By Sebastian Madlangbayan, founder of Cleonse: the world's cleanest 3-ingredient organic electrolyte.
The cleanest electrolyte is the one with the shortest ingredient list that still delivers real sodium. Cleonse uses three: organic fruit powder, organic cane sugar, and French grey sea salt — 500mg sodium and 85+ trace minerals per stick. Compare that to Gatorade powder's ten-item label or Liquid I.V.'s fifteen.
That's the whole answer. The rest of this guide is how to verify it yourself on any label in any store.
"Clean" is a marketing word. Ingredient counts aren't.
Nobody regulates the word "clean." A brand can print it on a pouch that contains nine synthetic additives and a dye, and no one stops them. That's why "clean hydration" as a claim is worth roughly nothing on its own.
What is verifiable is the ingredient panel. It's federally required, it's printed in descending order by weight, and it can't lie. So instead of arguing about what "clean" means, count the line items and ask what each one is doing there.
Here's how the major powders stack up, pulled from current public labels in July 2026:
| Product | Ingredient count | Sweetener | Dyes | Sodium per serving |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cleonse | 3 | Organic cane sugar | None | 500mg |
| LMNT (Citrus Salt) | 6 | Stevia leaf extract | None | 1,000mg |
| Cure Hydration (Watermelon) | 9 | Stevia + monk fruit | Beet powder (for color) | 240mg |
| Just Ingredients (Lemonade) | 10 | Stevia + monk fruit | None | — |
| Gatorade Thirst Quencher powder (Lemon-Lime) | 10 | Sugar + dextrose | Yellow 5 | 150mg |
| Gatorlyte powder sticks | 11–12 | Sugar + stevia | Yellow 6 / Red 40 (flavor-dependent) | 490mg |
| Liquid I.V. Hydration Multiplier | 15 | Cane sugar + dextrose + stevia | None | ~520mg |
Three versus six versus ten versus fifteen. Same category, same shelf, wildly different labels.
How to read an electrolyte label in 30 seconds
You don't need a nutrition degree. You need four passes.
Pass 1 — Count the line items. Anything over about eight, ask why. Every ingredient past the fourth or fifth is usually doing a job that has nothing to do with hydrating you: shelf stability, color, flow, mouthfeel, or a vitamin that makes the marketing panel look busier.
Pass 2 — Find the sodium. Flip to the Nutrition Facts panel, not the front of the pack. Sodium is the electrolyte you actually lose in meaningful quantities when you sweat. If a product leads with "72 trace minerals!" but the panel says 100mg sodium, it's flavored water with a story.
Pass 3 — Identify the sweetener. Cane sugar, dextrose, allulose, stevia, monk fruit, sucralose — every powder is sweetened by something. Decide which one you actually want, then check whether the brand is honest about it on the front of the pack.
Pass 4 — Scan for non-food. Silicon dioxide, calcium silicate, maltodextrin, modified food starch, corn syrup solids, artificial dyes, "natural and artificial flavor." None of these are in your bloodstream doing hydration work. They're there to keep powder from clumping, to bulk out a stick, or to make the drink a specific shade of yellow.
Cleonse survives all four passes because there are only three lines to read: organic lemon or strawberry powder, organic cane sugar, French grey sea salt. Nothing on our panel is an anti-caking agent, and nothing is a color.
What to actually avoid — and why
Dyes
Gatorade Thirst Quencher powder in Lemon-Lime lists Yellow 5. Gatorlyte powder sticks list Yellow 6 in Orange and Red 40 in Watermelon. The ready-to-drink Gatorlyte bottle also lists Red 40.
Dye does one thing: makes the liquid the color you expect. It does not hydrate you, it does not replace anything you sweated out, and it does not improve the drink. It exists because a clear lemon-lime drink doesn't look like lemon-lime on a shelf.
We don't use dye because we don't need to. Organic strawberry powder makes the water pink. Organic lemon powder makes it pale yellow. That's the fruit doing the job.
Stevia (and the aftertaste problem)
Stevia leaf extract shows up on almost every "zero sugar" electrolyte: LMNT, Liquid I.V., Gatorlyte, Redmond Re-Lyte, Cure, Just Ingredients. It's plant-derived and it's cheap in the sense that a tiny amount goes a long way.
The issue isn't safety — it's that stevia has a distinctive lingering, slightly metallic finish that a lot of people can't unnotice once they've noticed it. If you've ever put down a stick pack halfway through a workout because the taste got worse the longer you drank it, stevia is usually the reason. That's not a nutrition problem, it's an adherence problem: the best hydration protocol is the one you'll finish.
