Homemade Bulk Electrolytes Recipe: Staying Hydrated, Why It’s Only Getting Hotter, and What You Can Do
If you live in Florida, you know just how brutal summer (or really any time) is and how hard it can be to stay hydrated.
Even if you don’t, I’m sure you’re feeling the impacts of heat.
I’m someone who always has their reusable water bottle with them at all times, even accidentally bringing it into restaurants out of habit.
My water intake has been superb.
Or so I thought.
I would drink around 4-6 refills of my water bottle daily. My water bottle is 40 oz, but I’ll admit, I don’t usually fill it up all the way at home.
Conservatively, I was drinking around 80-100 fl oz of water daily and not really feeling any different. I had done this for many years.
Honestly, when I started seeing friends use electrolyte packets, I didn’t think much of it and wrote them off as a bit of a scam.
I thought, “I drink a lot of water and eat lots of plants with micronutrients. I don’t need those.”
It wasn’t until I had a particularly tough day outside and had some free tester electrolyte packets at home that I gave it a try.
Almost instantly, the headache I felt coming on fell away. The foggy brain I had from the heat sharpened.
Must be a fluke, I thought.
So as any scientist would, I tried it many more times to see if that was just a one-off.
Turns out, my hypothesis was completely wrong, and I probably had been diluting my electrolyte concentration due to my water intake all these years.
Nowadays, I can’t imagine packing for a day outside in Florida without one bottle dedicated to electrolytes.
Plus it’s only getting hotter as the years go on…
So you know I couldn’t justify all the single-use packets I was using, and you know I love making things in bulk, but first let’s talk about why this is all happening.
Why is it getting hotter? Climate Change
Since the age of the Industrial Revolution, we have exponentially increased our output, and especially our emissions.
Fossil fuels are used ubiquitously not because they’re the better, easier, cleaner form of energy, but because it is “cheap”.
Why are fossil fuels “cheap”?
Corporations like the Big Oil giants, their lobbyists, and politicians are signing the papers to do their bidding through government subsidies.
Giving these corporations our tax dollars to build infrastructure like plants, refineries, and pipelines to drill into the Earth and extract a finite resource that we have gone to war over numerous times.
I won’t even get into detail about the petro-dollar here.
Scientists have long been sounding the alarm.
The politicians knew. Big Oil knew. Their lobbyists knew.
Despite this going on for decades and the Earth remaining relatively normal, we are now seeing and experiencing the impacts of climate change firsthand.
Sporadic weather all year long and “once-in-a-lifetime” major weather events happening every year around the world are not part of “Earth’s natural cycles”...
It’s the Earth trying to expel a virus.
Humans are not the virus.
The virus is greed, overdevelopment, overconsumption. Prioritizing corporate interests over the lives of billions.
The inability to satiate ourselves on the most biologically diverse planet we know of is our biggest downfall.
However, all is not lost.
There are brilliant people around the world working on climate solutions.
Not just scientists and researchers, but ordinary everyday people who are gardening, educating, organizing, creating, lobbying, advocating, and designing a better future for us all.
You can be one of them.
What Can We Do?
First of all, the great thing about living more sustainably (truly, not like, aesthetically) is that you’ll save money and you’ll live a healthier life that doesn’t revolve around the material world!
The sooner you can shift your mindset from buying to solve your problems to getting creative, using what you have, and consuming less, the more you will have mastered true sustainability.
That being said, I think your sustainable lifestyle can and should be tailored to you, your life, and circumstances.
For instance, I live in an apartment so I’m not focused on converting to solar or catching my rainwater.
Instead, I have a membership to my local community garden where I grow food.
I shop secondhand for most of my clothing and furniture. I only buy refurbished tech.
I don’t have an Amazon Prime account or Netflix subscription, but I do pay for a composting service.
I shop with small businesses as much as possible.
I volunteer regularly to do beach cleanups, reef cleanups, dune restoration, invasive species removal, and do my own cleanups in my community too.
I vote in every single election, federal and local, especially local, and make sure others do too.
These are just some of the things I personally do, but what’s available to you could look different.
Could you take public transport more? Bike or walk?
Could you attend your local commission meetings?
Could you organize a monthly community cleanup?
Could you give someone in your neighborhood a ride to a polling location?
There are so many ways to do your part, AND these habits will benefit you as well.
I have met some of my best friends by being involved in my community and volunteering.
If you do nothing else, please VOTE.
Check your voter registration here: www.vote.gov
Vote for a Better Future
Yes, we should hydrate.
Yes, we should do the individual habits that make us more intentional and more conscious of our impact on the world.
Yes, and we must also vote.
Nothing else matters if we don’t also vote.
Check your voter registration and update or register by October 5: vote.org
Once the Midterms have passed, I encourage you to stay engaged or become acquainted with a few specific issues going on in your community.
Attend a meeting. Give a public comment or don’t. Talk about it with your neighbors.
Let’s be engaged with the future we want to see.
In the words of Angela Davis: “freedom is a constant struggle.”
Homemade Electrolytes Recipe
For the plain electrolyte base, I used LMNT’s recipe on their blog, which includes the weights for 30 servings.
Bulksupplements.com is where I got my supplements, and I use pink Himalayan salt I get in bulk from Costco for the sodium chloride.
It’s mostly salt, which is another reason to make your own bulk electrolytes, so I would recommend getting a good quality one.
I also really like Celtic Salt, but it’s more wet, so you’ll have to dehydrate it in the oven if you want it to be a powder and not clumpy.
LMNT’s recipe is just for the electrolyte mix; it will be plain and salty. They have some flavor options if you scroll down that blog.
Most of their recipes involve fresh citrus or things I wouldn’t have on hand, so I decided to flavor it myself.
That’s where nuts.com comes in.
I get my fruit powders from them, namely the lemon crystals, strawberry powder (ground freeze-dried strawberries), and raspberry powder.
(Don’t bother with the dragonfruit one, trust me)
Usually, I make 30 servings of strawberry lemonade, 30 servings of raspberry lemonade, and 30 servings of plain electrolytes.
Recipe for homemade Strawberry Lemonade Electrolytes:
75 grams sodium chloride (salt)
11.5 grams potassium chloride
8 grams di-magnesium malate
15 teaspoons of strawberry powder
15 teaspoons of lemon crystals
Serving size = 1 teaspoon per ~16 fl oz of water
This recipe contains no sugar. I put sugar into my drinks when I’m mixing the actual electrolyte drink.
You can try it without and see how you do, but it will be extremely salty.
The sugar helps cut the sharpness of the salt, mellowing it out.
To mellow my drink, I add 1 tablespoon to each drink. So 1 teaspoon of the electrolyte mix, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and 16 oz of water with lots of ice.
If I want the drink to be more of a “fun drink/mocktail” situation, which I’ll admit I typically want, I add 1.5 tablespoons of sugar to each serving. This recipe would then be: 1 teaspoon of the electrolyte mix, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and 16 oz of water with lots of ice.
If you don’t want to buy the powders, I recommend adding the electrolyte mix to already-made or homemade juice.
Please share this with someone you know needs hydration, but most of all, make sure you get out and VOTE.
Take your friends and family with you.
Give someone a ride to a polling location.
Let’s create the world we want to see, and let’s do it more hydrated.
