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\n Sports drinks and instant electrolyte powders have long been of interest to athletes \u2013 and are now popular for general wellness too.<\/p>\n
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U.S. consumers spend more than $10 billion a year on sports drinks, according to Beverage Industry<\/a>, a trade publication. And we can’t lie that sometimes a Gatorade or electrolyte tablet sounds really appealing in the quest to hydrate daily \u2013 especially since it’s been a very hot, long summer.<\/p>\n But the question is: Are we even sweating enough to warrant all these sugary electrolyte-filled drinks?<\/p>\n NPR health correspondent Pien Huang<\/a> has been on the case, and she brings us answers she’s racked up in her reporting today, which you can read in-depth here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Interested in more consumer health or human biology stories? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org<\/a> \u2013 we may feature it in an upcoming episode!<\/p>\n Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org\/shortwave<\/a>.<\/p>\n Listen to Short Wave on Spotify<\/a> and Apple Podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sports drinks and instant electrolyte powders have long been of interest to athletes \u2013 and are now popular…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[97,269],"class_list":{"0":"post-143788","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-nutrition"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}