Welcome to your new day. This is Early Breakfast with Africa Milani.
Let's talk fitness. Now. It's seventeen minutes two five o'clock. The CEO of Revive, Mark Myerson, joins me via zoom. Now. Mark, a very good morning and welcome to the show.
Good morning Africa.
Let's talk about proper hydration and how it's important not only in fitness, but i'd argue more generally in management of one's body. What is hydration and what are some of the more common myths that people still believe about it.
I think cardration has changed a lot in the last ten years, and it used to be something that people considered only when they had diarrhea or when they were an endurance athlete. And as you say, hydration is now much more of a lifestyle thing. And people appreciate that water alone is not what your body is made of. Your body is made of a lot of salt. You know, if you lick your sweat and if you taste blood, it's really salty. And so people understand that drinking water alone,
your body needs much more than that. And these minerals that conduct electricity, sodium, potassium, magnesium are really important to the functioning of your body and your brain. And I think that's the appreciation, is that if you are underhydrated and you're only drinking water without the minerals, you're not able to optimize your body's function and your performance.
And I suppose that's a key point, right because the minute one uses the word hydration, literally, the first thing that comes to mind is, let me get a glass of water and quench my thirst, because my body is in desperate need of that. What you're saying, when it comes to hydration, particularly around fitness, we require more than just a glass of water.
Absolutely, there's nothing wrong with water, of course, but we must remember that the minerals that our body needs would come generally from food and from adding salt, so it doesn't need to be timed exactly with the water. But when your body loses water, it's also losing minerals, and to replace that properly, you need the minerals with the water. And so there's an appreciation that when you drink electrolytes with your water, you're getting the best performance out of your body.
The formulation then of those electrolytes becomes critical, doesn't it.
Exactly.
Let's talk about what needs to be included or.
Not, yes, exactly. The knot is also important. I think if we go back to the classic oral rehydration therapy and how that came about to be a medical grade intervention. When people had cholera, especially in the last century, there were a lot of kids that died of cholera, but they died really of dehydration. And in the nineteen hundreds the science evolved to where there was an understanding that if you drank water with salt and sugar, you could
prevent death. And this simple formulation is actually a medical grade kind of thing that has saved millions and millions of lives over the last hundred, one hundred and fifty years. And so there's an understanding that water alone is not enough, especially in the context of dehydration. You know, if you go to hospital and you're dehydrated, they don't put water into your mouth, They put saline solution directly into your veins,
and saline is salt water. So you know, when one considers these things, I think it's easy to appreciate that one's body needs more than just the water, and so the formulation has to have salt, and salt is sodium chloride. You need both the sodium and the chloride, and the modern hydration has usually potassium as well, and magnesium is another important mineral that is often included in the formulation. So with Revive we try and have the right ratio
of the right minerals. We try and have a clean salt. We're very proud of our relationship with our ex desert salt because the sodium comes from our amazing you know, African desert and it's not tainted with processing. It doesn't have additives like anti caking agents, it doesn't have coloring. We leave out the sugar and we use stevia, which is a cleaner sweetener if I can and say that with no calories. So it's also what you don't put in the formulation that is imortant, as you alluded to.
Absolutely why or let me ask this question differently, right though? What impact then does proper hydration have? One on energy, but more importantly on performance because this is a sickness related feature and people will be going out either go on a run or cycle or yoga for that matter. What will have what will have in proper hydration means for them?
I think the modern appreciation and the science of hydration is teaching people that you don't have to be clinically hydrated to suffer from underperformance. You just need to be mildly under hydrated, and your performance starts to suffer and your body doesn't work in an optimum way. So there's this new appreciation that you need to be having hydration all the time. As soon as you lose, you need to replace, and you shouldn't wait until you're feeling terrible
and you're confused and you're actually getting dehydrated. When you start to think about this, you're thinking about it all the time, and you're thinking about it in much smaller quantities. You know, small differences in hydration make massive difference to your performance. There's also an appreciation that your brain is of course, the nerves in your brain need electricity to fire and elect lights. Your brain is an electrical organ and so often the underperformance is in a cognitive sense.
It's concentration, its coordination, it's accuracy, it's speed, and so there's all these these nuances around hydration that people are now understanding. The energy is interesting because you know, energy in the classic sense means fuel. It's like petrol, for your car and in your body that is glucose and fat, but there are also other mechanisms for energy creation and using the car analogy like the spark plug and the
electrical wiring. It's all very well having fuel, but if the sparks are not coming and the electrical system isn't working, then your car isn't going anywhere. And it's a sort of similar analogy with your body.
How often should one take hydration sessions like revives.
Afrika. If one is living a healthy lifestyle, which means, you know, eating a low sugar diet, whole food diet, not a lot of processed food, then one sache a day with a nice amount of water is generally enough to maintain hydration and also give you the magnesium that
most people are deficient. And if one is in a sporting context, then it's different because you're sweating more, you're losing more electrolytes, and then you can take a second sashe a day, but it depends how long you're exercising, and then there are other contexts. You know, a heavy night out also means you're dehydrated, and people are taking it for that. Breastfeeding moms, cancer patients, people with low
blood pressure. So there's all these different situations where hydration becomes really important to think about.
Dennis, not sorry, not Dennis, but Dennis waiting for me on the line. But Mark, I'm going to be directing our listeners to your website get Revive, dot co, dot za. We've spoken about sachet is of course, what is available? Do you want to expand more on the product that you've got. We had a lovely box as a team from you and your team this morning, which you appreciate very much.
Really it's a pleasure the product we offer. We only do one formulation. I think a lot of supplement companies you want more and more products to sell more things to people, but we don't believe that that's necessary. People should eat real food and supplement only when necessary. So our product comes in different flavors. The variety of flavors is also important because if something doesn't taste good, people
won't use it. The trick is trying to get to taste good, but not using flavors that are artificial or have harmful additives in them. And flavors are interesting because people differ wildly. You know, some people love watermelon, another person will hate watermelon. Blood orange is probably the most
popular flavor. And then we have our raw, which is the very clean doesn't taste great, but it's just pure electrolytes with no flavor and no sweetness at all for the sort of hardcore health person that doesn't want any additives at all.
And of course you can get all sorts of wonderful water bottles that come with that as well. Mark, thank you very much for your time this morning. Mark Maison is the CEO of Revive, talking to us about why proper hydration is important and could Chlo transform your body. You can go to get revived, dot co, dot sor ay for more details on the product.