea of “little sugar to aid in flavor and absorption, and electrolytes”
Some try and get fancy with it and add in other vitamins for marketing and to be different but the core concepts are still all the same.

Most people do not actually need these. In most studies, unless you’re going at it for over an hour and losing a lot of sweat(like playing football in the southern sun like gatorade was meant for), most people do not actually see any benefit of sports drinks. They can even be worse since people think “This one bottle of water is like 5 since I added this packet to it!”
It’s not. You still need to drink water. Liquid IV has just found the market for “Clean packaging, heavy influencer marketing, all natural claims, and quasi association with medical things because of the name”, it’s effectively the same idea as any sports drink.
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The above answer was about a specific product but the statement still works.

Also salt water like from the ocean contains far far more salt than most food products.
Gatorade has 450ish mg of salt per liter.
Ocean water can have 30-40 grams per liter.
This is several times higher.
About 6,000% higher.

Even chicken noodle soup has about 1.5 grams of salt per liter.

There’s also things like isotonic, hypotonic and hypertonic which have different concentrations of sodium versus the body.