First off, electrolytes doesnt mean salt. Salt is an electrolyte, but so is potassium or calcium...so is anything that has a free ion. Secondly, when you sweat, you are losing salt, potassium, calcium, and a host of other minerals. Water does not replenish them...and adding salt to water still does not do the job. Gatorade contains the ingredients you lose in sweat...it is the superior choice to water for physical activities. Now, if we are talking about oral health, gatorade may be one of the worst things you can drink.
I recently noticed that Gatorade doesn't contain High Fructose Corn Syrup like it always used to. Same with Vitamin Water.
Water is absorbed in greater quantities when it is combined with sodium and glucose. This is the why gatorade is formulated the way it is. This is also the basis of treatment for diarrhea.
when you sweat you lose sodium. water enters the cells by following sodium through sodium channels, hence why drinks like Gatorade work. so if you are doing something physical exerting and losing a lot of sweat, thereby losing Na, drinking water does no good. You will just piss it right out.
It's the same thing except when you buy one gatorade and add water it's a better value. Why pay full price for watered down Gatorade with Propel?
A guy I play Ultimate with used to always bring a big jug of some kind of orange drink (not a gatorade-like drink) out to the fields. After the games on a particularly hot day he was in line at a pizza place and passed out. He was rushed to the hospital and after he revived, I believe the doctors told him that the electrolytes had been flushed out of his system and to start drinking gatorade when he played.
What I often do when I'm showing off my soccer skills and sweating like a warthog is drink water then gatorade from different containers interchangably but not mixed together. No way...
