DIY Electrolyte Mix

⚠️ Disclaimers

1. I am not a nutritionist and cannot guarantee this recipe’s effectiveness or safety for everyone. In particular, it can be dangerous to consume too much sodium or potassium.
2. This recipe is intended for endurance exercise, like hiking or running. As such, it has high sugar content. If you need electrolytes for another purpose (like rehydration, or getting over a hangover), then this is not the recipe for you.

Electrolyte mix recipe

This recipe makes about 23 1-tablespoon servings.

Ingredients

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 2 tablespoons + 1/4 teaspoon dextrose (or glucose; example)
• 2 teaspoons reduced sodium (example)¹
• (optional) 1 1/4 teaspoons magnesium malate (example)
• (optional) 3/4 teaspoons calcium citrate (example)
• 2 tablespoons lime powder (adjust to taste; example, or use something comparable)

Note: Magnesium and calcium are far less important in an electrolyte mix than sodium and calcium. You can optionally exclude them for simplicity.

Instructions

1. Measure all ingredients, add to a bowl, and mix. Duh.
2. Store in an airtight container.

Nutrition facts

Again, a disclaimer: I calculated these nutrition facts myself and I’m confident they’re correct, but I make no guarantees.

I recommend mixing 1 tablespoon of the electrolyte mix with 16-24 oz (or 500-750 mL) of water. Here are the nutrition facts per serving:

• Serving size: 1 tablespoon
• Sugar**: 10 g
• Sodium: 400 mg
• Potassium: 130 mg
• Magnesium: 10 mg
• Calcium: 10 mg

**The stated sugar amount excludes any sugar included in the lime powder or other flavoring you add. The flavoring may add a small (negligible) amount of additional sugar.

Comparison to other brands

Clearly the biggest advantage of the DIY electrolyte mix is cost. It comes in at just 10 cents per serving, which is less than half of the cheapest option (Gatorade, which is mostly sugar) and way less than the others.

Note that the flavor powder is actually the most expensive ingredient, accounting for nearly half the cost. If you omit the flavor powder entirely (which I don’t recommend), the price drops to 5 cents per serving. You could find a middle ground by using less flavor powder, or looking for a cheaper alternative.

How does it taste?

Taste is subjective, of course, but I think it’s pretty good! But it doesn’t taste quite as good as the more expensive options, especially the really sugary ones (my personal favorite is Skratch). But do the other options taste 3-10 times better? I doubt it. So the DIY mix definitely wins on value.

And you can of course try to improve the taste by modifying the recipe. Use more or less flavor powder, try a different flavor powder, and so on.

Background

In recent years I’ve become a big believer in drinking electrolytes while hiking, running, and biking. It seemingly keeps me from wearing down and allows me to hike a lot more miles in a day than I otherwise could. I typically use electrolyte powders (Skratch, Liquid IV, Nuun, etc.) that are mixed with water. They’re lightweight and convenient to carry while hiking. The only downside is they can be a little expensive, considering you’re really just paying for salt, sugar, and a bit of flavoring. So I did some research and whipped up my own recipe. I first used this mix on our Sawtooth hike, and I’ve used it on a bunch of hikes, runs, and bike rides since then.

It turns out electrolyte mixes aren’t very complicated. There are two main ingredients in every execrise-focused electrolyte mix:

1. Salt. Regular old table salt, NaCl. Your body needs sodium to regulate all sorts of things, and you lose lots of it when you sweat. (“Electrolyte” is just a fancy word for salt.)
2. Sugar. Regular old table sugar. It gives you energy, and makes it taste a lot better.

With those two ingredients alone you can make a very basic electrolyte mix. There is, of course, a little more that goes into the commercially available mixes. For example:

• Other electrolytes: Sodium isn’t the only electrolyte your body needs to replenish when you sweat. It’s also useful to add potassium, and somewhat useful to add magnesium, and calcium (roughly in that order).
• Glucose-to-fructose ratio: Glucose and fructose are two types of sugar molecules, and they are absorbed by the body differently. Glucose is absorbed quickly provides fast energy, while fructose is absorbed more slowly and provides longer lasting energy. Table sugar is sucrose, which is a 1:1 mix of glucose and fructose. In a mix used for exercise, increasing the glucose content can allow your body to absorb more total sugar, giving you more energy. There is universal ideal ratio for every situation, but commercial mixes range from 1:1 to 2:1 glucose to fructose (my mix is 1.25:1). (Further reading here and here if you’re interested.)
• Sugar-to-sodium ratio: It’s not strictly necessary to tune this ratio, and commercial mixes vary pretty widely. I found ratios of between 8:1 and 16:1 (measured as grams sugar to grams sodium, not sodium chloride) to be pretty reasonable in terms of taste and nutritional content, and my recipe has a ratio of ~11:1. But it’s important to know the absolute amount of sodium in a serving of your mix—taste alone is not a reliable method of detecting excessive sodium content (according to research here).
• Sodium-to-potassium ratio: Sodium is the most important electrolyte in your mix, and potassium is the next most important. Your body needs more sodium than potassium. Most commercial mixes are between 2:1 and 3:1 (my recipe is 3:1).

Modifying the recipe

(Nerd alert) I built an interactive web app that lets modify any of the amounts and ratios I used in the recipe. Check it out below if you want to make any changes, or just scale it up or down.

(Please remember the disclaimers at the top, and I especially can’t guarantee safety or effectiveness if you use a recipe with non-default parameters.)

If the app does not load, try this link.

1. This recipe assumes that the reduced sodium salt is 50% sodium chloride (regular table salt) and 50% potassium chloride, which is the most common blend. If yours has a different percentage split of sodium and potassium chloride, use the interactive tool below rather than following the recipe above. If your reduced sodium salt has other ingredients, like magnesium salts, then you might not want to use it for this recipe (although it would be fine if the other ingredients make up a small percentage of the salt). ↩︎