One of my partners has long-covid induced POTS. As part of their management of their POTS symptoms, they take a significant amount of supplemental sodium.
When a supply issue happened with their go-to source of that supplemental sodium, I dove into the details to help them find an appropriate replacement. This turns out to be surprisingly complex, as different supplements contain massively different ratios of various electrolytes and other nutrients.
As such, I decided it was probably something other folks might find helpful, so I set it up to share.
I am not a doctor, I am a clown
I am not recommending anything. Nothing here is sponsored. I merely have brought together what's listed on various products' nutrition facts.
This may be out of date. Please verify accuracy before purchasing a product.
I am not a data scientist, I am a clown. I barely know how to use a spreadsheet program, I may have completely gotten my math wrong. Double check me please before using something!
This is a living document, if you notice that something is inaccurate, please contact me and let me know! (if you have the spoons to) I'll update it!
This is not exhaustive. While I am not recommending anything, every brand (and the majority of the individual products) were recommended to me by others who use them.
I have a two sheet spreadsheet (ods) file. (if you don't have a go-to spreadsheet reader/manipulator, I used libreoffice, they're open source and ai free)
The first sheet is the straight supplement facts of each of the products I looked at. (Note: It doesn't have a full ingrediants list, just the nutrient data) The second sheet manipulates that data to give a more useful direct comparison. It assumes you have a goal amount of sodium you wish to add to your daily intake. If you write that number in mg in the yellow box, it will calculate how many doses of the various products it'll take to meet that amount. There's a labeled row that displays the exact (likely decimal) number of doses, and then another row below it that rounds up to the next whole number. It then multiplies the various nutrient values by the rounded number. So you can easily see side by side how much of each nutrient you would get per day if you use each product to meet your goal amount of sodium in whole servings of the product.
Because cost is also a concern, I have some cost numbers below the serving numbers (in USD, when purchasing in the USA). Many of these products cost less when purchased in bulk or as part of a subscription, so I have a row each of the highest and lowest cost per serving (direct from the company, deals from stores that stock them may exist), and then below those are rows showing the total cost per day based on the rounded up number of servings that would be needed to hit the daily sodium goal.
Below that I have a few rows of data points that were important to us, whether a product contained cane sugar, whether they failed to be labled dairy free, whether they failed to be labled gluten free. Below that I listed the form of the supplement, as I have tablets that fizz in a beverage, packets or scoops of powder that stir into a beverage, and capsules that are to be taken alongside drinking water.
Alright, so here's the spreadsheet! I hope you find it useful!