Arrival of Israeli troops in the southern border town has choked aid supplies, as hunger deepens in southern Gaza
Fayiz Abu Ataya was born into war and knew nothing else. Over his first and only spring, in a town stalked by hunger, he wasted away to a shadow of a child, skin stretched painfully over jutting bones.
In seven months of life, he had little time to make a mark beyond the family who loved him. But when his death from malnutrition was reported last week, it sounded a warning around the world about a rapidly deepening crisis in central and southern Gaza, triggered by the Israeli military operation in the southern town of Rafah.
The taste bud diagram, used in many textbooks over the years, originated in a 1901 study but was actually showing the sensitivity of different areas of the tongue.
Comedian, writer and actor Stephen Merchant on standup, fame and the pressures of cancel culture; testing the ‘world-leading science’ claims behind the Zoe nutrition app; and the point when writer Harriet Tyce realised she didn’t want to be remembered only as a drinker
Electrolyte powders come in all different flavors, mineral concentrations, and sweetener options. They’re sold to athletes, to dieters, and as a hangover cure. But how many of us can actually benefit from taking electrolytes? And how many of the hydration "facts" we hear on social media are actually myths?
If you’re expecting me to say that electrolytes are useless, that’s not exactly true. I love a cold swig of LMNT when I come home from a sweaty summer run. I appreciate electrolytes’ many functions in the human body. But we have to dissect some of the claims that are popping up on social media as every influencer tries to sell you their favorite brand of electrolytes. Most of them are trying to solve a problem of their own making.
But more about that in a minute. First, let’s look at what electrolytes really do, and who can benefit.
What are electrolytes?
Electrolytes are minerals that we get in our diet, and specifically the ones that become charged ions when dissolved in water. Table salt, for example, is sodium chloride. When you mix it into water, it breaks down into a positively-charged sodium ion, and a negatively charged chloride ion.
(The “electro” in the name comes from the fact that these ions have an electrical charge. If you think of water as a conductor of electricity—like the reason you shouldn’t drop a hair dryer in a bathtub—it actually gets that conductive property from those dissolved minerals. Distilled water does not conduct electricity.)
Our body needs a variety of chemical elements to work, and those include electrolytes. We use sodium and potassium ions to make our nerves fire, and calcium to trigger our muscles to contract, among other functions. And since we can’t make chemical elements from scratch, we need to get them in our diet. When you hear about “vitamins and minerals” as micronutrients, those minerals include electrolytes. These electrolytes include:
Sodium
Potassium
Chloride
Magnesium
Calcium
Phosphate (which contains phosphorus)
Where do we get electrolytes?
Forget the supplements for a minute—we normally get electrolytes in our food. Anything with salt in it provides sodium and chloride, for example. Potassium is in plenty of fruits and vegetables—famously bananas and coconut water, but also leafy greens, potatoes, and more.
There are only two minerals where people commonly fall short, according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. These are calcium and potassium.
Sodium is also mentioned in the guidelines (and on nutrition labels), but for the opposite reason—too much sodium can be bad for you, especially if you have high blood pressure. That said, people who exercise a lot or sweat a lot may need more sodium than the guidelines indicate—which is where electrolyte supplements come in.
Electrolyte supplements may help athletes who sweat a lot
When we sweat, we lose water and sodium. A 2011 review in the Journal of Sport Sciences points out that athletes can lose four to seven liters of water per day if they’re training hard or in hot weather—that’s eight to 14 standard sized water bottles’ worth. Alongside that, a typical sodium loss may be 3,500 to 7,000 milligrams.
Compare that to the recommendations for non-athletes: most of us are advised to keep our sodium intake under 2,300 milligrams per day, or under 1,500 if we’ve been advised to keep sodium low to control our blood pressure.
While you may not think of yourself as an “athlete,” it’s not hard to find yourself in a situation where you’re losing a lot of water and sodium—and other electrolytes as a side effect. One way to illustrate this is to weigh yourself before and after going for a run in the summertime. If you don’t pee in the meantime, then any weight loss between the start and end of your run is likely to be water you’ve lost, at least some of it through sweat. If you lose two pounds, for example, that’s about a liter—or two water bottles’ worth.
The most important electrolyte to replace in this case is sodium. Trying to replenish all those fluids with plain water, without any added sodium, may lead to hyponatremia, a dangerous shortage of sodium in the body. (If you’re replacing electrolytes, you don’t want low-sodium sources. Coconut water has plenty of potassium, and that’s great, but its low sodium content makes it not a great option here.)
Electrolytes can reduce the harm of fasting or extreme dieting
I’m not going to endorse extended fasts or extreme dieting here, but something you’ll hear from fasting communities online is that supplemental electrolytes are crucial for health if you’re fasting. That’s true.
