Electrolytes have become one of the most heavily marketed areas of modern sports nutrition and wellness. What was once a relatively specific tool for certain endurance athletes has increasingly been reframed as an everyday requirement for hydration, energy, focus, productivity, and general health optimisation.

But how much of this messaging is grounded in physiology, and how much is an example of industry taking a real mechanism and extending it far beyond the evidence?

In this episode, we examine why many common use cases are unlikely to require an electrolyte product. Along the way, we explore how wellness marketing, biohacking culture, diet communities, and social media narratives can turn narrow sports nutrition applications into broad claims that many people come to accept as true.

To discuss this topic, Danny is joined by Zoe Rom, a science and environmental journalist, and Kylee Van Horn, a sports dietitian, to discuss how these claims are shaped by marketing, culture, and the attention economy.

Timestamps:

• [04:00] Interview start

• [07:03] Wellness industry rebrand

• [09:16] Electrolytes 101

• [16:02] Fear marketing and vague symptoms

• [22:50] When athletes actually need them

• [28:19] Salt fix and anti science narratives

• [33:53] Keto biohacking and identity

• [43:42] How to evaluate your need

• [48:43] Who should skip electrolytes

Links:

• Go to episode page
• Join the Sigma newsletter for free
• Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium
• Enroll in the next cohort of our Applied Nutrition Literacy course
• Your Diet Sucks podcast
• Fly Nutrition – Endurance Sports Nutrition

This is a Premium-exclusive episode. Go to the Premium feed to listen. Or subscribe to Premium.

Blood glucose is easy to measure, but not always easy to interpret. This Premium-only episode brings together insights from several previous guests to examine blood glucose responses in more detail.

We discuss the misuse of clinical thresholds, the difference between OGTT results and free-living CGM data, and whether "flatter" glucose curves are actually better in normoglycemic people.

The episode also covers when repeated high glucose excursions may be worth investigating, how sugar intake should be interpreted in context, and why skeletal muscle and exercise play such an important role in glucose regulation.

Overall, the aim is to clarify what glucose responses can tell us, what they cannot tell us, and how to avoid pathologizing normal physiology.

Links:

• Go to episode page
• Join the Sigma newsletter for free
• Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium
• Enroll in the next cohort of our Applied Nutrition Literacy course

When considering the health impact of foods, it is important to consider "compared to what?". Increasing the amount of a certain food or nutrient in the diet, typically implies a displacement of another.

While comparisons are more obvious in trials, in epidemiology food substitution models can be useful to help us determine the health effects of increasing/decreasing intake of a food, food group or nutrient.

However, these models are often misinterpreted and miscommunicated as if they are a game of "rock, paper, scissors", where one food beats another, and the losing food must be removed from the diet or considered harmful to health.

In this episode we discuss the problem of treating substitution analyses as food-ranking contests, rather than context-dependent comparisons shaped by the comparator, the unit of substitution, the baseline diet, and the outcome being studied.

• [01:30] Misuse of "compared to what?"
• [06:39] What substitution models do
• [10:43] Specified vs unspecified substitution
• [16:57] Why the units used matter
• [26:45] Example: organic vs conventional produce
• [31:22] When substitutions are useful
• [34:35] If legumes beat fish, does that mean fish intake should be zero?
• [44:31] Naive vs bias-adjusted: artificial sweeteners case study
• [49:14] Checklist: how to interpret food substitution analyses

Links:

• Go to episode page (all study references linked)
• Join the Sigma newsletter for free
• Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium
• Subscribe to Alinea Nutrition Education Hub
• Enroll in the next cohort of our Applied Nutrition Literacy course
• Episode #472: Compared To What?
• Episode #589: Causal Inference in Nutrition Science – Daniel Ibsen, PhD