Page Love, RDN

August 11, 2026

Topic: How to beat the heat with hydration and nutrition

Healthy Habits Episode 6 August 11 2026

[00:00:00] Welcome to the TY Healthspan Healthy Habits weekly briefing. I’m excited to be a part of this, new wellness collaborative, as one of the dieticians on board and involved in doing these weekly, webinars. I’ll be doing one about once a month, and I thought as we’re winding down the summer and, a lot of the country is still experiencing extreme heat issues, this would be a good end-of-the-summer topic just to remind us about our hydration and our nutrition to support adequate hydration.
So I’m gonna highlight some basics, but also hopefully introduce you to a couple of new concepts today, particularly in the area of how to monitor our hydration a little bit more closely. But I’m gonna start off with diet,

[00:01:00] and we forget that eating adequately helps us hold on to fluids in our body, and one of the most common trends in the diet world right now is still low-carb diets, and low-carb diets actually act as diuretic side effects to the body.
Starches are like sponges holding on to water. So when you’re trying to stay well-hydrated, it’s important to be eating your healthy carbs, being selective with those carbs, being reasonably portioned with them, but not completely avoiding them. So allowing, for example, a cup of grain at every meal, whether that be starting off your day with oatmeal or some whole grain toast, maybe a bowl meal at lunch that has some legumes, maybe a dinner meal that has some brown rice or potato.
That will help the muscles hold on to fluid appropriately and help your body

[00:02:00] stay hydrated. This is why this is also so important for athletic people or those who are exercising to eat adequate carbohydrate. So I’ve got examples on the slide of things on the left that would be more meal staples, things on the right that might be more sides, and I’m gonna talk a little bit about how fruits and veggies both contribute fluids and energy to the diet.
So just another little side note about these high protein, low carb diets. They cause muscle fatigue, which actually sets the stage for more frequent heat illness issues. They act as diuretics, diuretic side effects, which means you’re losing body water. High protein actually causes the kidneys to work harder to excrete the byproducts of the protein breakdown.
So that’s part of the diuretic process that’s happening in a high protein diet, which if you are somebody that is into fitness and exercising, which we hope you are,

[00:03:00] that makes it harder for you to exercise and exercise for a whole hour and keep up the same intensity. Overall, these diets increase risk for heat illness What I also want to hit on is just how important it is to include fluids in our meals, particularly starting with the morning meal because you have gone all night long fasting.
Breakfast is breaking that fast, so we want to rehydrate and fuel up at the breakfast. Definitely want to get a good complex carbohydrate source at that meal. I’m a big advocate as a sport dietician for people to get a good carbohydrate in before they exercise For a hydration benefit, but also for a fueling benefit.
You might get your fluid partially through a dairy product, for example, partially through a fruit. A fist-sized serving of fruit has about a half a cup of water. In a normal meal, if we’re looking at breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals, we really should be shooting for about two cups of fluid per meal. That helps

[00:04:00] us contribute to the total amount of fluids that we’ll talk about in a little bit that we need to stay hydrated for the whole meal.
But start that hydration first thing in the morning, and then if you are exercising, these are some guidelines on before, during, and after from the National Athletic Trainers Association and American College of Sports Medicine, which are two of the big sport bodies that really come together and put together all the research and decide what the research is telling us.
So we know that we should pre-hydrate before those exercise sessions, and this complements what I just had on the previous slide, with twelve to sixteen ounces of fluid, ideally within the hour before. Every twenty minutes during activity, this is why it’s important to walk with a water bottle if you’re walking or have a water bottle with you at your cardio equipment.
We want to be drinking a half a cup to a cup every twenty minutes. And then right after exercise, we want to be replenishing sweat losses. A pound of

