Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 648 with Robb Wolf.

Meet Robb Wolf

Robb Wolf: Welcome. This is the Tom Rowland Podcast. I am Robb Wolf. I am a middle-aged, balding dude who's sold some books on the topic of paleolithic nutrition. I co-founded the first and fourth CrossFit affiliate gyms in the world and was formerly a research biochemist in the areas of cancer and autoimmunity investigation.

Tom Rowland: Okay, Robb Wolf. Man, I'm glad to have you on here. Thanks for doing this.

Robb Wolf: I am honored to bring down property values anywhere folks are foolish enough to let me on, so thank you.

Tom Rowland: Well, seriously, I know I mentioned it before we started recording, but I've been following you for a long time. The Paleo Solution, the very early days of CrossFit. You've done some tremendous work. I've learned a tremendous amount from you from a distance, and it's nice to finally meet you in person.

Robb Wolf: Huge honor, thank you.

Tom Rowland: And now you're all into jiu-jitsu. Well, not now — for the last few years, I guess.

Robb Wolf: I've been scrapping away at it for a while.

Tom Rowland: What belt are you now?

Robb Wolf: A brown belt, but don't read too much into that. It's kind of like when you think you're done having kids and then one sneaks through the net — I think it was more of a drunken accident than any reflection of me getting better at it. But I definitely love it. It's an amazing community, and fortunately my whole family — my wife and both my girls — participate in it too. So everybody's kind of on that same page.

Tom Rowland: That's great. Jiu-jitsu is certainly an incredible sport. I was a wrestler in high school and have continued wrestling as my kids also wrestled — I've wrestled with them all the way through their high school careers. My oldest son started jiu-jitsu, and he loves it. He had to figure out how to continue doing jiu-jitsu through COVID, which was probably a challenge for a lot of people. He's out in Montana now.

Robb Wolf: Oh, we're out in Montana too — Bozeman.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, he is. There's a jiu-jitsu affiliate there in Bozeman now, so definitely have him check it out. Both my boys went to Montana State there, and they're both still out there. My daughter is at Auburn — she's 18.

Anyway, I wanted to have you on here because, first of all, you're an interesting guest, but I know you've done a tremendous amount of work on hydration. And for the people that listen to this podcast — myself included — this is a bit of a selfish pursuit, because I want to know as much as I possibly can about hydration. The more I've learned about hydration and the better I take care of myself, the more I can see incremental increases in my energy level, my performance, and my attention span throughout the day.

What's going to be really interesting to the people that listen to this — mostly fishing guides — is that they spend eight to ten hours in the sun. A lot of times they're offshore and moving around, pretty active, or they're inshore guides poling a boat for eight to ten hours a day. A lot of these guys are also athletes, because in order to pole a boat for eight to ten hours a day, a hundred and fifty days in a row without taking a day off, you also need to be in pretty good shape. So they're runners, they're lifters, they're CrossFitters — getting a workout in either before or after they go out on the water — probably also drinking a lot of caffeine, then a lot of water, and peeing throughout the day. So there are some very interesting hydration requirements there.

When I was guiding, I had a gallon of water that I'd just put in the boat, and I said, okay, I'm not getting out of the boat until I drink that gallon of water. If I got back to the ramp and there were two inches left in the bottom, I'd just drink it. That was a huge improvement over not drinking very much water at all. But as I've learned — and what I want to learn today — is that there's more to it than just drinking plain water. So I'm wondering what your journey was to learning more about hydration.

The Genesis of LMNT and the Sodium Discovery

Robb Wolf: I am part of a company called LMNT now, and I'd couch things with — of course, the guy that's got something to sell is going to sell you on why the thing is important. But the genesis story maybe puts a little context around that, because the company was born out of a freemium platform. We initially just posted a "how to mix your own electrolytes at home" guide.

Let me back up a bit. Twenty-three years ago I had a pretty serious health condition. I had ulcerative colitis bad enough that I was facing a bowel resection and immunosuppressant drugs. I'm five-foot-nine, normally a hundred sixty-five to a hundred seventy pounds, reasonably fit. At the low ebb of my ulcerative colitis I was down to about a hundred twenty-five, a hundred thirty pounds — imagine forty pounds less of me — I was emaciated. My gut was so inflamed that any food I ate just went blasting out the other side pretty much unchanged. People die from ulcerative colitis all the time; oftentimes they end up with a J-pouch or big chunks of their digestive tract removed.

Fortunately for me, the idea of a paleolithic diet, ancestral eating, got on my radar. For me it was nothing short of a miracle — it got me off that track of needing surgery. Honestly, for the twenty-three years I've been working in this space, I worked with the Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Program for six years, talking to the SEAL teams and special boat teams and their families about sleep, nutrition, training, all kinds of stuff. I've worked with Olympic athletes, but really the center-of-the-bullseye folks for me are people with complex gut and autoimmune issues, because that's what I've dealt with my whole life. Those are the people who usually run the gamut of the standard medical system, get a little bit of help, but aren't really having the underlying root-cause problems addressed.

