Potassium

Children with gastroenteritis, which is nobody in a gym. The trials were graded poor to moderate quality and mostly unblinded, since a drink cannot be disguised as a drip. Each route carries its own complication: vein inflammation with the drip, a stalled gut with drinking, roughly one in 50 and one in 33. The death counts, six against two across four trials, are far too small to read anything into.

Hospitalised children with acute diarrhoea, compared against another rehydration solution rather than against water, so nothing here reaches a well person drinking one. This is the 2002 version of a review since updated, cited for the finding that changed the formulation. The trials were mostly unblinded and largely in low- and middle-income hospital settings. Low blood sodium was looked for in only six trials with events in three, so that reassurance rests on thin data.

These are general-population reference values, not sport nutrition, and they describe what a healthy adult is thought to need over a day rather than what anyone should drink during exercise. The salt equivalent is arithmetic from the sodium figure, not a separately measured value. The report's own opening observation is that what you eat does not usually move your blood electrolyte levels, because the kidneys and hormones hold them steady.

One real exception sits inside the largest of these studies: among American footballers alone, sweat measurements did carry a weak signal, and in the other ten sports none did. Beyond that, cramping was self-reported throughout, and serum electrolytes were sampled before and after a race rather than inside the muscle at the moment a cramp struck, which is where the theory actually locates the problem. Forty-three crampers is enough to rule out a dominant effect, not a small one.

Twenty crampers is a small group, and the finish-line enzyme gap is borderline at p = 0.034 with spreads wide enough to swallow it. The blood was drawn after the cramp, so muscle damage could as easily follow a cramp as cause one. Crampers and non-crampers only diverged in pace from 25 kilometres onward, which points back at effort. The paper's own abstract calls 20 of 88 a rate of 24 percent; it is 22.7 percent.

This is a reference-intake document for the general population, not exercise guidance, and it says nothing about what to drink during a race. The 2,300 milligram figure is a chronic-disease risk-reduction value introduced in the same 2019 report, not a toxicity threshold, and the child and adolescent versions were extrapolated from the adult one rather than measured. Anyone whose kidneys or medication affect how they handle potassium sits outside all of it.

A chemical identity record, not a study: it says what these compounds weigh and nothing about what they do in a body. Both percentages were calculated from the retrieved molecular weights rather than read off the record, so they carry that rounding.

Weak discrimination is not a screening test, and the authors do not offer it as one. Cramp history was self-reported, and sweat was collected during ordinary training, never during a cramp. Forearm patches estimate whole-body sweat sodium indirectly and carry real measurement error. One other significant result among roughly fourteen comparisons, potassium content in women, is what chance produces at that many tests.

A label proves what a company was permitted to print, not that anything printed on it is true, and being listed on the US drug label database is not approval. This is one product, so it shows such a thing exists and is listed rather than that the category behaves this way. Its marketing text, including the three-bottles promise, sits inside the section reserved for safe-handling warnings, while the sections for indications, purpose, active ingredient and precautions are all empty.