[00:05:00] weight loss is not a pound of fat that we lost in an exercise session. If, if it was lost just in that time of the exercise session, that’s the sweat that we have sweated out.
That’s the fluid loss. So we actually wanna replenish that right away ’cause that came out of the working muscles. And to prevent further issues like cramps later on in the day, we want to replenish that, and it’s also the essence of the muscle. Muscles are eighty percent water, so we want to replenish that muscle weight.
We wanna drink until our urine color is lemonade yellow. So you see the, hydration color pee chart on the side here of this slide. That’s actually just a very easy self-assessment that we can do. So we can be looking at our urine color, and I will say B vitamins withstanding. If you’re taking a B vitamin and looking at your urine color right after it, it’s gonna be a bright yellow.
But later on in the day, you want that light y- lemonade yellow color,

[00:06:00] and that’s a sign that you’re well-hydrated. Clear, a lot of people think clear is the goal. Clear is overhydration. It me- it means you’re actually drinking so much you’re flushing out important electrolytes. That means overhydrate. So we actually want a little color to the urine.
We want it to tell us that you’re at the right place. So when we’re trying to hydrate throughout the day, lots of things count towards our fluids. A lot of people get very frustrated and overwhelmed thinking, “I’ve got to drink a gallon a day. There’s no way I can do it.” And you really don’t have to drink that much water.
About half of our fluid comes in through water, and the other half comes in through what I call food group sources, so juices, smoothies, dairy. That baseball or fist-sized fruit or vegetable has about a half a cup of fluid. So ideally, most adults need three to four liters, active adults. A really good goal is to drink a cup every

[00:07:00] waking hour.
If we’re awake 12 to 14 hours and you drank a cup every hour coming from either water or some of these food group sources, you would be very on track with your hydration. And I’m gonna talk at the very end about some practical tools that we can use to track our hydration to be more on top of this, but that might be a simple goal.
Can I chug a little cup every hour? And again, fruit juices could be a source of the fluids, vegetable juices could be a source of the fluids, as well as the fruit and vegetable themselves. So when you have a whole cup of juice, that is a whole cup of liquid that gets to be counted towards your water intake.
Orange juice is awesome because it gives you 100% of your vitamin C. Tomato juice, we’re going to talk about again in some upcoming slides. It’s excellent for replenishing salt, and a lot of us are losing a lot more salt in this extreme heat that we’re experiencing. And I’m also going to talk about ways we can assess that individually, some, some of the new technology that’s out there.
But salty

[00:08:00] beverages in recovery can help us with then holding the fluid back into the muscle, or drawing the fluid and then holding it in the muscle. So when we’re exercising, some things to keep in mind that are ideal to be drinking during sport, definitely water. Fitness waters that contain small amounts of electrolytes, and then sport beverages or sport drinks that contain the electrolytes and some carbohydrate energy.
Those are best for during sport. Non-ideal choices are things that are too dense, too thick to be absorbed quickly into the muscle, things that would cause stomach upset, or things that are higher in the types of electrolytes we’re not actually losing. For example, coconut water went through a phase where it was really popular to drink during activity, and if you’ve ever tried it, it just kind of sits in your stomach.
It’s really high potassium. It’s, it’s one of the highest potassifruit juices out there. Coconut water is considered a fruit juice, and that does not empty out of the stomach quickly. High-carb beverages that you’ll

[00:09:00] hear, endurance athletes talk about using, they’re the type of athletes that can use this and be able to hydrate.
But a, an average recreational athlete won’t need that level of carbohydrate. It’s very concentrated. It doesn’t empty out of the stomach quickly. Juices during activity are also too concentrated. The fructose is upsetting to the stomach. Some people drink sodas during activity. That’s actually much higher in sugar than we typically would need for energy, and the carbonation can cause stomach upset.
And then energy drinks are extremely high caffeine and have a strong diuretic side effect. Caffeinated beverages are not a good idea because you end up speeding up the rate that the kidneys are filtering fluids out of the body, thus a diuretic side effect. So they’re not going to hydrate us. Energy drinks are typically, most of the commercial energy drinks, equivalent to two or more cups of brewed coffee, so they’re extremely high caffeine.
So we want to watch out for those when

