What You Need To Know About Electrolytes: Types, Purpose, and Normal Levels
Electrolytes are chemicals that, when dissolved in water, have a natural positive or negative electrical charge.
They assist your body in various ways, including regulating chemical reactions and maintaining the balance of fluids inside and outside your cells.
They’re also essential for diagnosing a variety of medical ailments and disorders.
If you want to know how they work, what their types are, and the average level of electrolytes in a healthy human body, keep scrolling down this article.
What Are Electrolytes?
Electrolytes are chemicals that, when dissolved in water, have a natural positive or negative electrical charge.
Since an adult’s body is around 60% water, electrolytes are found in practically every fluid and cell in the body.
They assist your body in various ways, including regulating chemical reactions and maintaining the balance of fluids inside and outside your cells.
What you eat and drink provides electrolytes or their components to your body.
Excess electrolytes are filtered out of your body and into your urine by your kidneys. When you sweat, you lose electrolytes as well.
Why Are Electrolytes Important For Our Body?
Electrolytes are equally essential for our body cells to perform effectively. These are electrically charged minerals that help your body do its work. It helps the body produce energy and contract the muscles.
Here are a few things electrolytes do:
- Regulate fluid level in your body.
- Maintain the PH level of your blood.
- Enable muscle contractions.
- Help blood to clot.
- Helps with building new tissues.
These are only the surface function of electrolytes inside our body. To understand its purpose deeply, continue reading.
Types
Electrolytes are of various types. Let’s have a look:
1: Sodium
Sodium is essential for maintaining the proper fluid balance in your cells.
It’s also utilized to aid nutrition absorption in cells. It’s the most common electrolyte ion in the human body.
However, if your body has too much sodium, it can result in confusion or behavioral problems, as well as abnormally strong reflexes and muscular control, seizures, and coma.
2: Magnesium
Magnesium can help convert nutrients into energy to restore a proper balance in your body.
It is also essential for the proper functioning of your brain and muscles.
Heart rhythm alterations, impaired reflexes, and cardiac arrest are all symptoms of hypermagnesemia. It is a condition when your body has too much magnesium.
3: Potassium
Potassium and sodium are both used by your cells. A potassium ion exits a cell when a sodium ion enters and vice versa.
Potassium is crucial for heart health.
Too much or too little of either might lead to serious heart issues.
4: Calcium
Calcium is an essential nutrient for your body, but it does more than just keep your bones and teeth healthy.
It’s also utilized to control muscles, transfer nerve messages, regulate heart rhythm, and more.
Too much or too little calcium in your blood can create various symptoms in your body’s various systems.
5: Chloride
One of the most prevalent electrolytes in the body is chloride.
It’s also an essential aspect of how your cells keep their internal and exterior fluid balance.
It also aids in the maintenance of the body’s natural pH equilibrium.
6: Phosphate
Phosphate is a phosphorus-based substance that helps your cells move chemical compounds and molecules outside of your cells.
It aids in metabolizing nutrients in your cells and is a component of nucleotide molecules, which are the building blocks of your DNA.
Phosphate also helps nerve functions and muscle contractions.
7: Bicarbonate
Bicarbonate is a negatively charged electrolyte that maintains your blood’s pH level.
It works well with sodium, chloride, and potassium to maintain electrical neutrality.
It means bicarbonate helps balance the acids and bases in the human body.
Purpose
Electrolytes help your cells conduct electrical charges, which allows your muscles to contract. Chemical reactions benefit from the exact electrical charges, especially when it comes to hydration and fluid balance inside and outside of cells.
Electrolytes work on the concept that certain chemical elements can naturally hold a positive or negative electrical charge. When certain elements are dissolved in a liquid, the liquid becomes electrically conductible, maintaining the blood pH level.
Electrolytes assist your body in maintaining balance at the simplest chemical level. Ions are used by your body to carry chemical molecules in and out of cells, which means electrolytes are also necessary for regulating blood pressure.
An electrolyte imbalance can be caused by many factors. However, it is mostly the cause of excessive fluid loss from the body. For example, when someone is suffering from ailments like diarrhea, or fever; dehydration is common.
Why Is Electrolyte Balance So Important?
This is to make you understand why Electrolyte balance is so important for you.
We already know that electrolytes are minerals which help to maintain a balance in the body.
- It helps to balance the density of water in your body.
- The nutrients that you consume, it is the electrolytes job to send nutrients to their body.
- It also helps to move the waste particles away from the cell.
- It also ensures the proper functioning of your body organs, for example, nerves, muscle, the heart, and the brain.
All the electrolytes which were mentioned before, like sodium, calcium, and potassium, chloride and phosphate; they all need to have a balance in the body. Professional athletes may want to look at electrolyte hydration solutions from leading brands such as Ultima Replenisher to supplement their electrolyte intake.
Normal Levels
| Electrolyte | Milliequivalents per liter | Milligrams per deciliter | Millimoles per liter |
| Sodium | 136 – 144 | – | 136 – 144 |
| Potassium | ?3.7 – 5.1 | -? | ?3.7 – 5.1 mmol/L |
| Chloride | 97 – 105 | – | 97 – 105 |
| Bicarbonate | 22 – 30 | – | 22 – 30 |
| Calcium | ?2.16 – 2.60 | ?8.5 – 10.2 | ?2.12 – 2.54 |
| Magnesium | ?1.4 – 1.9 | ?1.7 – 2.3 | ?0.7 – 0.95 |
| Phosphate | 0.87 – 1.55 | 2.7 – 4.8 | 0.87 – 1.55 |
The Bottom Line
Electrolytes are helpful for the human body when it is exposed to too much heat, or loses excessive sweat while working out.
The types, purpose, and normal levels of electrolytes are all mentioned here so that you can get a good overview of them.
If you still need more information on them, ping us in the comment box.