I've found that lower-carb, gluten-free, ketogenic, paleo-type diets work amazingly well for this stuff — nothing short of miraculous for helping people reset. The cool thing is that if you have complex health issues, thirty days of fiddling with your nutrition this way will be an absolute eye-opener. Either it transforms your life, or it's kind of "meh," and either way you learn something. It's typically not a subtle experience.

Tom Rowland: Before we move on — when somebody does have that, what do you suggest the first step is? Is it elimination or addition? Do you add in the paleolithic foods, or are you immediately taking out the processed foods? Where do you tend to coach people?

Robb Wolf: Usually elimination is the thing that benefits people most, and this isn't a hundred percent — a good friend of mine, Dr. Michael Ruscio, wrote a book called Healthy Gut, Healthy You, and in my opinion it's the gold-standard resource for gut-related issues. There's also a book by a dietitian named Aglaée Jacob that's also outstanding. They generally start folks on an elimination diet: include meat, seafood, fruits, and vegetables, and pull out the grains, the pasta, and often dairy, at least for thirty days, and then reassess. The ideal story is that the person goes from sick to not sick, and then we figure out what latitude we have. Some people, like me, need pretty tight lane lines to stay healthy; others have a lot more latitude. But that reset is really the critical piece — usually thirty days to get things back on an even keel, and then we tweak and modify from there.

But something I hadn't appreciated in twenty-three years of fiddling with this stuff was how critically important electrolytes are — specifically sodium. Eighty-five percent of the sodium that folks consume is in the form of processed foods; we're getting it adjunctive to eating kind of junky foods. When people improve their diet — whether they go paleo, vegan, Mediterranean, or whatever — unless they're really making an effort to include sodium, their sodium intake plummets. And what's interesting is that when people are eating better, their insulin levels tend to be lower. Insulin is a hormone that helps control blood sugar, but it's also really important in regulating electrolyte status. When people eat well — a minimally processed diet, let alone a low-carb diet — their tendency to retain sodium decreases. We tend to pee out sodium and water.

Every physiological process in our body is driven by sodium-potassium pumps — people might remember this from high school or college biology. Every thought, muscle contraction, and nerve impulse is driven by these pumps. If things get off a little bit — a little too little sodium, a little too much potassium — things go haywire really quickly. If somebody shows up unconscious to an emergency room, the three things they check immediately and very carefully are blood sugar, pH, and electrolytes. Between pH and electrolytes it would be a tough race to say which is more tightly regulated, but if either gets off by just a little, you'll go unconscious or potentially die. So the body has a lot of different mechanisms to control what's going on there.

An individual working at high motor output in heat and humidity may lose more than ten grams — ten thousand milligrams — of sodium in a day. We've worked with NHL athletes who do some pretty cool testing: they'll put a patch of known surface area on a person, see how much sweat and sodium goes into it, calculate what percentage of body surface area that represents, and extrapolate. Pretty good numbers suggest these guys will lose ten grams of sodium over the course of an hour-and-a-half to two-hour game or hard practice.

Tom Rowland: And that's not entirely different from jiu-jitsu with a gi — you're in a hot room, dripping wet for two hours. And back then, you weren't supposed to drink water. That was for weak people.

Robb Wolf: Right — and the contrast is that our medical gatekeepers suggest we should consume less than two grams of sodium a day, largely out of concern about high blood pressure and hypertension. There's definitely a relationship there, but the interesting thing is that folks with hypertension who go on low-sodium diets don't see their hypertension go away — it goes down a little, but a high-sodium diet for a hypertensive person isn't good either. Interestingly, a low-sodium diet doesn't fix the problem, because the main driver isn't sodium intake — it's insulin resistance, where the body becomes unable to respond to insulin properly, and so it tends to retain sodium. This is why when folks go on a low-carb diet, they pee like crazy for three or four days, because the body is shedding all that excess water and sodium. That's great if you're hypertensive. It's not so great if you're out pulling a boat for eight hours in equatorial sunlight.

When I figured this stuff out for myself — because I do jiu-jitsu and eat lower-carb to address my gut issues — I couldn't believe it. All these problems I'd had, like a lack of a low gear while grappling, slow recovery, disordered sleep, resolved almost immediately. And I started looking at the people I serve and thought, damn, ninety-five percent of the problems people report are probably inadequate sodium.

So my pitch, whether you want the product I have or not: when we started off, we made a make-it-yourself guide called Keto-Aid — table salt, some sodium or potassium chloride from a no-salt product, some magnesium, lemon juice, stevia to sweeten it, water, shake it up. We posted this online, and within five or six months we'd had a half-million downloads — it went like wildfire. Folks reported their sleep was better, their recovery was better, they didn't cramp anymore, and that mid-afternoon caffeine craving was gone because their energy levels were better. It's kind of crazy to suggest this, but energy drinks really shouldn't be a bunch of caffeine and stimulants — they should be electrolytes, because that's where we generate energy, from sodium-potassium pumps. It should be like coconut water with a pinch of salt — that's arguably a much better energy drink than a Monster.