If you’re not eating food, you’re missing out on all the usual sources of minerals (including electrolytes) in your diet. While our body can handle going without most vitamins or minerals for at least a few days or weeks, electrolytes are needed more urgently.
I’m not going to give guidelines here; if you’re eating so little food that you’re in danger of an electrolyte shortage, you should really be getting your information from a medical professional, not a blog on the internet. I will say that, unlike athletes replacing losses from sweat, you need to consider more than just sodium. Please don’t assume that table salt (or Himalayan salt, or salt plus lemon juice) covers all your bases.
Electrolytes probably do nothing for hangovers
You’ve probably heard about using Pedialyte or Gatorade to prevent or “cure” a hangover; some electrolyte supplement companies market products specifically for, as Waterboy puts it, “weekend recovery.”
But hangovers result from drinking alcohol, not from dehydration or electrolyte deficiency. Cedars-Sinai reports that people with hangovers tend to have the same electrolyte levels as people who are not hung over.
And, honestly, you could have figured this out yourself. I’ve been dehydrated, and I’ve been hung over. Despite some minor similarities (nausea, headache), they’re entirely different experiences. If you’re dehydrated, a glass of water will fix you right up. If you’re hung over, that bottle of Pedialyte is just there to distract you while you wait for your liver to work through the night’s backlog.
Why everybody on TikTok wants you to take more electrolytes
So if electrolyte supplements are only really useful for athletes and in a few medical applications (like rehydrating people who have suffered a nasty bout of diarrhea), why are they all over your feed? Because they’re supplements, of course. Supplements are some of the most affiliate-marketable things out there: cheap to produce, cheap to ship, and in the case of electrolytes, they can be made into a good-tasting drink.
The electrolyte boom also builds off the escalating advice to drink more and more water. All the health-conscious girlies carry a gigantic water bottle (or Stanley tumbler, or whatever trend we’ve moved onto) and sip from it all day long. (This is not necessary.)
Ironically, the marketing pitch I’m seeing most often on TikTok and the like is a response to that. Are you going to the bathroom constantly? Are you peeing almost clear? Maybe you’re “overhydrated.” The solution? Not drinking less, no no. The solution is to follow my link in bio and buy some electrolytes to add to your water.
Or maybe you’d like a DIY solution. Since lemons have magical health properties (I am kidding, okay?) we add lemon juice and sea salt to our water bottle. Some of the TikTok recipes call for a tiny amount of salt, so little we can't taste it. That would be about one-tenth of a teaspoon, providing 200 milligrams of sodium in a liter of water, according to World Health Organization data on how much sodium we can usually taste. Other recipes call for a full teaspoon of salt (2,300 milligrams of sodium) in 1 to 1.5 liters of water.
Some of the videos claim that electrolyte supplementation is necessary if you drink filtered water, but a liter of tap water only contains 2-3% of your daily calcium and magnesium, varying depending on where you get your water from, and less than 1% of other electrolytes. So you aren’t missing out on any significant sources of electrolytes by filtering your water.
Is it bad to drink a lot of electrolytes?
If you’re chugging a ton of water, adding electrolytes to some (maybe not all) of your water could be a sensible move. Just pay attention to your total sodium intake, and make sure you’re not getting astronomical levels.
For example, if you already get 2,500 milligrams from your diet (which you can track with an app like Cronometer), two packets of LMNT will bring you up to 4,500 for the day. If you aren’t doing a ton of sweaty exercise outdoors, that’s probably more than is good for your health. Pay attention to the numbers and use a little common sense.
Getting enough protein is important for our baseline health, and for supporting athletic endeavors. Calorie tracking apps like my fave, Cronometer, can help you keep track of your protein intake, but sometimes you just want to make sure you’re hitting your protein targets without putting calories front-and-center.
Why you might want to track protein
After all, tracking your macros isn’t just for weight loss. (And weight loss doesn’t require calorie tracking; that’s just one helpful tool, not the only way to do it.) Protein tracking can be helpful if:
You’re trying to gain muscle.
You do a lot of endurance sports (like distance running).
You’re pregnant or lactating.
You’re trying to eat better, and you’ve chosen protein as your focus rather than trying to improve everything at once.
Protein-only tracking is especially popular among people who are getting into the habit of lifting weights. You may need to get out of your calorie- and weight-based comfort zones, and just focus on fueling yourself.
To figure out which is the best protein tracking app, I downloaded the top four protein trackers in the iPhone App Store that are not full-featured calorie trackers. Read on to learn what I found.
All the big protein tracking apps are very simple, and similar
I suppose this is a niche market, but somehow I expected more. The App Store is full of protein tracking apps, and they all have nearly identical interfaces: a circular progress meter for the day’s protein (showing how much you’ve eaten relative to your goal), and a button to let you add the foods you’ve eaten that day. I tested these four:
Protein Tracker (which appears, after installation, under the name ProteinPlus)
Unlike most calorie trackers, though, there’s no way to search for foods for free. Two of them (Hello Protein and Protein Log) don’t have a search at all. The other two (Protein Tracker and Protein Pal) have a search, but it requires a premium subscription.