[00:10:00] we’re trying to hydrate A lot of new sport beverages on the market. Here are some basic guidelines to consider that we’d want to be aiming for a beverage that has a little bit of sodibecause sodium’s the main electrolyte in our sweat, the main electrolyte we’re losing, and the main electrolyte that holds water in the body.
We want to look also that a sport beverage would contain a little bit of chloride and potassitwo other nutrients, electrolytes that our body loses in sweat. And then we want a little bit of energy, particularly if you’re doing a high-power sport activity, let’s say fast running or stop-and-go activity.
I’m really into pickleball these days, and I always need a little bit of energy on the pickleball court. So a 6 to 8% carbohydrate solution, which is about 6 to 8 grams per 100 milliliters, would give us a small amount of energy, but not so much that it’s dense. The high-carbohydrate beverages I was referring to on the previous slide are upwards of 15 to 20%.

[00:11:00] carbohydrate solutions, so they’re, they’re much thicker and harder to empty out of the stomach as quickly. We want it to get to the working muscles fast. Here are some popular new products that are out on the market you could consider exploring and trying to see what feels good in your system. A lot of people like the new BodyArmor line because it is fruit juice based, but it’s got the added electrolytes, and it’s not as, as concentrated as regular fruit juice.
Liquid IV has been popular for quite some time. Ultima has been around, but newly being, advertised, and a lot of people are picking it ’cause it’s very light. It- it’s a nice daily hydration option. Salt Stick would be one to consider if you are a high sodiloser, and I’m gonna talk about how to determine if you are a high sweat sodiloser.
Nuun Sport is also very light. It comes in a tablet form. You dissolve it into your bottle of water. The Sport version has a little bit more electrolytes, so that’s a

[00:12:00] good low sugar electrolyte beverage. LMNT is a high sodielectrolyte source that’s also low sugar. So pending if you feel like you need energy during your activity, it’s important to consider using a beverage that actually has some carbohydrate.
If you’re just looking to replenish electrolytes, you might want to look for something that does give you, electrolytes, but the primary electrolyte we really want to be looking for is salt, and we want to have at least 100 milligrams. Some people need upwards of 500 milligrams, what we see in the Liquid IV and LMNT.
LMNT is actually 1,000, so it’s even higher. And I do a lot of work with professional tennis, and I see that some tennis players lose upwards of 3,500 milligrams of salt per hour, if you can believe that. So they have to do a lot of these LMNT type packets to get what they need, and that’s per hour. So we lose a lot more salt than we realize when we’re heavy sweaters.
We also need to be aware for our own safety

[00:13:00] that when temperature is high and humidity is high, the apparent temperature, what we feel the temperature would be, is much higher. So the impact on our cardiovascular system, our sweat rate is amplified. So if we just pick, for example, if it’s 90 degrees, which we’ve definitely been having some 90-degree weather, but it’s 90% humidity, it’s our body thinks it’s 122 degrees.
That’s what it feels like. So you can imagine the side effect to the body, and we have much increased risk of heat illness, heat exhaustion when we’re at these really high levels, and a lot of sport, organized sport activity will suspend play. Um, I was a dietician for an ATP tournament in Acapulco this year, and because the temperatures are so high during the day, they do all the play at night for this very reason.
They start the matches at 5:00 when things start cooling down.