Why Plain Water Alone Can Be Dangerous

We released that free guide for making your own electrolytes, and it went crazy. Then we started getting tagged on social media by folks saying, hey, we love this, but when I travel with three bags of white powder, TSA has some issues with that — could you make a convenient stick-pack version? That's really the genesis of the whole product. To this day, if people go to LMNT's homebrew page, they can still get the make-it-yourself guide.

My long pitch is this: if you're out in the heat and humidity with high motor output, and even if you eat well and pay attention to your food, you're probably not eating so much processed food that you're getting enough sodium. Chances are you're broadly electrolyte deficient and specifically sodium deficient. When we sweat, the electrolyte we lose is almost exclusively sodium — we lose only trace amounts of potassium and magnesium, both of which are still critically important. But if you're sweating — doing jiu-jitsu, on a boat with the sun beating down, high humidity, pouring sweat — sodium is what you're going to be most deficient in, and it's the thing that really makes or breaks whether you can stay in the fight versus getting heat exhaustion.

Tom Rowland: So like a Gatorade — if somebody just drinks a Gatorade, what kind of sodium content does that have?

Robb Wolf: It's a funny story. When Gatorade was first formulated, it had about a gram — a thousand milligrams — of sodium per serving, plus some glucose, or now sucrose, standard table sugar. Now you get about two hundred milligrams of sodium. Over time, Gatorade and similar drinks — although some have sugar-free options, which I think are far better — have had their sodium go down and their sugar go dramatically up.

Even so, they're way better than plain water in this circumstance, because the disaster with drinking plain water is that you're becoming depleted of sodium and water through sweat, and if you just pour water on top of that, you're actually further diluting the ratio of sodium to potassium in your body. This is where people can kill themselves. Every year you hear about boot-camp recruits, football players during two-a-days, or triathletes ending up hospitalized from over-consuming water — it's a state called hyponatremia, low sodium status. It's funny — back when I played football, it was youth sports, and it was "take a salt tab."

Tom Rowland: I knew that's what you were going to say. I remember you'd go to the training room — you didn't even have to step inside — there were these pill dispensers right there, you'd turn the bottom and two salt pills would come out. The coach would say, go by the training room, get your salt pills, and meet me on the field. And then somewhere along the line, that just went away — I feel like it's because of the blood-pressure connection between sodium and hypertension. But I've read that the evidence behind that isn't great, that it all goes back to one study — I don't know, that's just what I've read.

Robb Wolf: There is a real relationship between blood pressure and sodium, but the thing about it — and I hate to say "the science is settled" about anything, because that phrase chaps my ass — is that in science, nothing is truly settled except in a simple system like billiard balls of known weight and density. Once you introduce the variability of a biological system — genetics, environment, everything — we have general guidelines, but not much is settled.

What we've noticed is that the hypothesis "sodium increases blood pressure, period" doesn't hold up cleanly: high-sodium diets don't increase blood pressure in all people, and in people with high blood pressure, low-sodium diets don't uniformly decrease it either — it comes down a little, but not by much. But when we get people to normal, healthy insulin levels — from eating fewer calories, usually a bit less carbohydrate — their blood pressure magically tends to normalize. This is one of the interesting things going way back, when people on an Atkins-type protocol would notice their blood pressure normalize. So I agree that the demonization of sodium, because of increased rates of hypertension, did away with the gym salt dispenser — and what replaced it was the water bottle we all carry everywhere now.

I was talking to my wife about this — when I was a kid, I don't know how old I was before our car had air conditioning; my family was on the poorer side. I lived in rural Northern California, where summers hit 115, 120 degrees, and I didn't have a water bottle or a milk jug of water with me. You just suffered through as a kid until you got where you were going. But the interesting thing is I wasn't super-diluting my blood and my sodium content — it was probably almost a better move to go that way, even though I know that sounds out there.

Tom Rowland: Not really, though — I saw that same journey. We would basically never drink water; sometimes you'd just drink a soft drink as a kid, because they weren't demonized yet — you'd drink three Cokes and be good to go. Water crept in occasionally, but there was never a "you should really drink this much water" message. Then, somewhere along the line, the salt pills went away, and people were told they should be drinking a gallon of water, carrying a gallon around everywhere.

I was as guilty of that as anybody. When I first got to the Florida Keys, I didn't know how to take care of myself, wasn't eating properly, wasn't wearing appropriate clothing in the sun, was getting way too much sun, and I was just fatigued — while other guides around me, wearing full long pants and long-sleeve shirts and big hats, weren't fatigued. I started realizing the more I protected myself from the sun, the less fatigued I was. And if I drank water, I felt even less fatigued — so I thought, if a little's good, a lot's better. I ended up with a gallon of water in the boat, sweating out a gallon and peeing out a gallon, on top of a few cups of coffee before leaving the dock at five in the morning.

