Too bad the commercial nature of “sports drinks” have dialed up the sugar and broke away from the clinical goal of rehydration.
The normal one is for high powered endurance activities and contains some carbs (sugar) to help fuel you through them.
They have one with even more carbs, sodium and potassium for people running marathons.
The last two on that chart aren't a good choice for someone who isn't active. Stick to the first two for that.
If you look up the evidence for the downsides of artificial sweeteners anything that finds one is generally an observational study. So for example, the claim that they cause obesity is backed by the observation that obese people consume it in greater amounts than people who are not obese. That's like standing in front of a hospital and noticing everyone with a broken leg is on crutches and coming to the conclusion that crutches are the problem. Double blinded, placebo controlled studies don't find this effect. The best evidence we have indicates they are safer than the obesity that full calorie sweeteners cause in most people.
This is a false choice and has nothing to do with the above commenter's preferences.
Many people just desperately long for convenient foods/drinks that aren't so sweet in the first place and feel frustrated that the largest brands don't want to bother with them.
Sometimes I add a dash of lime
Veeeey low cost and great. And you can pre-mix it in a zip lock bag to have it always available. And add some orange flavour kool-aid powder if you need flavour.
Commercial Rehydration drinks are overpriced and overhyped IMHO
The ones that come as tablets which dissolve in water give you the electrolytes without the sugar. Less packaging waste, too. SIS (Science In Sport) is good, and other brands are available.
Sugar, like salt, is a solute and will impair water absorption.
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-FCH-CAH-06.1
Just 4 ingredients:
Glucose, anhydrous (dextrose)
Sodium chloride (salt)
Potassium chloride
Trisodium citrate, dihydrate
Of course, the batch size of 75 kg may not be the most convenient for home use, but it's easy to scale down.
Noteworthy that others tried to gatekeep thier low tech approach and experimental efforts. So much "perfection, enemy of the good" in expert circles.
The amazing discovery was that just a bit of glucose made the world of difference.
Other doctors and nurses found their experiment [drinking water w/ sugar+salt] bizarre and tried to stop them.
And maybe it was that. But I also found this talk from Dr Cash; he gives other examples of resistance (along with their causes).
Whereas, in one country I went to, Jamaica, I was puzzled, even though I was working at that time for PAHO, that there was terrific opposition. It seemed that they wouldn’t cooperate with anything. Even they wouldn’t give my assistant a bed in the residence quarters.
So I found out gradually—I was investigating this—and I found out several things. One is, the head of the hospital was so skeptical about this working that he had made a hundred dollar bet with his residents that it would fail. So obviously there was an incentive for it to fail. (Laughs.)
Secondly, the head of hospital stores, I found out, was making a lot of money on kickbacks from the IV company. So he had no interest in terms of resource flow of substituting oral for IV.
Always been like this. Even something as simple as making them wash hands was a pain.
There's much I don't know about medicine in Bangladesh, but I'm guessing doctors think it's unethical to treat patients with anything other than the best accepted standard of care, unless engaging in an experiment for which the risk and benefits can be described and there exists a reason to believe the benefits outweigh the risks. I suspect that was not communicated well by the experimenters.
Talk about leaving a dent.
Both (Norman Borlaug and Dr Cash) go to show that modern and traditional medicines can be carefully manipulated in amazing ways to save millions of lives.
> Oral rehydration therapy (ORT) is a type of fluid replacement used to prevent and treat dehydration, especially due to diarrhea.[1] It involves drinking water with modest amounts of sugar and salts, specifically sodium and potassium.[1] Oral rehydration therapy can also be given by a nasogastric tube.[1] Therapy can include the use of zinc supplements to reduce the duration of diarrhea in infants and children under the age of 5.[1] Use of oral rehydration therapy has been estimated to decrease the risk of death from diarrhea by up to 93%.[2]
I wonder how much one informed the other.
I was in a cholera study at the University of Maryland for a week. Read a lot of sci fi, played ping pong and drank fluids with electrolytes. There is a first phase which is uncomfortable but otherwise, as the docs said, cholera is a piece of cake if treated with hydration.