That means that most of the time, when you’re using these apps, you just have to know how much protein is in the food you’re logging. You can either check a label, Google it, or just know it off the top of your head. For someone like me who has been tracking protein for years, that’s not too hard—of course an egg has 6 grams of protein—but it seriously limits the user-friendliness for beginners.
The best for minimalists: Protein Log
Credit: Protein Log
Protein Log is one of the apps that doesn’t have a search feature. It doesn’t find the foods for you, and it doesn’t help you figure out how much protein you should be eating. It just gives you a place to say “chicken, 44 grams” and adds that to your daily total.
There is a history tab showing what you ate and how much protein each item had. You can also use the calendar to check your protein intake for any day in the past. In the Analytics tab, you can see how much protein you had each day this week, this month, and this year, relative to your target.
Runner-up: HelloProtein is also in the minimalist category, but it has a pretty huge drawback: there’s no way to edit what you ate on previous days. I logged some things yesterday, then woke up this morning and remembered that I needed to log a protein bar. Too bad—no way to add it. HelloProtein does give you an analytics page, but what good are my weekly stats if I know that Monday is missing 20 grams that I know I ate?
Protein Pal has the most features for the best price
Credit: Protein Pal
If you want something with a built in search, Protein Pal is the app you’re looking for. It also recommends a protein target for you, if you like. When you start the app, it gives you a place to enter your protein target, but there is also a “protein calculator” to help you out if you aren’t sure what number to pick. It recommended that I aim for 110 grams of protein per day, which is about 0.73 grams per pound of body weight and fits right in with the recommendations for muscle gain (which was the goal I entered).
Once you’ve decided on a target, this app behaves a lot like my minimalist pick, Protein Log. The main difference is the search, which is available under the pro subscription ($3.99/month or $23.99/year, with a 7-day free trial). You can now find foods through a text search (“powered by FatSecret,” it says) or a barcode scanner (“powered by” and then there’s a green icon I don’t recognize).
Both are a bit clunky. The barcode scanner will display results, then immediately scan its surroundings again, so you need to move the camera away from the thing you just scanned if you want to actually enter it. Disappointingly, the database is not always accurate. My favorite protein bar, Barebells Salty Peanut, registered in the app as containing 16 grams of protein when the label says it has 20 grams.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki
Runner-up: Protein Tracker/ProteinPlus is a similar app with similar features; its search even gave the same, incorrect 16 grams of protein for my Barebells bar. It also gave me a 7-day free trial before charging $24.99/year, but the month-by-month cost is $9.99—a full $6 more each month than Protein Pal. (Protein Tracker has a slightly nicer looking interface for the search, but I’m not paying an extra six bucks just for that.) When I went into my subscriptions (under iPhone Settings > Apple ID) I noticed that there were two yearly options, one for $24.99 and one for $19.99. If you end up going with this app, make sure to pick the cheaper one, because paying $5 extra for no reason is just silly.
The author on how his mission to improve our national diet began – and where it needs to go
Chris van Tulleken has suggested we meet at his local pizza place, Sweet Thursday, in Hackney, east London. If the choice seems counterintuitive for a man with a mission to improve our national diet, he puts me right when we sit down. “Pizza has become emblematic of junk food,” he says, “but proper homemade pizza is very healthy.”
At Sweet Thursday, purist Italian chefs work their fresh sourdough bases in an open kitchen (rumour has it they are so purist in this vocation that they draw the line at making salad). But it is not just authenticity that counts, it is also community. Van Tulleken lives around the corner; the owner grew up nearby and this is where local families tend to come to catch up or to celebrate. “Above all, a restaurant should never be just a way of extracting money in exchange for nutrition,” Van Tulleken says. “Or for paying dividends to offshore investors. And I think these things are actually obvious even if you don’t live, like me, in a world of nutritional studies.”
The wellness project claims to help users make ‘smarter food choices’ based on ‘world-leading science’. But many scientists claim its fee-based services are no better than generic advice
“Your body is unique, so is the food you need.” This is the central credo of personalised nutrition (PN), as professed by its leading UK advocate, the health science company Zoe. Since its launch in April 2022, 130,000 people have subscribed to the service – at one point it had a waiting list of 250,000 – which uses a pin prick blood test, stool sample and a wearable continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to suggest “smarter food choices for your body”.
Like other companies working in this space, Zoe has all the hallmarks of serious science. Its US equivalent Levels counts among its advisers many respected scientists, including Robert Lustig, famous for raising the alarm about the harms of refined carbohydrates such as sugar. Zoe is fronted by King’s College London scientist Tim Spector and claims to be “created with world-leading science”.