And probably on those days the clients were bringing lunches — deli meat, sandwiches, cookies, not great things, but picked for you — so you were probably getting a decent amount of sodium in a meal like that, and maybe the gallon of water wasn't so bad in that context. But then I started eating cleaner — moving toward a Zone plan, then a paleo plan, eating as clean as I could — and I was eliminating a lot of that much-needed sodium from my diet while still drinking the gallon of water. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I was tired and fatigued, and then I'd go home and run. The sodium just wasn't getting in, and until recently I didn't realize how important that was.

A lot of people are told by every energy-drink billboard, every hydration-drink ad, to "get your electrolytes" — but I think most people don't really know what electrolytes are, how many there are, or how much you lose. The other thing I'd like you to explain is that the body has a mechanism for getting rid of excess sodium. Can you die from too much sodium? Or does the body equalize that by peeing or sweating it out? What's the actual danger of too much sodium, and how would you even know you had too much?

Too Much Sodium vs. Too Much Water

Robb Wolf: That's an interesting question. I'd make the case that it's far more dangerous to have too little than too much. For most people, if they over-consume sodium, the main issue is going to be blood pressure. If you really consume a huge amount of sodium, you're going to end up with "disaster pants" — dashing to the bathroom — because at some point sodium pulls a lot of fluid out of the body into the digestive tract and gives you diarrhea. It's kind of self-limiting. In poison-control settings, if somebody's ingested a particular substance, they'll sometimes do a salt bolus specifically to help flush it out the other end.

The interesting thing is that if you consume a lot of sodium, about thirty minutes downstream your kidneys have filtered it, increased urine output, and you're back to a pretty good normalization. So it would be hard to kill yourself from over-consuming sodium. It is super easy to kill yourself from over-consuming water, or even potassium — this is why most potassium supplements are capped at around ninety-nine milligrams. It's a little morbid, but lethal injection uses a giant bolus of potassium; it causes the heart to cramp once, and that's it. That's why we use two hundred milligrams of potassium alongside a gram of sodium in our product — the real key is that there's a balance. We get criticized both for not having enough potassium and for having too much sodium, and other people freak out about even the amount of potassium we do have. But because it's roughly a five-to-one ratio of sodium to potassium, and we actually need to consume more potassium than sodium overall, we're recommending people get the bulk of their potassium from minimally processed whole foods.

The real danger is under-consumption of sodium and over-consumption of water — that can kill you in twenty minutes if you really get after it, like some of the sorority and fraternity hazing incidents where people pound water. You can kill yourself in quick order doing that. This is some of the stuff I didn't realize until I got deeper into this. The American College of Sports Medicine's position is that athletes in high heat, high humidity, high-work-output conditions need a minimum of seven to ten grams of sodium per day. And you'll hear that recommendation immediately followed by "but people shouldn't consume more than two grams of sodium per day, because it'll give you hypertension" — because that guidance is catering to an overweight, overfed population, not to athletes in high-heat, high-output environments.

Tom Rowland: So your product has a thousand milligrams. Are you telling me these NHL players should be drinking ten of these a day?

Robb Wolf: Throughout the day, yes — they should be getting the equivalent of ten grams of sodium, from a genuinely clean diet.

Tom Rowland: A friend I work out with all the time is totally paleo. He's had the greatest results — he looks the same except twenty-five pounds came off him. He was in good shape before, and one day he asked me what I was doing, what kind of diet. I said, mostly paleo — you can eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and some fruit, and just stay away from processed foods. He took that and ran with it. He's incredibly strict, and he loves eating that way — vegetables, meat, some nuts. So he's getting some sodium from the nuts, but for the most part, zero processed foods. And he cramps a lot — he's one of those crampers, prone to it whenever we work out. I've been telling him I think his sodium intake is really low. But if somebody wanted to know exactly — not the population-level or sports-league suggestion, but their own personal number — is there a way to figure that out? Some people sweat way more than others, and I'd imagine sodium needs differ for a heavy sweater who's also a heavy exerciser, six days a week, two hours a day, versus somebody else. How would someone find their own personal sodium intake and output?

Robb Wolf: It kills me, because I'm a chemist and I like making things as objective as possible, and this is a very subjective process. A blood sample tells us one moment in what's actually a three-dimensional movie — we could be globally sodium deficient but look okay on a blood test, because we've been pulling sodium out of our bones. And when we pull sodium out of our bones, we pull calcium out too. So this is where we really look at symptoms. People who are cramping are so far down the sodium-deficiency road that they've already had miles of suboptimal performance — their sleep has been negatively impacted, their heart-rate variability has been negatively impacted, their cognition day to day has been negatively impacted. By the time you're cramping, your heart rate at any given work output has probably been five to ten beats per minute higher than it needs to be.