[00:14:00] So we don’t need to be so afraid of salt unless you’ve been told medically by your cardiologist or internist that you need to limit salt, that that raises your blood pressure. We’ve found that salt’s not as much of an evil. People need a little bit more than they think.
Lot… I see a lot of people have low blood pressure that need to be adding salt to their day. So using table salt, using salty beverages, particularly in the heat, helps again for your body to hold onto fluid and stay hydrated. Also, just choosing salty foods, salted crackers, salted pretzels, salted nuts, trail mixes, pickles.
I’m sure some of you have heard about the, time period when pickle juice was a popular beverage for athletes to try. We actually recommend that athletes use that more outside of activity, not during activity, ’cause it’s so, so salty. S- same recommendation we make with tomato juice. These are better in the recovery along with water to help us get the added sodium.
Sipping on a soup broth can

[00:15:00] sometimes be a good pre-exercise practice in cold weather in particular. W- wouldn’t crave it this time of year, but that can help with getting in the salt and the fluids. Soups are another food group way to get in fluids that we need. And jerky is very popular right now, and that’s a, a popular recovery option, whereas a lot of people like to use protein drinks.
Eating a piece of jerky will replenish protein and salt. You want to do that with water, and then you’re getting something similar to a protein recovery beverage in the form of a meat jerky, which also gives us other important minerals that we need, like iron, which we wouldn’t get from a lot of the commercial protein beverages We don’t want to forget about magnesium.
There is a small subset of our active population that can lose a lot of magnesiin their sweat as well. This is an example of a study that looked at a female tennis player who had low blood magnesilevels, was

[00:16:00] having muscle cramps, and then supplemented five hundred milligrams of magnesia day, and that totally dissipated her muscle cramps, and she was totally back on track.
So a lot of these minerals have been individually studied. We know the most about sodium. Magnesiis probably second in line for the most common mineral that causes muscle cramp type problems. So what we do to determine what kind of minerals and in what levels people are losing them and the rate of sweat loss is to do sweat tests, sweat patch testing.
I actually do these. Um, it looks like a bandage. You put it on your arm, you go out and exercise for an hour. It could be an hour on a treadmill, it could be an hour running, could be an hour on a pickleball court. You bring the patch back to me, I have a little test tube you put it in, and I can tell you the sodithat you’ve lost per hour, as well as whether or not you’re a high-volume sweat loser.
Um, I have a g- little gadget that

[00:17:00] actually tests that, and that’s kind of some of the newer technology. There’s also more, sophisticated lab work that can be done, and we can send a sweat patch off to a lab, and they can look at all the minerals. The, the very quick gadget I have looks at sodibut you can actually send a patch to a lab, and there’s a couple labs around the country that are well known for doing this with athletes, and it will look at what is your magnesiloss per hour, what is your chloride loss per hour.
You can get very individualized on what you’re replenishing or taking in during sport activity to match your sweat loss needs. That’s the current science, and elite athletes actually use this type of technology. This is my gadget looking at another unique way that we look at hydration status, and that is saliva osmolality.
We actually can touch a sensor to the tongue, look at the concentration of the saliva, and the more viscous the saliva is, possibly the more dehydrated someone is.

[00:18:00] It correlates with our body’s hydration. So we– when we want to know very quickly with an athlete, rather than having them go look at their urine or having us analyze urine, which might be not very practical in a sports situation, we can touch this gadget to the tongue and in thirty seconds tell someone, give them a baseline read on if they’re well-hydrated to start activity.
And I also do this after activities. So it’s called MX3 Saliva Osmolality Testing, and I also do this on the professional tennis tour. Couple of practical things you might want to think about is just using an app. I had a couple people ask me about this today. How can I keep up with my, my water intake, my fluid intake?
And there’s some really fun apps out there. I really like Watercat. I’m a cat lady, so that one appealed to me. But these are different graphic type apps. You load them on your phone, and it helps you keep up with your hydration throughout the day. The Waterminder’s kind of, you can kind of see the visual on that.
It’s filling up a

[00:19:00] visual of a female or male body, and when you’re more full going up the body, you’re, you’re better hydrated throughout the day. So there’s a lot of these out there. You just want to check them out. These are some of the most popular, the most, easy to use. Hydrate Spark, the one that’s got the water bottle, the app connects, syncs with your water bottle that’s also, tracking your fluid, and it goes back to your app.
So that’s kind of a neat one too. So you have to get the water bottle that goes with the, app. So those are the highlights I had for today. I just wanted to give you some practical tips, both on the nutrition side and the fluid side, as well as what electrolytes to pay attention to and some of the current technology that’s out there to monitor our hydration status and stay more on track with this, and just to be aware that there’s really cool technology that can really hone in on exactly what our hydration needs are

