Quench Hydration + Performance, Citrus Lime

Pull the national intake data and the picture is lopsided. In an analysis of 16,110 Americans from the NHANES survey, only 3 percent reached the adequate intake for potassium even after supplements were counted, and 45 percent came in under the requirement for magnesium. The same survey series run through 2018 on 39,925 adults found those two minerals still underconsumed and sodium overconsumed. The CDC's own read of that data is that adults in this country eat past the 2,300 mg sodium guideline and land under the 3,400 mg of potassium a man is supposed to get every day.

So when a hydration powder hands you another 1,000 mg of sodium, it tops up the one thing you already have plenty of and does nothing for the two you are short on. That is the gap Quench is built to fill, and it is why potassium is the biggest mineral on this label at 400 mg, with magnesium at 120 mg.

Sodium is not the villain here, and a formula with none of it would absorb worse. The pump that pulls water across your gut wall runs on sodium and glucose together, so the 250 mg in a scoop is there to run that pump, and the amount was chosen so a day of Quench, IGNITE and food does not push you past the range the outcome data favors. In the PURE study of 101,945 people across 17 countries, the lowest risk of death or a major heart event sat between 3 and 6 grams of sodium a day, and the people above 7 grams did worse along with the people below 3 grams. Higher potassium intake was tied to lower risk. That is the balance this label is built around.

Your small intestine takes in around 10 liters of water a day, and it does most of that without any pressure pushing the water through. The water rides on the transporter that moves glucose and sodium into your gut wall. When that transporter was studied on its own, every glucose molecule it carried dragged 260 water molecules with it, which the authors estimated accounts for about 5 liters of your daily water absorption by itself. That is the mechanism oral rehydration solution has used for decades, and it is the reason there are 3.5 g of dextrose in a scoop. The sugar is there to carry water, and 3.5 g is a small amount for that job.

You can see the effect in a bottle test. Maughan's group gave 72 men a liter each of 13 different drinks and measured what came back out over four hours. Plain water produced 1,337 g of urine. An oral rehydration solution built on this pump produced 1,038 g, and at the two hour mark it had held about 54 percent more of its fluid than water had. Cola, a sports drink, coffee, tea and orange juice all behaved like water.

Glutamine does not use the glucose pump. It has its own sodium-linked transporter in the gut wall, and in a jejunal perfusion study of 19 adults with acute cholera, glutamine given with glucose stimulated water absorption to the same degree glucose managed on its own. Glutamine is also the fuel your gut lining burns first, which is a sensible thing to feed a gut you are asking to absorb a lot of water.

Glycine is carried by a separate transporter again, so on mechanism you have three independent routes into the gut wall. Read the human data for what it is, though. When researchers fortified standard oral rehydration solution with glycine for children with diarrhea, it rehydrated them fine and it did not beat the standard solution, and in animal perfusion work adding glycine lowered net absorption because it pushed the osmolality up. We took the lesson from that in the dose. Glycine sits in Quench at 1 g, low enough to keep the drink hypotonic, and the amino acids as a group are capped for the reason below.

More amino acid is worse past a point. In three crossover trials at Loughborough, groups of 15 to 17 people drank beverages carrying different amino acid loads with heavy water added as a tracer, and the researchers tracked how fast that tracer showed up in their blood. A small amount, 3.5 g per liter, got fluid into circulation faster than a carbohydrate sports drink did. Five times that amount slowed delivery down. Quench carries 2.5 g of amino acids in a 16 oz scoop, which keeps it well under the load that slowed delivery. That ceiling is why there are no EAAs in this formula, and it is why you should not dump a scoop of protein powder into the same shaker.

Osmolality is how crowded a drink is with dissolved particles. A drink more concentrated than your blood pulls water into your gut before it gives any back, and a drink less concentrated than your blood moves the other way. A meta-analysis of 28 studies and 68 drink treatments during continuous exercise found that hypotonic drinks, meaning under 275 mOsmol/kg, were the most likely to hold plasma volume, ahead of isotonic drinks with a probability the authors put at 98 percent, and ahead of hypertonic drinks and plain water. Quench was built to that line. The finished formula was measured by an outside lab at 261 mOsmol/kg, and the sweetener system was chosen so nothing pushed it over: no sugar alcohols, and a stevia extract dosed in milligrams.

The NIH depletion and repletion study that set the modern vitamin C recommendation found that a single 200 mg dose is absorbed completely, that your immune cells are saturated by 100 mg a day, and that at 500 mg and above the extra mostly ends up in your urine. So 200 mg is the dose your body actually takes up, and a full gram would be a bigger number on the label with nothing behind it.

You do lose zinc in sweat, and the amount is small. In cyclists riding for two hours, sweat zinc came to about 9 percent of the daily allowance for men and 8 percent for women. Zinc is here because 8 percent of Americans in the intake data still come in under the requirement, and because the bisglycinate form is absorbed through amino acid transport and is easy on an empty stomach. It is the same form in the Anvil Zinc Glycinate capsule.

B6 and B12 are here in small amounts near the daily value, and the B12 is methylcobalamin, the same form the Daily Multivitamin uses. Both are water-soluble, so a scoop on top of the multi does not push you toward any upper limit.

Vitamins D, E and K and the trace minerals stay out of Quench because you already get them from the multi and from D3+K2, and a water mix is the wrong vehicle for a fat-soluble vitamin anyway. Everything in this canister dissolves in water, which is what makes the one scoop rule safe to stack with the rest of the lineup.