So what I'd recommend for a guy like your friend is to use an app like Cronometer and really document every morsel of food and every scrap of sodium for three to five days, and make sure you're getting at least five grams of sodium a day, and see where you land. This guy is probably around eighteen hundred milligrams — one-point-eight grams — so he's two-and-a-half to three times under the bare minimum. If he's a bigger guy, closer to two hundred pounds, that need might double. I've seen small women who are really high-motor-output CrossFitters in the twelve-to-fifteen-gram sodium intake range in order to operate optimally. There's a lot of variation.

You mentioned differences in sweating — there are legitimately people who are "super sweaters." They pour sweat, and the interesting thing is they don't just lose more water, they lose disproportionately more sodium. In any given hour, those people will lose twice as much water and twice as much sodium as the person next to them. So it becomes more art than science — you can't just say, "You're six-foot-two, a hundred eighty-five pounds, it's ninety-five degrees and ninety-eight percent humidity, are you in direct sunlight or overcast?" There are just too many variables. What you really need to do is play to symptoms. If you feel foggy-headed, or if you're seated or in a deep squat and then stand up and get light-headed or the room spins, you're almost guaranteed to be sodium deficient — there's a lag in the heart's ability to pump enough blood to deal with that change in fluid volume. There's a medical condition called POTS — postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome — that mainly affects kids but can affect adults too, and those folks need more sodium than average to avoid passing out when they go from seated to standing. The POTS community was one of the earliest groups to figure out they need a lot more sodium than average to make things work.

Tom Rowland: That's super interesting. I've had that on occasion — not throughout the day, but after working out first thing in the morning, sometimes I'll stand up and get a little light-headed.

I've started using your product as a pre-workout mix, because I've been reading James DiNicolantonio — he's got a book called Win, and another one, The Mineral Fix, and The Salt Fix too. I've read all three, and I think they're really good — some of it's a bit over my head, but I can make it through. The most interesting chapters have been on sodium. In the back of his book, the bottom hundred-twenty pages are references, so he seems to do a good job citing his studies. Some of those studies show sodium improving performance immediately — with cyclists, for example, where one group gets a thousand milligrams of sodium and another doesn't, and the group that gets it can ride twenty minutes further. That's not one percent — that's ten percent further, or maintaining wattage ten or twenty percent longer.

He goes through a bunch of studies, and I've started doing that in the morning — one of these as the first thing I have, maybe with a little beta-alanine. It seems to have helped performance greatly, but it's also super hot this time of year and I'm sweating like crazy. So now I'm getting a thousand more milligrams of sodium than before as a pre-workout, but where do I go after that? If I've got a three-hour or two-hour session, then I go to work or fishing — should I get another one afterward? Sometimes it's a full shirt-ringer, like you just jumped in the pool.

Robb Wolf: I'd play with it, because everyone's individual, but a rule of thumb is about one liter plus one stick pack — one gram of sodium — per hour of fairly intense activity. What I find is that if you do that, you never cramp, and you don't get that brain fade where you're just staring off by the end of it. We've been fortunate to run a jiu-jitsu retreat in Costa Rica — usually ninety-five degrees, ninety-eight percent humidity, in a non-air-conditioned steel building up on a hill. You can see the ocean, there's a cross-breeze every day, but it's hot — the sun's beating down on the building, and you're in there wearing a gi. In a situation like that, a liter plus a stick pack per hour keeps me right as rain. If I fall behind on that, I'll start getting toe cramps, and even before the cramps, I'll just get fatigued — I'm not sharp, I'm not able to stay focused, I'm not taking notes, I just start fading out.

A really cool thing about the electrolyte story is that if you're deficient and feeling off — maybe you don't even notice it — say it's one o'clock and you feel like you need an iced tea or an espresso for a kick, try electrolytes instead. As an aside, I'll do a salty Arnold Palmer — Lipton iced tea with either citrus or raspberry LMNT mixed in — it's amazing, and if you put a shot of vodka on top of that at the end of the day, it's pretty damn good too. But you just feel amazing, and it doesn't take very long — five minutes — for electrolytes to start normalizing a person. Creatine, we all know, is great — it's an antioxidant, it prevents oxidative damage in hypoxic environments, protects neural tissue — but I've never really noticed a dramatic subjective difference from it. When your electrolytes are on point, it's not subtle at all — you just feel better immediately. Again, if folks are skeptical, they can go to our homebrew page and learn to mix it themselves. If you're just doing your regular routine but pre-workout, a little post-workout, mid-afternoon, whenever you feel like you might be a little low-energy, trying to up your sodium intake in that liquid format is magic. Five or ten minutes later people feel way better, and they notice they don't need the caffeine — or the sugar — to get that shock of energy.

Tom Rowland: So as far as a fishing guide — somebody in a low gear all day in the hot sun, wearing protective clothing — or a roofer, another good example, working all day up and down a ladder. That's kind of the equivalent of the fishing-guide thing, though a roofer's probably carrying more weight. A fishing guide is often holding a cast net — it's heavy, maybe fifty pounds — and you've got coolers and gear you're lifting around, and you're out there a long time. Then when you get back to the dock, a lot of guys have to clean fish for the customers, still in the blasting sun — sometimes that's the worst part, because on some boats there's at least a little shade, but on the skiffs there's none, and you're pushing the boat all day with a heavy guy up front. What do you think — is it a liter an hour plus a stick, or maybe more or less, for somebody like that?