How cool would it be if we could prevent sunburn and skin cancer without sunscreen—just by eating certain natural foods? It’s a really attractive idea, which explains why it’s all over TikTok. Too bad it doesn’t actually work.
Can we quit it with the “sunscreen is toxic” bullshit already?
The food-as-sunscreen TikToks don’t always come out and say it, but they’re trading on the established myth of sunscreen being somehow bad for us. (You don’t want to know how many “akshully, sunscreen causes cancer” statements I had to scroll through while researching this article.)
As I’ve written before, this is not some kind of sensible risk management messaging. It’s complete nonsense. The harms of UV exposure are concrete and well-documented. The harms of sunscreen are unproven, mostly guesswork, and the occasional legitimate concern is on the level of “hey, it would be helpful to have more research to know if some types of sunscreen are safer than others.” This stuff is absolutely not on the level of “avoid sunscreen because it’s bad for you.”
What the science actually says about food and sun damage
The TikToks about natural sun protection give a laundry list of foods, saying vaguely that they protect from sun damage. Sometimes they’ll recommend a specific supplement. But they never go into detail about the things that are important to know when recommending a preventative treatment, like:
What dosage is needed to get the intended results?
Has this actually been tested in humans?
How much protection does the food or supplement give you, and how was that measured?
Does the protection start working immediately, and if not, how long does it take?
Does the effectiveness vary from person to person?
Does the protective ingredient break down over time, and is there a way to refresh its protection (equivalent to reapplying sunscreen)?
What are the downsides to the food or supplement when used in the recommended dosage?
For actual, FDA-approved sunscreens, there are answers to all of these questions. For the foods recommended on TikTok, there are not. Instead of this fully fleshed-out information, we just get statements like “Eat watermelons, tomatoes, walnuts, carrots…”
If you look into the research, none of it really supports the claims the TikTokers are making (or implying). For example, here is a study showing that an antioxidant found in walnuts can protect human skin cells from some of the effects of UV damage. Sounds promising, until you realize that the skin cells were not in humans, but rather are a human-derived mutant cell line (sounds weird, but it’s a very normal thing in science labs). The researchers made a walnut extract and combined it with the cells in cell culture plates, which are basically teeny-tiny test tubes. So to review: This study did not involve people, eating, walnuts (as a food), sunlight, or sunburn.
Here’s a more relevant study: Light-skinned, non-smoking volunteers ate 40 grams of tomato paste (about three tablespoons) along with 10 grams of olive oil every day. After 10 weeks, they showed less reddening of the skin in response to exposure to a UV lamp. That’s promising! Very cool! Heck, if you felt inspired and wanted to start eating tomato paste (going through a little can of it every 4 days), I wouldn’t stop you.
But pay attention to what the study didn’t find. It doesn’t tell us what results people with lighter or darker skin tones would get. It doesn’t tell us how this protection changes (or doesn’t) over time—would you get the same results at the end of the summer as at the beginning, if you used this as your only sun protection?
And, most importantly, it only found that the people who used tomato paste got less reddening of the skin. The tomato paste didn’t completely prevent sunburn. The TikTokers are talking about these foods as if they are magic potions, or get-out-of-sunburn-free cards. Even the most promising studies don’t back that up.
And of course everybody is selling a supplement
If there’s one thing wellness TikTokers love, it’s selling supplements. Supplements are cheap for manufacturers to make, easy to ship, straightforward to explain (“X is good for Y”) and anybody can throw up an affiliate link in their bio to get a cut of the profits.
And so it is with these allegedly sunburn-preventing supplements. The hot one right now is Heliocare, which of course has a “brand affiliate” program. It’s made from a fern called Polypodium leucotomos, and there is actually research (!) supporting the idea that it may help a little bit to lessen sunburn.
But, as with the tomato studies, the results are at the “hmm, kind of interesting” level. This isn’t something that will let you ditch your sunscreen if you’re being at all responsible about it. I’m looking at the graphs in the paper’s results, and honestly I’m not sure if I can see a difference in redness at the later timepoints. If the supplement only delays how long it takes for a sunburn to show up, that doesn’t seem very useful. (I might actually wonder if it’s worse, since that could lead you to stay out longer before you realize how bad a burn you’re developing.)
Again, a statistically detectable difference in redness is not the same as completely (or even mostly) preventing sunburn. It’s also worth noting that the dosage of Heliocare (one 240-milligram pill per day) is less than what was used in the study (7.5 milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight, which works out to be 528 milligrams for a 154-pound person, or over two pills’ worth). If you take three pills per day, that $34.99 bottle will only last you 20 days. I’m not seeing the advantage over just applying sunscreen normally.
Rib-eye steak “is viscerally and primitively satisfying to me,” said Dr. Shawn Baker, who was instrumental in the online rise of so-called “meatfluencers.”
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