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The Video That Started a Fight
Dr. Tony Hampton dropped a video last week called "Keto Flu or Toxic Additives? The Truth About LMNT, Re-Lyte, & Keto Chow." It's sitting at 22,000 views with 235 comments, and the comment section is a war zone. People are angry about maltodextrin. People are defending their favorite brands. And buried in the middle of it all is a genuinely useful conversation about whether you even need to buy pre-made electrolyte packets.
I've written about electrolytes on carnivore before, and this video adds an important layer: ingredient transparency. Let's break it all down.
The Maltodextrin Problem
The biggest accusation in the comments is aimed at LMNT. Multiple commenters pointed out that LMNT's "natural flavors" reportedly contain maltodextrin, a corn-derived carbohydrate with a glycemic index between 85-105 (higher than table sugar at 65). There's apparently a lawsuit about this.
One commenter wrote: "LMNT isn't completely honest. Their product contains maltodextrin. I used LMNT for years but dropped them when I found out I was lied to." That comment has 56 likes, which tells you this isn't fringe concern.
Now, context matters. Maltodextrin used as a carrier in "natural flavors" is present in tiny amounts, likely milligrams per serving. It's not going to spike your blood sugar or kick you out of ketosis. The issue isn't the metabolic impact. It's the principle. When a brand markets itself as zero-sugar and clean ingredients, and then uses a high-GI carbohydrate as a hidden processing agent, that erodes trust.
What's Actually in the Big Three
Let's compare the popular options Dr. Hampton reviewed. Everything below is off the label. Label figures describe what's in the product. They are not a target, and they're not a hint about how much of it anyone should be using.
Before you compare anything else, sort the shelf into two piles. Some of these products are sodium only. Some of them also contain potassium. That single distinction matters more than flavor, price, or brand loyalty, because potassium is the ingredient that interacts with common blood pressure and heart medications. Salt is a grocery item. Potassium in a scoop behaves like a supplement.
LMNT (per packet):
- 1,000 mg sodium (from salt)
- 200 mg potassium (from potassium chloride)
- 60 mg magnesium (from magnesium malate)
- Citric acid, natural flavors (the controversial ingredient)
- Price: roughly $1.20-1.50 per packet
Re-Lyte (per scoop):
- 810 mg sodium (from Redmond Real Salt, which includes trace minerals)
- 400 mg potassium (from potassium citrate)
- 75 mg magnesium (from magnesium malate)
- Also includes coconut water powder, citric acid, stevia
- Price: roughly $0.80-1.00 per serving
Keto Chow (daily minerals):
- Designed as a full daily mineral supplement, not just electrolytes
- Higher potassium and magnesium content than the packet brands
- Includes trace minerals like zinc, copper, selenium
- Drops format (no flavoring agents)
- Price: roughly $0.50-0.70 per daily serving
Dr. Hampton has an affiliate relationship with Keto Chow, which he disclosed. That doesn't invalidate his analysis, but you should know about it.
What to actually read on the panel:
- Does it list potassium at all? If it does, that's the line you take to your pharmacist along with your medication list. If it doesn't, you're holding a salt product.
- What counts as a serving? Brands differ on purpose. One packet, one scoop, half a scoop, or two scoops of a tub can all be "a serving," and the panel numbers mean nothing until you know which.
- Is the sodium just salt? Sea salt, Real Salt, and plain table salt are all sodium chloride with different trace minerals and very different prices.
- Where does maltodextrin or sugar sit in the ingredient list? Ingredients run in descending order by weight. Near the end means traces. Near the front means you bought a sports drink in a smaller sachet.
- Which magnesium form? Glycinate and malate are gentler on digestion. Citrate and oxide are the two most likely to send you looking for a bathroom.
- Cost per serving, not per tub. Divide the price by the number of servings before you decide anything is expensive.
The label trap most people miss: "lite salt," "low sodium salt," and anything sold as a salt substitute is a potassium product. It sits in the spice aisle next to the salt, it costs a couple of dollars, and nothing about the packaging says supplement. Read the back of that one the way you'd read a bottle from the pharmacy shelf.
The DIY Side: Why People Mix Their Own
The most upvoted comment on the video, 67 likes, is somebody's homemade mix: salt, plus capsules emptied into a big bottle of water, drunk through the day. The replies are full of people saying they do the same. I'm not reprinting the amounts. A recipe on a page like this one has no way of knowing whose kidneys and whose prescriptions are reading it, and the next section is what that looks like when it goes wrong.
