A Pinch of Truth: Rethinking Salt | ft. Robb Wolf
In this self‑contained second part of the interview, host Nick Norwitz talks with former bestselling author, CrossFit pioneer, and Element Electrolytes co‑founder Robb Wolf about the central role of sodium and other electrolytes in low‑carbohydrate and high‑intensity performance. Wolf recounts his personal discovery that chronic sodium deficiency was limiting his own athletic output despite a ketogenic diet, and how a data‑driven audit of his diet (using tools like Cronometer) revealed he was consuming far less than the ~5 g/day needed for optimal nerve‑muscle function. They explain the physiology behind the “natriuresis of fasting,” insulin‑mediated sodium retention, and how leptin‑driven vascular remodeling in obesity creates salt‑sensitivity that links high sodium intake to hypertension only in metabolically compromised individuals. Practical dosing guidelines are offered – a baseline of 3–5 g sodium per day for most active people, with higher intakes (up to 8–12 g) for extreme ketogenic athletes – and a focus on whole‑food sources such as pickles, olives, kimchi, anchovies, and fermented condiments. The conversation shifts to the creation of the DIY “KetoAid” electrolyte mix, its evolution into the commercial Element product line, and the recent controversy over undisclosed maltodextrin in the flavoring. Wolf details the company’s deep‑dive into supply‑chain transparency, on‑shoring of ingredients, and the philosophical stance that authentic disclosure, even when potentially harmful to brand perception, builds long‑term trust. The interview closes with reflections on the broader health narrative, emphasizing fundamentals like sleep, exercise, and community over obsessive ingredient scrutiny, and provides listeners with Wolf’s Substack for further learning.
Chapters
They could not be more important. Like, they can save or kill you.
Every nerve impulse, every muscle contraction, every thought is driven by sodium-potassium pumps.
I do want to address the elephant in the room, which is this idea of sodium and blood pressure.
There's a low-carb diet and anaerobic or alactic activity are kind of tough bedfellows.
There's a hormone that changes the way your body will respond to sodium.
Electrolytes are very tightly managed and they will change rather quickly.
It's a bandage. It's not addressing the underlying root cause.
It was literally like a, a light switch was flipped.
Hey everybody, I'm back with Robb Wolf. If you missed the first part of our conversation, this is self-contained, so you can just stick here. I'm gonna give you his background again. He's a former 2x New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, including of The Paleo Solution, Wired to Eat, and Sacred Cow. He's also the co-founder of Element Electrolytes, and it's quite the background beyond that, having trained and coached people from Navy SEALs and NASA scientists He founded some of the earliest CrossFit gyms and he holds a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu to boot. So don't piss him off. Anyway, in part 1, we talked all about ancestral health, nutrition, the limitations of these principles. It was a really great conversation. I'm excited to have him here now for part 2 where we're gonna talk a lot about electrolytes, get into the nitty-gritty. So Rob, first, thanks for joining me again. Good.
Huge honor to be here. Thank you.
I want to start off with, you are the co-founder of maybe one of the world's biggest electrolyte brands, Element. What led you into the world of electrolytes in the first place?
You know, it's funny, in part one, we kind of unpacked what got me into the health space at all and kind of my health journey. And the electrolyte story is a, a 20-year downrange tangent to that. So I discovered that to manage my gut and autoimmune issues, which range, you know, I had ulcerative colitis in the past. I have several autoimmune conditions, essential tremor syndrome, some rheumatoid arthritis, few other fun things to contend with. But what I find is that a low-carb ketogenic diet really manages those issues pretty well. And like, if I deviate off of that track very far, I have really significant health consequences. So, just, you know, unless I want to constantly be in pain, constantly dealing with issues, I eat this ketogenic diet. But like you mentioned in the intro, I do Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I co-founded the first and fourth CrossFit affiliate gyms. I do a lot of physical activity. And under a lot of circumstances, a low-carb diet and anaerobic or alactic activity are kind of tough bedfellows. You know, some of those things are glycogen-driven. And although a person well adapted to a ketogenic low-carb diet can and does get glycogen, you know, restitution within the muscles and the liver and whatnot. There's just some challenges to it. And something that I didn't understand, and it should have been so front and center for me, is that when we eat a low-carb diet and really just any type— there's two pieces of this— when we eat a lower-carb diet or a