Someone, please make clean electrolytes (recipes included)
I just want someone to make squeaky-clean electrolyte powders.
No maltodextrin or fillers, no citric acid (did you know that most food-grade citric acid is produced by fermenting sugars with Aspergillus niger, also known as black mold?), no non-nutritive sweeteners, no “natural” or artificial flavors.
The best I’ve seen on the market is Saltt Unflavored / Clean Slate. It’s fine. But I feel like we could do even better, and it would be nice to have flavored versions (but again, without natural or artificial flavors or any sweeteners and instead using organic real ingredients).
So: my wife and I have been making our own and testing different formulas. We’ve settled on a few that we think are really good (three flavors, each with a subjective rating of 8.5/10 or above from both of us). Here’s just a part of the tracking spreadsheet!
We’ve tested a lot of different ingredients:
I’m publishing these recipes desperately hoping that some enterprising company will choose to start making these. I think there’s a huge demand for ultra-clean supplements like this right now. Electrolytes are a big — and growing — category, and deserve a clean offering.
I will concede that at-scale manufacturing, packing, shelf life considerations, and other realities of commercial electrolyte production add nuance that our kitchen experiments don’t need to account for. Excipients and fillers make a lot of this easier. But I’m sure someone can figure it out…
Our three favorites so far: chocolate, mixed berry, and wheatgrass. Recipes below. The process for making them at home is simple:
- use a spice grinder to grind the salts finely
- combine everything and put it through a fine sieve
- then shake it up in a mason jar
Each of these assumes a 10g serving (roughly two scoopfuls of one of my leftover creatine scoopers) to get roughly 1000mg sodium, 200-250mg potassium, 60-100mg magnesium, and a wide range of calcium (which I was not optimizing for).
In the calculators below you can change the serving count and it will update with how much you need of each ingredient.
Salted Chocolate
One 10g serving costs $0.52 in raw ingredients, has 26 kcal, 5g carbs; 1026mg sodium, 206mg potassium, 58mg magnesium, 4mg calcium.
Mixed Berry
One 10g serving costs $0.72 in raw ingredients, has 36 kcal, 6g carbs; 994mg sodium, 202mg potassium, 67mg magnesium, 14mg calcium.
Wheatgrass
One 10g serving costs $1.05 in raw ingredients, has 18kcal, 2g carbs; 1035mg sodium, 263 potassium, 102mg magnesium, 25mg calcium.
As best I can tell, all the ingredients above that can be organic are so, and I don’t believe any of them have fillers. The electrolytes themselves come from natural sources (sodium mostly from the salts, potassium from the cave salt and coconut water powder, magnesium from seawater extraction).
If you have any suggestions for better ingredients or approaches, please let me know!
Note: Amazon affiliate links included in this post.
Looking for more to read?
Want to hear about new essays? Subscribe to my roughly-monthly newsletter recapping my recent writing and things I'm enjoying:
And I'd love to hear from you directly: andy@andybromberg.com