We use a small amount of real organic cane sugar instead. It tastes like lemonade because it basically is lemonade.
Fillers, flow agents, and maltodextrin
Watch for these four:
- Maltodextrin — a cheap carbohydrate bulking agent. Common in Gatorlyte sticks. It adds carbs without adding food.
- Silicon dioxide / calcium silicate — anti-caking agents that keep powder pourable in a factory. Liquid I.V. uses silicon dioxide; Gatorade powder uses calcium silicate.
- Modified food starch — texture and flow. On the Gatorade Lemon-Lime powder panel and Gatorlyte Orange.
- Corn syrup solids — on the Gatorlyte Cherry Lime panel.
None of these are dangerous. They're just not doing anything for you. Every one of them is a line on your label that exists to solve a manufacturing problem, and you're the one drinking the solution.
Vitamin stacking
Liquid I.V. carries Vitamin C plus B3, B5, B6, and B12 — five of its fifteen ingredients are vitamins. It reads well on a panel. But B vitamins are water-soluble, most people aren't deficient, and stacking 150–330% DV into a hydration drink is a marketing decision more than a physiological one. If you want B vitamins, take B vitamins. Hydration is a separate job.
Sodium is the electrolyte. Everything else is a rounding error.
This is the part most brands blur.
When you sweat, you lose water and you lose electrolytes — but not in equal proportions. Sodium is by far the most abundant electrolyte in sweat. Potassium, magnesium, and calcium are present, but at dramatically lower concentrations. Sweat sodium concentration varies a lot between people (genetics, heat acclimation, fitness), which is why some athletes finish a session with white salt rings on a black shirt and others don't.
So when you're choosing a hydration product, the sodium number on the Nutrition Facts panel is the number that matters most. Cleonse delivers 500mg of sodium per 30g stick.
That's a deliberate middle. It's more than triple what a serving of Gatorade Thirst Quencher powder provides (150mg). It's roughly in line with Liquid I.V. (~520mg) and Gatorlyte (490mg). And it's half of LMNT's 1,000mg, which is a very high dose built for keto dieters, sauna users, and heavy-sweat endurance athletes — great for those cases, a lot for a Tuesday.
A note on how brands inflate this number: some products advertise a total "electrolyte" figure that adds up sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, and chloride into one big milligram count. It's technically arithmetic, but it's designed to look like a dose. We don't do that. Our electrolyte story is 500mg of sodium plus the 85+ trace minerals naturally present in French grey sea salt — and we'd rather you check the panel than trust a hero number.
Trace minerals, explained without the woo
French grey sea salt (sel gris) is harvested by hand from clay-lined salt ponds on the Atlantic coast of France. It's raked from the bottom of the pond, which is where the grey color and the residual moisture come from. Critically, it isn't refined, bleached, or stripped.
Refined table salt is processed down to essentially pure sodium chloride, then often has an anti-caking agent added. Unrefined grey sea salt keeps the 85+ trace minerals that were in the seawater — magnesium, potassium, calcium, and a long tail of minerals present in genuinely trace amounts.
Here's the honest framing, because this is where a lot of salt marketing goes off the rails: those trace minerals are present in trace quantities. They are not a meaningful magnesium supplement. What they are is the difference between a whole ingredient and a processed one. We use grey sea salt because it's real salt that hasn't been taken apart and reassembled — and because it dissolves clean without the harsh metallic edge refined salt can have in water.
The sodium does the hydration work. The trace minerals come along because we didn't strip them out.
Real sugar during exercise is fuel, not a flaw
The zero-sugar movement in electrolytes has been genuinely good for the everyday category — nobody needs 21 grams of sugar to rehydrate on the couch. But it swung far enough that a lot of athletes now believe sugar in a training drink is a defect.
It isn't. During exercise, carbohydrate is the fuel your muscles burn hardest. Sports nutrition guidance has pointed the same direction for decades: for sessions past about an hour, taking in carbohydrate alongside fluid supports both fueling and fluid absorption. Sodium and glucose are co-transported across the intestinal wall — they move together. That's the actual mechanism behind every "rapid hydration" claim in this category, including the ones with trademarked names attached.
So when a competitor's marketing tells you their proprietary transport system is why their drink absorbs faster, the honest translation is: there's sugar and salt in it.
Cleonse has 24g of organic cane sugar and 100 calories per 30g stick, with 26g of total carbohydrate. We don't hide it, we don't dress it up as "cellular transport technology," and we don't bulk it with dextrose or corn syrup solids. It's cane sugar. It's fuel. It's on the front of the pack.