Robb Wolf: I think that's a great place to start, and I don't think you'd need much more than that. There's also a limit to how much you can absorb in a given period — if you overwhelm the system you'll end up with GI problems, which would be horrible on a boat.

Tom Rowland: It happens.

Robb Wolf: Yeah, it happens — but you don't want to invite that gremlin onto the boat with you. So, probably about a liter plus a stick pack, and the stick pack again is a gram of sodium. If people are homebrewing this, that's about a gram of sodium, roughly half a teaspoon of salt per liter — so with something like sugar-free Kool-Aid or Crystal Light, you just mix your own with about a half-teaspoon of table salt per liter. That's not a bad way to do it. If you're doing that — out all day, food's a little dodgy — I'd go the extra mile and get some Morton's No Salt, which is potassium chloride, and do roughly equal amounts, maybe a half-teaspoon of regular salt and a quarter-teaspoon of the no-salt, just to keep a little potassium in the mix.

Why the Formula Includes Magnesium

Tom Rowland: Because this is a thousand milligrams of sodium, two hundred milligrams of potassium, and sixty milligrams of magnesium — where does the magnesium play into the electrolyte mix, and why did you decide to include it?

Robb Wolf: Most people are magnesium deficient. When we formulated this, we had an idea of what a daily electrolyte need looked like, and we had about three hundred people eating a minimally processed whole-food diet whose sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium intake we looked at. By and large, people were fine on calcium, so we didn't feel compelled to add it — and there's a little concerning signal in the literature around calcium supplementation and cardiac events, since calcium is part of the clotting cascade. People are generally at least a little deficient in magnesium, which is important for muscle contraction and relaxation dynamics, gut health, and vitamin D metabolism — your vitamin D doesn't function properly without adequate magnesium. So we added a bit of a highly absorbable form.

Even so, I have a good friend, Dr. Kirk Parsley — a retired Navy SEAL, six-foot-three, two hundred fifty pounds — who has to put LMNT in a liter-and-a-half and slowly sip it, because he's very magnesium-sensitive and it'll give him disaster pants if he goes too hard on it. So there's variability there. But what we found, finally, was that people were really, really deficient in sodium — that was the thought process behind the formula, looking at what you'd get from a minimally processed whole-food diet and what the daily needs looked like.

We're not expecting people to hit five grams of sodium a day entirely from stick packs — you can take five if you want, but we're really hoping you also eat some kimchi, sauerkraut, or olives. Ten olives give you a gram of sodium; a good-sized dill pickle gives you a gram of sodium — and when you get to the bottom of the pickle jar, a little pickle juice shot does the same thing.

Tom Rowland: And that's what a lot of people do — athletes have drunk pickle juice for a long time, and that probably has a tremendous amount of sodium if you just drink it straight.

Robb Wolf: It's a pretty good product when you get right down to it — it extracts some of the potassium out of the pickles too, it's very high in sodium, and it's got a little spice in it so it tastes good. Actually — you were asking about dosing, I forgot about this. I don't have science to back this up, it's very anecdotal, but what we've noticed is when people mix this up at about one stick pack per liter, if you're really sodium deficient it'll just taste sweet — you'll taste orange or lemon or raspberry, whatever the flavor is, and you'll keep sipping it. Maybe you get three-quarters of the way through the bottle, and all of a sudden it starts tasting salty — we think there's some kind of thirst mechanism that kicks in once you've got enough sodium, and it starts tasting salty. It's really weird. Usually people then don't want to drink it quite as much, but then they'll motor along for twenty or thirty minutes, keep sweating, go back to that same bottle — maybe it's warmer now, less appealing — but all of a sudden the sodium flavor is gone, and they mainly taste sweet again.

The only thing I know of scientifically that's similar is the zinc-tally test — a liquid form of zinc that people suspected of being zinc-deficient put under the tongue, and it doesn't taste like anything. Then you do another dropper and it tastes like a chrome bumper. The thinking is that the body's reached a saturation point with the zinc, and I think a similar mechanism is going on with sodium.

Tom Rowland: Interesting. Have you come across the calf-twitching thing — not necessarily cramping, but the muscles in the calves twitching all the time — is that sodium related?

Robb Wolf: That's generally electrolyte-driven, though it can be a bit B-vitamin-driven too — B-vitamin deficiencies. Every once in a while this is where people use tonic water, because the quinine in it ends up having some anti-cramp, anti-twitch activity.

Tom Rowland: Really? I have that happening all the time with my calves — they don't necessarily cramp, but it's going on right now.

Robb Wolf: The easy test on that is to mix up an LMNT, start sipping on it, and see if that addresses it. But it could be some B vitamins, or some other mechanism too.