lower glycemic load diet, we tend to reduce insulin levels relative to higher carbohydrate intakes, and we really tend to retain sodium and electrolytes broadly, pretty much in lockstep with, with some degree of insulin signaling. So there's this process called the natriuresis of fasting when insulin levels tend to be quite low during fasting. We just shed electrolytes like crazy. Sodium tends to be offloaded first, and then potassium gets offloaded because the kidneys are trying to maintain a sodium-potassium ratio that's very specific and the body gets quite cranky if we get outside of some, some very specific boundaries with that. And I had just struggled for the better part of 20 years on the, the performance side. You know, I felt pretty good cognitively, like a ketogenic diet gives me pretty clear thinking. It manages a lot of my gut and autoimmune issues, but these higher intensity physical bouts that I, I like to participate in, just very, very difficult. And I actually, it was bumping into one of our other co-founders, Luis Villaseñor, who's a really phenomenal coach, and he's been using a ketogenic diet for himself doing bodybuilding and powerlifting for, for close to 15, 20 years. But they had developed an online community where they coached people through a host of different activities, mainly like body composition related stuff, but they had people doing CrossFit at a high level and, and jiu-jitsu and whatnot. And I was just kind of stalking these guys and they had folks performing at a really high level and not complaining about being constantly exhausted and sleep disturbances and all this type of stuff. So I, I kind of stalked Luis and started chatting with him and asked him to look at my, my food. And he looked at it and he's like, all the chow looks fine. I just think you're really sodium deficient. And I was like, oh, I salt my food. I'm good, you know? And so of course, when you ask someone who's an expert what their opinion is on something, you just ignore them. You know, I mean, that, that's clearly what one does. You know, this guy has trained thousands of people at successfully using these methods. And so why on earth would I listen to the guy the first time? So we became friends. We would hang out intermittently. He lives in Mexico City, but he was in the States hanging out and I was still bemoaning my situation. Oh, do I add some more carbs so I can, you know, perform better? But then when I add the carbs, then I have these gut and blood sugar issues and it's the, you know, kind of difficult thing. And he did this crazy thing. He said, hey, why don't you weigh and measure all of your food? Use something like Cronometer, which documents not just the macronutrients, protein, carbs, fat, but it will show you sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, you know, all this stuff. And he was like, I just really want to make sure that you're getting at least 5 grams of sodium a day. I'm like, I will totally get sodium. Sodium. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And so people know that's more than twice what is recommended by like the AHA, right? I think they say, yeah, less than 2.3 grams of sodium. Yeah. And then some, some even say less than 1.5. I mean, some pretty bland food, but just to kind of give a, a level of no less than over twice what is recommended. Continue.
Right. So I ran, you know, 3 days of food through there and I was averaging less than 2. Grams of sodium per day because I eat minimally processed, mainly whole foods. And although I salt my food, like you have to really do kind of Herculean efforts to get that much sodium from, from either, you know, salt sources or you have to do things like pickles, kimchi, sauerkraut, olives. Like there, there's some, what's interesting to me is a lot of traditional foods that they tend to have these things that sit at the edge of the plate. That you will throw in the mix that tend to be quite salty. And, you know, it just, just about all cultures end up having these, these really kind of salty side condiments. So I endeavored to get up to 5 grams of sodium per day. And it was, it was literally like a light switch was flipped. Like, I would— you, when we think about the way that electrolytes play out in the body, every nerve impulse, every muscle contraction, every thought, is driven by sodium potassium pumps. And so if that is off by a bit, then you're gonna be functionally suboptimal. And so when, when I realized that that was a major issue for me, I looked out at the folks that I've been trying to serve over this time, following my books, following the, the podcast. And I'll, I'll just really quickly as an aside, any, any dietitian that is well-versed in like setting up a ketogenic diet for kids with epilepsy and whatnot, they understand that you need 5 grams of sodium per day at least. Like it, that is well understood. Jeff Finney and Volek, you know, when they, when they released their book, The Art and Science of Low-Carb Performance, they mentioned the need for this. Somehow I just glazed right over that, that stuff for, for a long time.
