Transcription
Maybe you saw this Super Bowl commercial. Hydrate with Liquid IV or the constant influencer endorsements.
I typically drink Element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electrolytes. Hydration is a priority for me. I'm all about hydration. This is why I love liquid IV. Go ahead and pour that thing in there. I don't think y'all understand for real how this tastes.
Doctors, scientists, athletes, beauty influencers all seem to agree that various packages of minerals, salts, artificial flavoring and vitamins are essential for hydration, performance, mental acuity, and by extension, success in life itself. But what if I told you that electrolyte drinks are largely a scam? I mean, yes, electrolytes are crucial to biological life, a key component of neural activity, but their constant, almost hyperbolic endorsement by top influencers is not about hydration as much as it is about the profit margins of these companies selling cheap, shelf stable ingredients to social media audiences at high markups. And the rise of electrolyte hype has been proven to be dangerous. In this video, I'm going to tell you the dirty truth about electrolytes. That the industry shilling them isn't concerned with your health as much as it is in promoting what amounts to dehydrated soda with its own frankly obvious risks.
I developed um hallucinations. So, I was having auditory and visual hallucinations. I developed headtotoe neuropathy.
So, first let's talk about what an electrolyte actually is. They're electrically charged minerals including sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium chloride, phosphate, and bicarbonate, which are essential for regulating nerve and muscle function, balancing the body's pH, and maintaining hydration. They act as electrical conductors inside and outside of cells. Now, if you didn't have electrolytes, you'd be dead. And certain medical conditions can make you lose them fast, like excessive sweating and heat or intensive exercise, or if you're losing a lot of fluid because of diarrhea.
While that's all true, here's the thing. Most ordinary Western diets contain more than enough natural electrolytes that you don't need supplementation. And not just by a little. The average American salt consumption is almost a full gram over what your body actually needs. There's a lot of uh wellness rhetoric around you can't absorb water without electrolytes or you you absorb water better with electrolytes and that's actually not true. Water is regulated really well in the body and it's absorbed very effectively in the gut without electrolytes.
That's Danielle Shine and I'm an accredited practicing dietician and nutritionist. It's very deceptive when we see athletes promoting these products for the everyday person because the everyday person does not need an electrolyte supplement. Beauty people, beauty influencers that promote electrolytes, I think it's very concerning because if these people are taking them themselves and they aren't losing a lot of fluid and sodium, then they don't need them. And I have to question maybe their ethics and integrity behind that. A lot of social media influences, I think, are putting people's health at risk.
Which is to say, there are specific occasions where it's useful to take them, but they're not supposed to be an everyday thing. And this crucial point is the difference between healthy hydration and potentially dangerous health outcomes. So, what is behind this electrolyte craze?
Yo yo yo, it's Austin here. We about to do a 24-hour challenge with Liquid ID. You're no doubt familiar with Gatorade, which has been a staple on the electrolyte circuit since at least the 1980s. Nothing cuts through thirst by Gatorade thirst.
Gatorade's electrolytes come to you directly in a premixed liquid form. And there is no doubt that it's useful on athletic fields where everyone is moving all the time. But how often do you just pop open a Gatorade while you're hanging out at home? Is this ever the first thing you take when you get out of bed?
All right, this is going to sound obvious, but the big difference between Gatorade and electrolyte satchets is that one is a drink and the other is a tiny package of salts that you mix for yourself. And that might seem immaterial to the average observer, but think about it from a business perspective. Packets of actual liquid are heavy and expensive to transport relative to the tiny satchets of salt in this packet. All right. Now, these salts, they're shelf stable, and they cost mere pennies on the dollar. Yet, both products, these things, they cost about the same price, about $2.50. But that markup on salt and sugar allows companies like Liquid IV and Element to instead spend big on social media marketing and even Super Bowl commercials. In other words, you are the one paying for the marketing.
If you've been around this channel for a while, you've probably seen my videos on the Green Slurry Nutrient Shake AG1, where I have variously exposed the criminal history of its founder, the shaky evidence that it does anything at all, and most relevant for this video, how its business model is based on deception, not health. Just like AG1, an electrolyte company like Element or Liquid IV can offer to pay influencers a full third of the price and still make a heavy profit for themselves. And this model that pushes marketing before anything else has allowed the global electrolyte market to a staggering $39 billion valuation.
According to Fortune Insights, more than hydration, electrolyte companies are selling the idea that their salt and sugar mixtures give you energy. And this is not a new tactic. It might be as old as modern marketing itself. Ice cold Coca-Cola. There's no waistline worry with Cookino. Actually, this individualsiz bottle has no more calories than half a grapefruit.
In the 1960s, Coke was sold as a health drink endorsed by doctors and nurses, where sugar gave you the energy you needed to make it through the day. Meanwhile, the candy bar Baby Ruth was promoted as having high levels of dextrose, a sugar that gives you the energy you needed, apparently, to golf. Heck, in the 1920s, one company even sold radioactive radiium infused tonics for a pickmeup, which predictably ended in customers dying of jaw cancer. You know, people, they want energy, and they're willing to pay for it. But that doesn't mean that those claims have merit. And that history of advertising alone should be more than enough to make you question the healthy marketing sheen of anyone trying to sell you a wellness product on social media today. People wanted money in the past just as much as they want it right now.
At this point, you're probably asking yourself what the actual harm could be outside of an injury to your wallet. Well, a few weeks ago, I got an email from someone who had moved to Colorado from California in 2024 and turned to electrolyte drinks because she felt dehydrated in the much drier climate.
My name is Blair Huddy and Liquid IV destroyed my body and my health. Putty said that she first came across Liquid IV at Costco and figured she would give it a try. She was careful to only take the recommended dose of one packet a day, but things started to go downhill fast for her.