Sleep, Recovery, and Nighttime Sodium

Tom Rowland: I think we've covered hydration pretty well, but you have so much other work — the Sacred Cow project is really interesting, we could talk about that for a couple of hours. But another thing I was interested in, in the few minutes we have left, is sleep. You've done a tremendous amount of work on sleep and written a lot about it. Obviously, when you get to our age, you start to realize you not only need more of it, but need to be more careful about the quality of it. What kind of tips can you give on sleep quality and how it affects performance? To me it's a pretty easily discernible one-to-one relationship.

Robb Wolf: I was talking to my wife about this the other day — it would be really interesting if I could go back twenty years and run a parallel experiment where, instead of being the food guy, I'm the sleep guy, and I orient everything around improving sleep. Say we do a sleep study on you and you have terrible sleep — what's going on there? We put a continuous glucose monitor on you, you've got crazy blood-sugar swings, and think, hey, you might be insulin resistant, let's put you on a low-carb diet to improve your sleep. It would be so interesting to me, because dietary changes are like religion and politics — it's really hard to get buy-in, people have their habits and it's difficult to change. Sleep's a little different — the main people I see really struggle with it are the mega-type-A corporate execs who feel like if they're not out in front, they're behind, and some of the computer-programmer types.

But sleep arguably is more important than diet, arguably more important than exercise. You could live your whole life without exercising and it would kind of suck, but people do it and live a normal lifespan. Even you and I, reasonably lean, could probably last close to a month without eating before starvation. But the Guinness Book of World Records won't even entertain attempts at staying awake any longer, because the last four or five times people tried it, they got to about nine to eleven days, tapped out, went to bed, and died in their sleep — with no idea what they died from. They'll let you jump a rocket motorcycle over the Grand Canyon, they'll let you juggle flaming chainsaws — those are all safer than staying awake.

My good friend Kirk Parsley — you should get him on the show — makes the point that one of the big differences between us in our youth versus as we get older is that in your youth, you go to bed, heal all the trials and tribulations of the day, and come back better than you were that morning. You do it again and again — if you're strength training, studying, doing this and that, you get better and stronger. Then somewhere around twenty-five, you wake up one one-thousandth of a percent less than you were the day before — the sleep didn't fully restore you. That's usually when people start recognizing they can't eat like they used to and still look and perform the way they want. Sleep becomes a big deal, particularly between your forties, fifties, and beyond, versus the performance of a twenty-year-old. If your sleep is really on point and you're thoughtful about the volume and intensity of your training, you maybe can't perform like you did in your twenties, but you can knock on that door a little. If you're neglecting food and not prioritizing sleep, going to bed earlier, good sleep hygiene — that's where it really adds up, for better or worse, over weeks, months, and years, like ten percent compound interest versus two percent. The flip side is doubly true — it will crush you over time if you're not reinvesting in that sleep side.

Tom Rowland: And it's not just the amount of time — it's the quality, and your sleep environment. That's what I've found: the bed you're sleeping on, sleep hygiene, the amount of light in the room, the time you go to bed, but also just having a good environment somehow helps me sleep better. If the room's clean, if the bed was made when I get there — I don't know, maybe it's psychological — but you pull that bed down and think, yes, everything's good. Taking a shower before bed helps too.

Robb Wolf: Yeah, our mental state is huge. It's funny — our youngest daughter, who's eight, has gotten herself worked into this frenzy the past couple of months where she thinks she can't fall asleep by herself, so I'll go up and lie down with her for a bit, or my wife will. She's convinced herself she can't sleep, and clearly she can — we've been teaching her some belly breathing and a little meditation. The crazy thing is she'll say "I'm not like you, I can't do this," but then my wife will get her to put her hands on her belly, big inhale, big exhale, and after three minutes the kid is snoring — out cold, like a stun line. But the mental state she shows up with for bedtime — normally she's just a funny, high-strung kid — and to your point, there's not really a right or wrong here, but generally darker, cooler, clean, and organized seems to help facilitate relaxing. We don't have a TV in our room, I don't bring my phone in, and I've got an old-school wind-up alarm clock for the rare occasions I need one. With all that, I sleep like a dead man — no problem falling asleep, eight-and-a-half, nine hours.

Tom Rowland: Do you take any sleep supplement? There was an article on your website I read in preparation for this, with Kirk Parsley, about a supplement cocktail he recommends.

Robb Wolf: Parsley has a thing called the Sleep Remedy that he developed working with the SEAL teams. He was the West Coast dive medical officer for six or eight years — he was a pre-9/11 SEAL, got out of the teams, went to medical school, and got back into the teams post-9/11. What he expected to see was a bunch of orthopedic issues, since when he was a SEAL the problems were repetitive-stress stuff — guys wearing out their knees and ankles like triathletes. But his first day on the job as dive officer, two people came in who hadn't really slept in about two weeks. One guy had filled up a gas engine with diesel — he just wasn't paying attention; I forget the other guy's story. Kirk started talking to them: how do you sleep? Not so good. Do you take Ambien? Yeah, like four of them — enough to kill somebody. Do you do anything else? Yeah, I drink a quarter bottle of whiskey with it. These guys had habituated to a level of Ambien and alcohol that would kill someone who took it cold. And the thing about both alcohol and sleep aids like Ambien is you're not actually sleeping — if you do an EEG of the brainwaves, you're unconscious, but you don't go into REM sleep, you don't go into deep sleep, so you're not really restoring yourself. I tried Ambien once or twice for international travel and was better off just not sleeping at all — the day after taking it is the most profound fatigue I've ever had, just exhausted.

