AMA #33: Hydration—electrolytes, supplements, sports drinks, performance effects, and more

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome to a sneak peek, Ask Me Anything or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
Welcome to Ask Me Anything, episode 33 I'm joined once again by Nick Stenson. In today's episode, we talk about all things related to hydration. So we've got a lot of questions about hydration. And personally, this has become something that's a lot more interesting to me in the past couple of months than it had been previously, for reasons I'll explain in the podcast. So we kind of do, I think, a tour de force on this here. We had actually intended to talk about a few other unwritten questions, related topics, but we went so long on hydration that we just decided to make this a dedicated episode to that. So we kind of get into, where does water live in our body? You got to start from the standpoint of understanding, where are the water compartments of our body? And then you have to get into this idea of tonicity. So it gets a little sciency up there, but then once you understand that, and I think it's pretty straightforward to understand, everything that we start to talk about makes sense thereafter. So we get into kind of the difference between dehydration and volume depletion, what the health consequences of that are, how we're actually losing water, how much water we need throughout the day, how much water versus salt you're losing when you sweat, and how that changes under different conditions, and therefore what your hydration needs look like under different conditions of temperature and exertion. Talk about how dehydration affects performance, what the signs look like of dehydration, and we even get into what happens when you over hydrate. So that's something that is fortunately rare, but unfortunately can be quite catastrophic. And then we kind of get into all of the different ways one can rehydrate. So what's the difference about rehydrating with electrolytes only versus electrolytes plus glucose versus glucose only. We then get into all of the different sports drinks and how they're put together, which ones are based on scientific principles, maybe which ones less so. Even getting into kind of the nuance around the optimal ratio of glucose to sodium.
So if you're a subscriber and you want to watch the full video of the podcast, you'll be able to see it within the show notes. If you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of the video on our YouTube page. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 33 One addendum to this podcast since it was recorded. This AMA was recorded in early January of 2022
At that time, I had no involvement with any company producing any of the hydration products that are discussed here. However, since recording this podcast, I've continued down the rabbit hole of getting deeper and deeper into this. I've become particularly enamored with one of the companies that I mention here, and I am now a small investor in that company. That company is Element, LM&T.
So understand that while I now have a financial conflict of interest through my investment in Element, I did not have that at the time of this podcast.
All right, Nick, we're back for another AMA. This is your second one, so you survived the first one, huh?

**Nick Stenson** (3:34)
Yeah, I made it through the first one, so we'll see how this one goes.

**Peter Attia** (3:37)
All right. I don't know. I think we've got some interesting topics for today. What do we have?

**Nick Stenson** (3:41)
We have a good amount of questions that came through around hydration, all things that relate to that, which I know is a topic you became a little more interested in in the recent weeks and months.
I'm sure people, even if they haven't heard the stories, might have seen the scars on your face in some podcasts and things like that, which are healing nicely. So why don't you kind of give people a quick rundown of where this interest came from. Not that you weren't interested before, but where this additional focus.

**Peter Attia** (4:09)
Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a renewed interest actually. The story you're referring to was from the time of this recording several months ago. It was kind of a perfect storm of things.
So I, on a Tuesday, gave a lot of blood, about three units of blood.