Hello All! Just signed up today, but have researched this forum many many times and always find great info. This is my first post. 
I’ve never been able to find an answer to this question, but it’s mostly for my curiousity…
I’ve made ketorade before and to me it had little to no taste, my family said it tasted like drinking ocean water (very salty!). Is this just an individual taste sort of thing, OR do one of us have depleted electrolytes?
@Dainara7777 Greetings and welcome to the forum (officially)!
Definitely an individual thing - in combination with one’s electrolyte status.
I really enjoy the taste of salt water (NaCl + magnesium spiked) as thirst quenching ever since cutting out the carbs. It’s not that it really has much of a taste … it’s more that plain old tap water/spring water tastes flat and weird to me now.
I certainly couldn’t stand salty tasting water before. So in my case it’s clearly the low carb eating that has changed what my body craves.
Others who have tried my daily concoction gag on it.
Go figure.
I also drink salted water and find non-salted water insipid.
It’s possibly the latter. I worked in a factory for several years where, in the bad summer heat, they would give us line workers an electrolyte mix we were required to drink. I was intrigued to note at the time that the instructions read essentially, “drink this stuff until it stops tasting good.” That seemed to work well.
Nowadays, on keto, I find something similar with my salt intake (my other electrolytes seem to be fine), where I really like the taste of salt most of the time, but if I overdo it, the tastes becomes sickening.
You may be interested to know that the biology of this is that the elevated insulin resulting from eating the standard American diet interferes with the kidneys’ ability to excrete sodium. Hence, cutting carbs and therefore lowering insulin results in the kidneys’ returning to their normal, higher rate of excreting salt. And so we have to work a bit to keep our salt intake up to compensate.
It is also worth noting that, whereas the U.S. daily sodium recommendation is something like 2.3 g day, a couple of recent studies have demonstrated that the healthiest sodium intake is in the range of 4-6 grams/day, which is 10-15 g of sodium chloride (table salt).
I don’t like the taste of water without salt or electrolyte powder added. Or coffee, that needs salt too.
Thanks for the responses, very interesting stuff!!
I know how important salt and electrolytes are with a low carb woe, and I’m very mindful about keeping these up.
I too enjoy my water (and coffee) with salt or electrolytes as well. Definitely feel like it enhances the flavor.
Ditto coffee. I think most folks don’t realize just how much a ‘little’ salt enhances the flavours of coffee. Once you discover, there’s no going back.
Exactly! I love it when I catch people in movies or on tv put salt in their coffee, someone knows whats up! 