[00:20:00] during sport activity, and I’d be glad to field a couple of questions.
Page, thanks so much. That’s, that’s awesome stuff there. Well, you can, you can pack it in, I can tell you that. Um, so, I, I, I… Do, do any of y’all that are attending and have any, have any questions, you can either put it into the, into the group chat, or you can just unmute yourself and ask the question.
Either way, wh- whichever one works for you. I’ve got a, I’ve got a couple. We can start with you, Tom. Okay. Um, what about, what about zero sugar type stuff? So I’m a, I’m a fan of, you know, some, some… like the, the energy drinks that are claimed to be, claimed to be zero sugar. What, what… how do you feel about those?
Well, they do, if they’re not caffeinated. Um, so e- energy drinks these

[00:21:00] days are usually the caffeinated drinks, so, you know, from Red Bull to Alani. You know, there’s a lot of these out there. Celsius. Mm-hmm. They’re all very similar, n- and they all have sugar-free versions. Red Bull has a regular calorie version.
Those are strong diuretics, so I was kind of referencing that earlier without saying any of the brand names. And I’m not putting any particular brand down, but just realize what you’re putting into your body. And I think a lot of parents unknowingly don’t realize that those have a really strong diuretic effect.
And I will say these are very popular beverages with high schoolers. I would say on a daily basis, I… ’cause I also work with that age group, I’m encouraging high school athletes to decrease their energy drink consumption because they- Mm-hmm … are very popular. Uh, they use them for a coffee alternative, but they don’t realize, like I said, the…
it might, it might say on the label it’s only 200 milligrams of

[00:22:00] caffeine, but they’re what we call stacked drinks. They have caffeine, they have herbal stimulants in them, usually three or four herbal stimulants, like ma huang is one. And, and so that additional stimulant content raises the caffeine equivalent to be about two cups of coffee per small can.
So these- Wow … don’t hydrate the body. Um, the zero calorie part of it is just all a part of the carbohydrate craze. Um, so it’s not giving them any energy. I call them false energy drinks. Okay. Uh- A couple weeks ago we had, Dr. Joe Esposito on and, he, he mentioned something about resistant starch, which, which feels like a pretty good, pretty good w- thing to think about in terms of, in terms of, in terms of carbohydrates and sort of blunting the insulin response.
What do you, how do you feel

[00:23:00] about those? Well, you don’t see as much of that in beverages as you do in a lot of these… Unfortunately, a lot of those are in ultra-processed products, like the whole genre of protein bars- Mm-hmm … with carbohydrate replacements that the body can’t fully break down. That’s what resistant starch means, and that’s when they can say the net carbs are lower.
I’m not a huge fan- Mm … of that because of the highly processed content of a lot of those bars. I agree, for people who struggle with high blood sugar, we need to find ways that they won’t have foods that will raise their blood sugar, so for a small segment of the population. But I find a lot of really healthy people who need energy eating too many of these products, having a lot of gut GI side effects because the body can’t fully break it down and it creates havoc.
Um, and they’re not meeting the energy, they’re not meeting their energy

[00:24:00] needs. So I’m not a huge fan of a high, level of that. But if you’re just trying to lower sugar and you have, you know, struggled with high sugar food products and you’re looking to add one product like that to replace a, a less healthy product, I don’t see a problem with being very moderate with those types of products.
Yeah. And let me, let- It wouldn’t be as much- Yeah … wouldn’t be as much of a beverage or hydration. Yeah. Let me, let me, let me, let … I sh- I probably should have clarified the question a little bit more. He was t- he was talking about, taking, like rice and pasta and potatoes and actually cooling them overnight in the refrigerator and eating them the day, the next day, which creates a sort of a natural resistant starch, which is, which, which is, I think he’s feeling like that’s, that’s a better, that’s a better approach for- Okay.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So there’s two different types where you- Yeah … can