The first thing to go was my sleep. So, I'm a regular 8 and 1 half 9h hour sleeper and suddenly I was down to 1 hour a night and I had no idea why. And I'm still I I have to be medicated to sleep. So, that sort of still ongoing. Um, I then developed tinitis. So, I was having auditory and visual hallucinations. I developed headtotoe neuropathy.
The symptoms continued to get worse, but she couldn't figure out why, let alone connect the dots to liquid IV. Then, one night, she went out to a restaurant with her father and ordered a dish with chicken liver in it.
I'd never had chicken liver before. We, you know, it was a fancy restaurant. We decided to try it on the menu and I immediately started vomiting at the table. Um, my lips started tingling, my throat felt like it was closing, and I thought, "Okay, I'm having an allergic reaction, but I've never had an anaphylactic reaction before."
What she didn't know was that high levels of vitamin B had accumulated in her body and caused a sort of toxic overload when combined with the high levels of vitamin B inherent in chicken liver.
I have three different blood tests. I have the original blood test where my blood came back more than twice the upper limit of B6. The response to that was like the nurse that called me was kind of like whatever you're taking that has like your B6 is really high, whatever you're taking that has B6 in it, stop.
And that's when she made the connection to liquid IV. You see, while Liquid IV comes in an enormous number of flavored variations, one common theme is that in addition to salt and sugar, it contains an entire array of B vitamins, including B3, which is nascin, B5, B6, B12. Hoodie's blood test revealed that her vitamin B levels were more than twice the upper limit of the reference range at 40 nanogs per milliliter. After she stopped taking liquid IV, her levels reset to just 11 by the time that she took a follow-up test. a month later. Though her symptoms persist to this day, and this isn't an isolated case.
My inbox has been flooded with stories of people being poisoned by over-the-counter supplements containing vitamin B6.
And so, there's been this accumulation of this particular supple supplemental dose of B6. So, if someone's taking an electrolyte and it's got extra B6, depending what else they're having in their diet in terms of supplements, energy drinks, they are actually potentially putting themselves at vitamin B6 toxicity risk, peripheral neuropathy, and serious irreversible nerve issues.
The problem is so acute that Australia is introducing new regulations around B vitamins, which will restrict higher doses. The Therapeutic Goods Administration will tighten regulation of vitamin B6. Though it should be noted that the legislation won't affect the levels in a typical electrolyte packet.
Now, it could be that Hoodie is a genetic outlier who is especially sensitive to small amounts of vitamin B for some reason. And yet, overdoses appear to be on the rise. Nationwide, 439 cases of non-fatal vitamin B exposure were reported in 2024, up from 369 in 2019 and 311 in 2014. According to the national poison data system records, and that's just cases that ended up in the medical system. The real numbers are likely much higher.
The heart of the problem, as I see it, is that electrolyte companies sell the idea of hydration to get people to buy their first packet, but then they can only differentiate themselves on the basis of taste. This alchemy transforms a vital nutrient into a lifestyle product. Liquid IV advertises nine different flavors, and their bevy of influencers comment well, mostly on the taste.
I'm not going to lie, you could really taste the melon in it. I can't wait to taste this one. I can't wait to taste this.
Which is a subtle way to encourage people to consume and sell ever more of their product. The effect transforms electrolyte mixtures into a sort of soft drink and not a medicine that can have potentially toxic add-on effects. The marketing gimmick gets absolutely insane when you go over to Elements's recipe page, which actually encourages people to make alcoholic cocktails out of their hydrating packets, which is sort of counterproductive since alcohol actually dehydrates you. So, are these really health drinks? Are you supposed to have a cocktail after a workout? Do these companies actually have your best interests at heart? Well, obviously not. This is capitalism after all.
While Element does not contain potentially dangerous levels of B vitamins, we should still be concerned with needlessly adding levels of salt to an already salty American diet and the cardiovascular damage that goes along with that. But getting back to B vitamins, why even put them in hydration drinks at all if there's a potential danger to the customers? In other words, why not just sell salt and sugar and eliminate a potentially fatal risk to the people who drink your product?
Now, I thought about this question quite a bit over the last few weeks, and I kept circling around one idea. B vitamins, particularly nascin, but also other variations, produce subtle sensations characterized by intense skin redness, itching, burning, or warmth, typically on the face, chest, and arms, collectively known as flushing. At small doses, these effects can be minimal, but they do register as sensations at some level. And this is why research studies occasionally use B vitamins as so-called active placeos in clinical trials when scientists want to test how different sensations result in different health outcomes.
Now, I wrote about active placeos in my books, The Wedge and Dream, that showed how you can use strong and subtle sensations like an ice bath or a sauna or flotation tank or even marijuana and the drug ecstasy to create more positive placebo responses. It's a concept that I call the wedge. When someone connects the idea of hydration and energy to a nasin flush, they may in fact feel better as a result. And linking a sensation to an idea also turns out to be a great hook for marketers that keeps people coming back to buy more of that product. At least that's my guess for why Liquid IV and other companies might be willing to put their customers at risk. It all comes down to cash. But maybe you have a better explanation for why these ingredients are so popular. and let me know down in the comments.
One thing though is for sure. Liquid IV Super Bowl ad linking the color of your urine to a need for more electrolytes is misleading at the very least. Water will do just fine, and that's actually what changes the color of your urine in the toilet. In most cases, you don't need electrolytes. Just like with AG1, the current fascination with them mostly comes down to how profitable the business model is. They manufactured the idea that everyone is dehydrated and that you need to pay for something other than ordinary tap water to fix the ailments of modern living. Bottom line, take electrolytes only if you're sweating profusely and even then stay away from anything with a B vitamin in it just in case.
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