Two honest caveats, because this shouldn't be a sales pitch:
- If you're not training, you probably don't want 24g of sugar in your water. Cleonse is built for sweat — matches, long runs, heat, two-a-days. For sedentary sipping, a zero-sugar option genuinely makes more sense.
- If you're keto or specifically avoiding carbohydrates, this isn't your product. LMNT is a better tool for that job and we'll say so plainly.
Different tools. We're the one for the days you're actually sweating.
The three-ingredient standard
Here's the test we hold ourselves to: every ingredient has to be food, and every ingredient has to have a job.
- Organic lemon or strawberry powder — flavor and color, from actual fruit.
- Organic cane sugar — fast carbohydrate. Fuel, and it makes the salt drinkable.
- French grey sea salt — 500mg sodium plus 85+ trace minerals.
That's it. No artificial sweeteners, no artificial flavors, no dyes, no preservatives, no gums, no fillers, no stevia. Vegan and gluten-free by construction rather than by certification workaround.
Cleonse comes in Organic Lemonade and Organic Strawberry, plus a Duo Assortment 10-pack (five of each). Shipping is free on every order, and there's a 30-day guarantee — if it isn't the cleanest electrolyte you've had, send it back.
The bigger point stands whether or not you buy from us: go read the panel on whatever is in your cabinet right now. Count the lines. Find the sodium. Name the sweetener. If it passes, keep drinking it. If it doesn't, you now know exactly what you're paying for.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cleanest electrolyte drink mix?
The cleanest electrolyte drink mix is the one with the fewest ingredients that still delivers meaningful sodium. Cleonse uses three whole-food ingredients — organic fruit powder, organic cane sugar, and French grey sea salt — with 500mg sodium and 85+ trace minerals per stick, and no dyes, sweeteners, gums, or fillers.
How many ingredients should an electrolyte powder have?
There's no official standard, but a useful rule is that anything past about eight line items deserves scrutiny. Current labels range from three (Cleonse) to six (LMNT) to ten (Gatorade Thirst Quencher powder) to fifteen (Liquid I.V.). Extra ingredients are usually anti-caking agents, dyes, bulking carbohydrates, or added vitamins.
Is stevia bad in electrolyte drinks?
Stevia leaf extract is a widely used plant-derived sweetener and is generally recognized as safe. The common complaint isn't safety — it's the lingering aftertaste, which makes some people stop drinking mid-session. Cleonse uses organic cane sugar instead, so there's no stevia finish.
Do electrolyte drinks need sugar?
Not for everyday sipping. But during exercise, carbohydrate is useful: sodium and glucose are absorbed together, and carbohydrate is your primary training fuel for sustained efforts. Cleonse includes 24g of organic cane sugar per stick as fuel for training. If you're not sweating, a zero-sugar option is a more sensible fit.
What are the 85+ trace minerals in French grey sea salt?
French grey sea salt is unrefined, hand-harvested salt that retains the minerals naturally present in seawater — including magnesium, potassium, and calcium — rather than being processed down to pure sodium chloride. These minerals are present in trace amounts. The hydration work is done by the sodium; the trace minerals are simply what's left when you don't strip the salt.
Which electrolytes have no artificial ingredients or dyes?
Cleonse, LMNT, Redmond Re-Lyte, Just Ingredients, and Cure all avoid artificial dyes. Gatorade Thirst Quencher powder lists Yellow 5, and Gatorlyte powder sticks list Yellow 6 or Red 40 depending on flavor. Among the dye-free options, Cleonse has the shortest ingredient list at three and is the only one with no added sweetener beyond real organic cane sugar.
Try The World's Cleanest Electrolyte™
Three ingredients. 500mg sodium. Nothing artificial. Free shipping and a 30-day guarantee.
Shop CleonseKeep reading
- How to read an electrolyte label (without getting fooled)
- What is French grey sea salt? (And the truth about trace minerals)
- Cleonse vs LMNT: an honest comparison
Written by Sebastian Madlangbayan, founder of Cleonse and a state champion tennis player. This article is for general information and is not medical advice.
Editor's note on sourcing: competitor ingredient lists and nutrition figures in this article were verified against current public labels in July 2026 — LMNT via drinklmnt.com/pages/ingredients and help.drinklmnt.com; Liquid I.V. Hydration Multiplier via the CVS ingredient listing and H-E-B nutrition panel; Gatorade Thirst Quencher Lemon-Lime powder via the Prospre and Smart & Final label listings; Gatorlyte powder sticks via Powder Mix Direct's published stick ingredient lists and gatorade.com's Gatorlyte Orange page; Redmond Re-Lyte via living.redmond.com; Just Ingredients via justingredients.com; Cure via curehydration.com. Formulations change without notice — always read the panel on the pack in your hand.