The money argument is real, though, and it deserves a straight answer. Packets run roughly $1.20 to $1.50 each. Salt is pennies. A bottle of capsules works out to a few cents apiece. Per serving, homemade beats branded by a wide margin, and that's why the comment section keeps circling back to it.
What gets lost in that argument is that "DIY electrolytes" describes two completely different activities.
- Salting your food and drinking salty broth. No recipe, no measuring, no equipment, nothing to get wrong. This is what most people mean when they say they don't buy electrolytes, and it's the cheapest option on this page.
- Scooping concentrated mineral powders at home. Different job entirely. Potassium chloride powder and salt look the same, pour the same, and sit in the spoon the same way, and there's no taste or texture cue that tells you when you've got far too much of one of them.
Food covers more of this than the supplement aisle likes to admit. Meat, fish, and eggs carry potassium and magnesium, and eating enough of them to be genuinely satisfied at your meals does a lot of quiet work here. That's the part of DIY nobody can fumble.
If you do keep capsules in the house, leave them in the capsule and leave them in their own labeled bottle. Decanting loose powders into unmarked jars is how the story in the next section starts.
The Safety Concern Nobody Should Ignore
Here's where I need to be very direct, because one comment on this video is genuinely alarming.
A man shared that he accidentally put 8 teaspoons of potassium in a quart of bone broth instead of 1/8 teaspoon. Within three hours, he thought he was having a stroke. Called 911. His blood potassium came back above 8, where a normal level runs 3.5 to 5.0. He spent three days in the hospital. The ER doctor told him the outcome could have been "far different" if he'd waited longer.
Look at how small that mistake was. One-eighth of a teaspoon and eight teaspoons are the same two words in a different order. He ended up 64 times over from a single slip while cooking. Now stack up everything that made that slip invisible:
- The powder looks exactly like salt. White, fine, pours the same.
- Bone broth is already salty, so nothing tastes obviously wrong. Potassium chloride is bitter, but in a strongly seasoned liquid that reads as seasoned, not as dangerous.
- There's no visual feedback. A 64x overpour doesn't change the color, the smell, or the level in a quart of broth in any way you would notice.
- Kitchen spoons are approximate by design, and you're usually measuring over the pot. An overpour lands straight in the food and you can't take it back out.
- Nothing hurts at the time. His symptoms arrived three hours later, long after the moment when he could have caught it.
Every other thing you measure in a kitchen forgives you. Too much salt tastes wrong immediately. Too much pepper you can see. Concentrated potassium has none of those built-in brakes, which is why the measuring discipline that's perfectly fine for cooking isn't the right standard here.
Many potassium supplements give you no more than 99 mg per serving. That's a serving size the supplement industry settled on for itself, not a limit the FDA sets on supplements. The actual FDA rule is narrower than people assume: it covers certain oral potassium drug products above 99 mg per tablet, not the tub of powder in your cupboard.
So don't read 99 mg as your number. It isn't a target, it isn't a ceiling that makes anything safe, and it isn't evidence that a bigger spoonful is fine. It's just how the pills get portioned. That's what makes loose powder a different animal. A single teaspoon of potassium chloride powder contains roughly 2,500 mg of potassium, about 25 times that serving size, which is how an accidental spoonful becomes an overdose. Nothing on the tub points that out.
Hyperkalemia, meaning dangerously high blood potassium, can cause cardiac arrest. This is not theoretical.
Three things worth doing this week if any of that landed:
- Go read the containers you already own. The front of a package says "lite salt" or "electrolyte." The back tells you whether it's sodium chloride, potassium chloride, or both. Two minutes, and you'll know which category you've been using.
- Keep every product in its original container with its own scoop. No decanting, no shared jars, no borrowed teaspoons that live in the salt.
- Measure away from the pot. Anything you measure goes into a separate glass first, never over the food. An overpour you can pour down the sink is not an incident.
The signs that mean stop and get help rather than wait and see: muscle weakness, numbness or tingling, a heartbeat that feels slow, fluttery, or irregular, nausea or vomiting alongside any of that, or shortness of breath. If you've taken a potassium product and any of it shows up, tell whoever you call what you took and roughly how much. That detail changes what they do first.
