Biotic's Gain

Electrolytes are minerals that carry an electrical charge once they dissolve in the body’s water — sodium, chloride and potassium above all, with magnesium and calcium alongside them. They set how fluid is shared between the blood and the inside of your cells, and they make nerve signals and muscle contractions possible. You lose them in sweat, which is why heavy sweating is the one situation where putting salt back matters as much as putting water back. For an ordinary day, including an ordinary hour in the gym, food and plain water cover it comfortably: a normal meal returns far more sodium and potassium than a session takes out. Long efforts, hot weather and illness are where a drink with salt in it starts to make sense.

What an electrolyte actually is

The word sounds technical and means something fairly plain: a mineral that splits into charged particles once it dissolves. Sodium, potassium and chloride do most of the work, with magnesium, calcium, bicarbonate and phosphate alongside them. Sodium sits mainly in the fluid outside your cells and potassium mainly inside them, and holding that difference in place is one of the busiest jobs in the body — a surprising share of the energy you burn at rest goes on pumps doing nothing else.

That difference in charge across a cell membrane is what a nerve impulse is made of. A signal travels as a brief, orderly collapse of it followed by a reset, thousands of times a second. Muscle works on the same principle, with calcium released inside the fibre to trigger the contraction and pulled back out to end it. Balance is the point rather than quantity: too little sodium and too much are both problems, which is why the kidneys and thirst regulate it tightly instead of leaving the outcome to whatever you happened to drink.

What sweat takes with it

Sweat is mostly water, but it is not pure water. What it carries most of is sodium and chloride; potassium, magnesium and calcium leave in far smaller amounts. How salty one person’s sweat is compared with another’s varies widely and is largely fixed by their physiology — commonly quoted figures run from roughly half a gram to a gram and a half of sodium per litre, and people sit all over that range. If your training top dries with white tidemarks on it, you are at the salty end of it.

Sweat rate varies more still, somewhere between about half a litre and two litres an hour depending on heat, humidity, clothing, how hard you are working and how used to the conditions you are. Those two figures multiplied together are the whole question, and it is why a blanket rule is useless. An hour in a cool gym might cost well under a gram of sodium, which a sandwich covers. Four hours on a hot hill is a different order of loss entirely.

Why food and plain water cover most days

UK advice is to eat no more than 6g of salt a day, which is about 2.4g of sodium, and the average adult here is above that figure rather than below it. Most of it does not come from the salt cellar either — bread, cheese, processed meat, sauces, ready meals and eating out account for the bulk. So the ordinary British diet runs a standing sodium surplus. Against that background, an hour’s training followed by a normal meal needs no engineering at all.

Potassium tells the same story from the other end. It arrives in potatoes, bananas, beans and pulses, milk, fish and most vegetables, and the amount lost in sweat is small by comparison. A plate of food is a better electrolyte drink than an electrolyte drink, and it brings protein and carbohydrate along with it. Fluid itself is the part people most often get wrong, and that is covered in whether drinking more water changes your skin.

When a drink with salt in it earns its place

There are real situations where replacing salt matters, and they have a pattern: large losses, over a long stretch, without a meal in between.

• Continuous hard exercise past roughly an hour to an hour and a half, particularly in heat — long rides, marathons, hill days, hot team sports.
• Two sessions in a day, or several hot days back to back, where you never quite catch up in between.
• Heavy physical work in heat — kitchens, roofing, warehouses in a July heatwave.
• Vomiting or diarrhoea, where losses are large and sodium-rich. Rehydration salts from a pharmacy are made for exactly that, and a pharmacist is the right person to ask, especially for a young child or an older adult.
• Anyone sweating heavily for hours while drinking only large volumes of plain water, which is the one common case where the balance gets pushed the wrong way rather than simply left alone.

Two things worth knowing about the products. Coconut water is high in potassium and low in sodium, so it is a pleasant drink and a poor match for what sweat actually removes. And the useful version of this is cheap: a sports drink, squash with a pinch of salt added, or salted food alongside plain water all land in much the same place. Tablets and sachets in branded tubes are convenient, not special, and most of the ones being drunk at desks are selling people salt they already had too much of.

What a label is allowed to claim

In Great Britain, only claims on the GB nutrition and health claims register may be used on a food or a food supplement, and the register is a closed list. Where it does carry authorised wording for a mineral, that wording has to be used as it stands rather than livened up — which is why a compliant label reads more flatly than the advertising around it. Claims attach to the nutrient rather than to a formulation or a brand, the word “normal” can never be dropped or traded up for “improved”, and disease or treatment claims are banned outright.

So phrases like “restores everything you’ve lost”, “beats dehydration” or “fights fatigue” are advertising language rather than authorised claim language. It is worth reading hydration marketing with that in mind: the more dramatic the sentence, the less likely it is to be a sentence anyone was allowed to write.

Where the Whey Protein Isolate sits

A protein powder is not an electrolyte drink, and we do not sell it as one. Biotic’s Gain Whey Protein Isolate is a 2lb tub supplying 25g of protein and 5.5g of BCAAs per serving, in six flavours, filtered further than a concentrate so it is lower in fat and lactose. That is a description of the ingredient, not a promise about a hot day.

The authorised claims for protein in Great Britain read exactly like this:

Protein contributes to a growth in muscle mass.

Protein contributes to the maintenance of muscle mass.

Protein contributes to the maintenance of normal bones.

They are conditional on the food being at least a source of protein, meaning at least 12 per cent of its energy comes from protein, and they belong to the nutrient — so they apply to a chicken breast as much as to a tub of powder. There is no authorised whey-specific claim in Great Britain at all; a long list of proposed ones was rejected. Anything you read tying whey in particular to recovery, repair or performance is wording nobody was permitted to use. Whether you can hit a protein target without a shake is the honest version of that question, and the protein guide sets out what is worth knowing before buying anything.

When to ask a pharmacist or GP

Most of this is ordinary and sorts itself out over a meal. Worth asking about: cramp that keeps recurring despite sensible eating and drinking; feeling faint, confused, nauseous or unusually heavy-legged after a long effort in heat; vomiting or diarrhoea lasting more than a day or two, and any case of it in a baby or an older adult; and headaches or sickness that come on during long endurance events rather than afterwards.

One group should not take a sodium or potassium target from a label or from an article at all. If you are on medication for blood pressure, your heart or your kidneys, how much of either you take in can matter a great deal, and the number should come from the clinician who prescribed it.

Biotic’s Gain products are food supplements and are not a substitute for a varied, balanced diet or a healthy lifestyle. Nothing here is medical advice. If you have a health condition, are pregnant or breastfeeding, or are taking medication, speak to a pharmacist or your GP before starting a supplement.