Tom Rowland: I've never tried it — I definitely don't want that, because I get fatigue sometimes and I'm really interested in sleep. I've listened to Andrew Huberman, who seems to really know his stuff — he suggested a cocktail of apigenin, magnesium threonate, and theanine, and I've been trying that and it seems to work. He said it was far superior to melatonin, which definitely puts you to sleep but doesn't help you stay asleep. His cocktail was designed for people waking up in the middle of the night — which I was doing around two a.m., not because I needed to pee, just waking up. A lot of my friends will wake up at two and have to read half a book before they can get back to sleep; I can usually just roll over and go back to sleep. But I noticed that when I wake up at two and roll back over, I'm out of REM sleep and it takes a while to get back into it, and I'm noticeably less rested the next day. So I've been trying that cocktail, and it seems to have helped — I don't wake up like I used to. I don't know if it's the magnesium or what.

Robb Wolf: The melatonin pathway tends to initiate sleep, and the GABA pathway tends to maintain it, so a well-formulated product usually addresses both sides — something like tryptophan, serotonin, or melatonin to initiate sleep, and a GABA derivative or precursor to help maintain it. This is part of why alcohol is such a bugger — you fall asleep because alcohol works on the GABA receptor sites, but that's also why you wake up around two a.m. hot and uncomfortable, because it's messing with your normal ability to maintain sleep.

Tom Rowland: A lot of people use alcohol to try to get to sleep because they're not sleeping well, but then they don't get the restful sleep they wanted. That's what Matthew Walker says in Why We Sleep — he even said things like alcohol, and even marijuana, aren't good for sleep, because they actually make the brain work overtime instead of truly resting.

Anyway — sleep is super important, and I learned a ton about hydration today. I want to thank you for coming on, man. You've got so much knowledge, and I'd love to have you on again to talk about some other things — and I'd love to get introduced to Kirk.

Robb Wolf: That'd be great. Just follow up with me, I'd love to make the introduction — he's a great guy.

Where to Find Robb Wolf

Tom Rowland: So if anybody wants LMNT, or your books, or wants to follow you and learn more, how do people do all of that?

Robb Wolf: RobbWolf.com is the main spot for the work I'm doing, and DrinkLMNT.com is where you can find more information about LMNT — we have a ton of blogs covering fasting, ketogenic diets, athletic training, and more; our blog has grown a lot over the last year or two.

Tom Rowland: And tell me about the community you have — the Healthy Rebellion?

Robb Wolf: Really quickly, it's a place on the internet that doesn't have an algorithm trying to pit us against one another. I put that together because in 2018, Google's Medic Update basically made my website disappear from the internet — there's a whole backstory there. Many health educators got caught up in that update; they didn't make your site literally disappear, but I woke up one morning and my site traffic had dropped ninety-seven percent. You just couldn't find ten years of work I'd done on type 1 diabetes, CrossFit, and other topics that had very high-quality backlinks — it was effectively gone. So I wasn't sure what to do, but I put together a plan for a place where people could meet, have community, and build resilience.

We fortunately spun this up about six months before COVID, and it turned out to be really good — for me, and for the folks in there — just having a place to ask questions. Not everybody agrees on everything, but you don't get your head bitten off for asking a reasonable question, like the trade-offs of one vaccine versus another versus not vaccinating. It's damnably hard to find somewhere you can just have that conversation.

Tom Rowland: Like a message-board setup?

Robb Wolf: It's like Facebook, a message board, and a blog had a baby — it's on a platform called Mighty Networks. It's not as elegant a user interface as Facebook, so it's a little clunky in that regard.

Tom Rowland: Well, you're only operating on eighteen billion dollars less of a budget than Facebook. I'll check that out, that sounds really interesting. So, your books — you've written three of them?

Robb Wolf: Three books.

Tom Rowland: And those are all on Amazon, available wherever books are sold?

Robb Wolf: Absolutely. And DrinkLMNT.com for the electrolytes. That's about it — I'm hoping to go get murdered at jiu-jitsu later, so say a prayer for me.

Tom Rowland: I'm sure somebody will be happy to strangle you almost to death. Alright, Robb — well, it's been really great meeting you. Thank you for being on the show. And you guys should definitely go check out his books — The Paleo Solution was one of my favorites and definitely influenced the way I ate for about the next fifteen years. All good, all good. Thanks, Robb, really appreciate it.

Robb Wolf: Thank you.