[00:25:00] have an alternate resistant starch and in cooking result resistant starch. That would be safe. I think that’s a good idea. And, and eating adequate carbohydrate does help us with holding onto fluid, so I’m all about eating more of those types of foods adequately, moderately, and helping hold water in the muscle, muscle glycogen.
Mm-hmm. And that will help with, with our hydration. Excellent. Excellent. Um, any, any other questions? Yeah, do any of the ladies who are on wanna ask a question? Sure. Kimberly, you wanna just go ahead and just ask it. Hey, Page. I don’t know if you can see me ’cause I can’t see myself. Yes. Hi, Kimberly. But hey.
How are you? I’m pretty. Um, okay, so quick question. Um, what about people who have POTS? Um, like would you have, would you

[00:26:00] recommend that they double their salts hydration? So what Kimberly’s asking about is postural orthostatic hypotension, which is low blood pressure from- Hey, Pa- hey, Page? Yes. I think we’re having I think we’re having trouble with your microphone.
Is everybody else having trouble hearing Page? Can, can you hear me? Can everybody hear me? Yeah. There we go. That’s, that’s better. Okay. It might’ve been how close I was to the computer. Um, but what Kimberly’s asking about is postural orthostatic hypotension, POTS syndrome. Mm-hmm. And it’s pretty common, in women and but it, it, it can be very scary because it’s that sudden feeling when you go from sitting or laying down to standing and you almost black out.
Wow. And you can fall down, you can faint. Your blood pressure’s so low that you, aren’t able to circulate blood volume back to your brain quick enough to be able to hold an, a

[00:27:00] standing posture with a sudden postural change. The most common treatment of that is to increase your electrolytes, particularly sodiand I haven’t seen the research on the exact, like if you you should be doubling, Kimberly, but you definitely go up in sodium.
And typically, using those beverages like I had on that one side, the, LMNT and the- Yeah … Liquid IV, those are two common ones that are used a lot, and Pedialyte, for, for POTS because that gets in that higher sodilevel, 500 to 1,000 milligrams per serving, and that brings more fluid into the bloodstream which raises the blood pressure appropriately from being dangerously low to somewhat normal that then allows the blood to circulate more evenly throughout the body and not get pooled in the lower extremities which is causing that problem.
Yeah.

[00:28:00] Um, for some people it could be doubling, but it kind of depends on your dietary intake of salt, how regular you’re eating, you know, and where your blood pressure is. But that’s, that’s a great question. I’m gl- I’m glad you asked about that because, you know, people get so worried about salt who have high blood pressure, and then there’s a pretty big segment of the population who has low blood pressure who actually needs more salt.
And so some of these electrolyte beverages are excellent ways to get them, as well as the salty foods that I was talking about. Yeah. Thank you. You’re welcome. Good to see you. You too. Any other questions, folks?
Great. Well, Page, thanks a bunch for, another, another great Healthy Habits, briefing. We, we appreciate you joining us this evening. And, and for everybody that’s on, we’ll, we will send out the replay in the next few days, and you guys will be able to,

[00:29:00] to see, to, to review it and review all the, you know, transcript and the, what we’re calling the snacks, which is kind of, which is kind of fun.
We’re, we’re kind of chunking up all the, all the nuggets of information so that, so that people can sort of scan through the things that they’d, they’d like to understand, when they’re, when they’re looking at it online. Thanks a bunch to everybody and good- And I lo- I love that you’re calling it snacks.
That’s great. Yeah. You’re welcome. All right. Thank you guys for coming. Um, look forward- Thank you … to seeing you in the future. Okay. Okay, bye-bye. Come back and see us every Tuesday. Every Tuesday at 7:00. Thank you.