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Hydration isn’t complicated: Just drink water
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Hydration isn’t complicated: Just drink water
Electrolyte mixes have a time and place — but less than influencers would have you believe.
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by Victoria Song
Victoria Song
Senior Reviewer, Wearable Tech
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Follow See All by Victoria Song
Jul 3, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC
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_Pow_ erade is appropriate for World Cup athletes, but unless you’re also sweating buckets, water is usually enough.
| Photo: Megan Briggs / Getty Images
Victoria Song
Victoria Song
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Follow See All by Victoria Song
is a senior reporter and author of the Optimizer newsletter. She has more than 13 years of experience reporting on wearables, health tech, and more. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
This isOptimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewerVictoria Songthat dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.
Europe is melting, the eastern US is currently trapped in a “heat dome,” the Midwest has the corn sweats to look forward to, and if you’ve never felt the oppressive, sticky misery of monsoon season in Asia — consider yourself blessed. But as folks duke it out on social media about who has it hotter (and whether air conditioning is ethical), it’s time to address a nonnegotiable truth of surviving summer: hydration.
Surely, staying hydrated isn’t a controversial topic. Something as simple as drinking water can’t possibly be twisted by the wellness wild west. But alas, a recent TikTok search proved me wrong. “Sometimes water alone just isn’t enough,” an influencer named Grace, a “holistic nutritionist,” says in a partnership video with Liquid IV. She mixes a packet in, stirring with an aesthetic glass straw while spitting general truths about why electrolytes are important. “It’s about what your body does with the water that matters.”
Next, I was blasted with a clip of actress Mayim Bialik’s podcast emblazoned with the words “You’re hydrating wrong!” In it, Bialik’s guest, who is billed as an “exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist,” claims that drinking a lot of water won’t hydrate you properly. You’ll just pee it out, she says, because plain water doesn’t have the “ideal pressure” due to a lack of sodium and glucose.
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