The Biology

Sodium is the principal electrolyte of the fluid outside your cells. It sets the tone of that compartment, and where sodium goes, water follows. That is osmosis, stated without ceremony.

Drinking plain water without minerals dilutes what's already there. That is why "just drink more" can sometimes feel like less — you added volume without adding the thing the volume organizes itself around.†

The sodium-potassium pump (Na⁺/K⁺-ATPase) sits in the membrane of essentially every cell you own, trading sodium out for potassium in, thousands of times a second.

Nerve signals, muscle contraction and a meaningful share of your resting energy budget run on this exchange. That is a statement about physiology, not a promise about our stick.†

Sweat carries sodium out with it, and how much varies enormously — person to person, day to day, acclimatized or not, cool morning or a hot afternoon.

That range is exactly why we state our numbers plainly on the front of the stick instead of promising outcomes. 500 mg is a quantity you can reason about. "Optimized hydration" is not.

Magnesium participates in hundreds of enzyme systems, including ones involved in normal muscle and nerve function. It rarely gets the headline and usually deserves one.

We include 60 mg as malate. That is a statement about the ingredient literature; we hold it there.†

Sugar in hydration products has one historical job: rapid carbohydrate delivery during long endurance efforts. If that's your use case, add carbs deliberately — a gel, a banana, real food you chose on purpose.

For everyone else, we saw no reason to make salt taste like dessert.