This is the genuine advantage of pre-made packets and capsules. The measuring step was already done once, in a factory. There's no spoon in the process, so a distracted moment in your kitchen can't multiply anything.
When DIY Makes Sense
- Your version of DIY is salting your food and drinking broth. No recipe, no scale, no decimal point to misplace.
- You don't want flavoring agents, sweeteners, or additives in your water.
- Budget is the deciding factor and you've compared cost per serving instead of sticker price.
- You're getting potassium and magnesium from meat, fish, and eggs rather than trying to hit a number.
- You'd rather put the money into better meat, which is a perfectly defensible trade.
Where it stops being a budget decision: the moment DIY means scooping concentrated potassium powder. That isn't a cheaper version of a packet. It's a different risk category, and cost has nothing to do with it.
When Packets Make More Sense
- The measuring is already done. Nothing to scoop, nothing to convert, nothing to get wrong at 6am.
- You travel and need something that survives a bag and a security line.
- There are kids in the house, or a shared kitchen, or anyone who could mistake an unlabeled jar for salt.
- You're new to this and would rather change one variable at a time.
- Convenience genuinely decides whether you keep doing it at all.
The medication and kidney boundary, once, clearly. If you take a blood pressure or heart medication (ACE inhibitors, ARBs, spironolactone and some diuretics all affect potassium), or you have kidney disease, reduced kidney function, or a heart rhythm condition, then the question isn't packets versus homemade. It's whether you should be adding potassium at all, and that answer needs your chart. Take the label, or a photo of it, to your pharmacist along with your medication list. That conversation is free, it takes about five minutes, and it's the only way to get an answer that's actually about you.
My Take on What Dr. Hampton Got Right
Hampton's core message was solid: read your labels, question ingredient transparency, and consider whether you're paying a premium for marketing rather than quality. He's right that the electrolyte supplement market has exploded alongside keto and carnivore, and not every product deserves your trust or your money.
Where I'd add nuance: brand-name electrolytes aren't inherently bad. The maltodextrin amounts in LMNT's flavoring are negligible from a metabolic standpoint. If you like the taste and can afford it, that's a fine reason to buy it. Ingredient purism gets expensive quickly, and it isn't the part of this subject that keeps anybody out of an emergency room.
If you want more detail on why carnivore dieters talk about electrolytes at all, I covered the physiology in an earlier post. The short version: when you cut carbs, insulin falls, and lower insulin tells the kidneys to hold on to less sodium. Water goes with it, and some potassium and magnesium go along too. That's a real mechanism and it explains why the first few weeks feel the way they do. What it can't do is tell any individual person what to take, which is exactly the gap every supplement ad on the internet is delighted to fill.
How to Shop This Aisle Without Guessing
There's no universal number to put here, because there isn't one to give. Kidney function, medications, how much you sweat, how much you already eat and how hot it is where you live all move this, and they move it by a lot. What you can do is make a good decision standing in front of the shelf.
- Sort by potassium first. Sodium-only in one pile, potassium-containing in the other. Decide which pile you're shopping in before you look at a single flavor.
- Eat first, supplement second. Meat, fish, eggs and salted broth cover a lot of ground, and food is the one route where a decimal point can't hurt you.
- Read the serving size, then the panel. In that order, every time. The panel is meaningless until you know what the brand counts as one serving.
- Use one product at a time. A packet plus a capsule plus a salt substitute in the same day makes it impossible to know what you actually took, and the salt substitute is the one everybody forgets to count.
- Keep a two-line log for a few weeks. What you used, and what the day was like: heat, training, sleep, illness, appetite. A pattern across weeks tells you more than how you feel on any one afternoon.
- Ask for a basic metabolic panel at your next appointment. It shows your actual sodium, potassium and kidney function. It costs less than a few months of packets, and it's the only number in this whole conversation that belongs to you.
And the line that means stop rather than adjust: chest pain, fainting, a heartbeat that's racing or irregular, confusion, or muscle weakness that comes on fast. That's an emergency room, not a dosing question.
I'm not a doctor and this isn't medical advice. If you take medications or have diagnosed conditions, especially kidney disease, heart conditions, or anything involving potassium-sparing diuretics, consult your healthcare provider before starting any electrolyte product.