It's very easy to overlook sodium and potassium and magnesium because they're kind of like, I think a lot of focus goes into macronutrients. Mm-hmm. And things that are calorific. So they kind of like fly under the radar and aren't considered as, it doesn't get the emphasis even though they could not be more important. Like they can save or kill you. Yeah. So just as a case in point, you probably know what refeeding syndrome is, but for people who don't, like if you don't eat a lot for a while or you're starved and then you quickly bolus, you were talking about the natriuresis of fasting. So basically when you're, your insulin goes down, you pee out these electrolytes. Well, something like the reverse can happen where if you bolus a lot of food and spike your insulin a lot and you're primed to be responsive to it, you can drive all the electrolytes, like, you know, into cells, cause an imbalance in the blood and it can actually kill you. It can cause like cardiac arrhythmias. It can just straight up kill you. You can Google refeeding syndrome. It's not a joke. I'm not saying it's gonna happen if you just like your average person goes and eats like, you know, a big dinner.. But just to emphasize the point, electrolyte balance in the body is very, very tightly maintained. And if you throw that off even a little bit, you can feel pretty crappy. Probably won't die most of the times. Mm-hmm. But you can feel pretty crappy. And so these little interventions like, yeah, eating a, a tin of anchovies, which can be super salty, even if it's unpleasant in the right circumstances, they can have a, like a night and day effect on your energy levels and performance, which is usually not where people go looking. They're usually like, ah, I cut the carbs out. Maybe I need this banana to pre-workout. So it sounds like that was your discovery journey and then you, it really was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it, when I looked at the folks that I've been trying to serve and when you kind of catalog like the complaints that people have, sleep disturbances, muscle cramps, fatigue, brain fog, I was looking at that and I was kind of overlaying that with what occurs with low electrolytes. I'm like, oh shit. Like everybody, low electrolytes, you know, I was like, oh, you know, because I had never done a particularly good job talking about that. Like, I, again, I had never, I, and I think we'll talk about this in a bit, like kind of the delta between, I think the reality of sodium and its role in cardiovascular disease, hypertension and whatnot. Like I had been a bit of a contrarian on that. So I wasn't afraid of salt and I encouraged people to use salt, you know, salt to satiety or, you know, make things taste good and whatnot, but there was kind of a reality. I, I did push strongly a minimally processed whole food diet. And when you eat that, there's not much sodium there. Like it just poof, like, oh, oh, the bulkier sodium just disappears, you know, unless you're really doing some Herculean efforts again to, to reintroduce some sodium elsewhere. Yeah.
Yeah.
So it, Luis and I, we, we just had this, this idea and what we initially did is put together a homebrew guide and we, we called it KetoAid., and it would use this much sodium chloride, this much potassium chloride, this much magnesium citrate, lemon juice, stevia, water, shake it up and go. And we just put this on, on our respective websites. We didn't, it wasn't like a, a lead magnet. We weren't collecting emails or anything like it, it just, we, we wanted folks to know about this stuff. And within 6 months we had 500,000 downloads of this thing. And we started getting tagged on social media. You know, people are like, man, this KetoAid is awesome. But guys, when I travel, like, the 3 bags of white powder are really a problem for TSA, you know? And they would show us these pictures where like TSA had like pulled, pulled it aside out of their backpack and stuff like that. And I'd ask Luis, I'm like, do you think like there's a product here? Like, could we stick this in like a tub or a stick pack or something? And so he's like, well, we could give it a shot. So a couple of us got together, our now CEO James Murphy and Luis and myself. Got together and we did a pretty modest run. It was 5,000 boxes of a citrus flavor and 5,000 boxes of our raw unflavored. And we did the raw unflavored. That was my wife's idea because I do cater to the paleo keto CrossFit scene. And although I love those folks, they can be the lunatic fringe too. They can major in the minors and just absolutely lose their minds over things like stevia or malto or, you know, whatever the topic is. So it's like, okay, here's just salt in a stick, nothing else. And that's what we launched with. And we're 6 years downrange and yeah, it's gone really well. And it, it's weird to think about in a world when we launched this, there was Gatorade and Powerade and a number of other things, but that really sodium-forward formulation that we've done that a lot of other people have kind of fallen in lockstep with, there was clearly a need for that, you know, at least seemingly a need. Yeah.
I mean, if you were to have asked me a priori whether I thought it'd be a success, I probably would have said no, just because the phobia around sodium, the fact that it took off so successfully. Yeah, I think it did identify a need. We will get back into the company and maybe some of the strong responses from the extreme minority in a little bit. But I do want to address the elephant in the room, which is this idea of sodium and blood pressure, because it's not that straightforward. I won't dismiss it entirely, but, you know, before I get on my soapbox, which I'm prone to do, around the topic and the science around it, you know, do you think there is a connection between high intake of sodium and blood pressure, or does sodium not increase blood pressure? What's the complexity there?
Oh, it, again, to your point, like if I, you're a doctor, so I, I show up to you and let's say I've been exercising really hard and I had, and it's hot and I show up and I'm hypovolemic. What do I need? I need some sodium and I need some fluids to re— you know, to bring my blood volume back up. Like you can have the syncope, you go from seated to standing because I don't have enough blood volume and so I could pass out. So sodium and fluids is increasing my blood pressure under that circumstance. But one would argue, I think maybe the delineation that we kind of need to pull out there is sodium will absolutely increase one's blood pressure. I think people need to do some very specific things for sodium to start moving into hypertension, you know, like chronically elevated blood pressure. And we usually need some sort of an overfed state, some, some tweaking in the insulin-leptin axis that cause us to tend to do the opposite of the fasted state, which is retain larger amounts of sodium. And it's ironically, it looks very, very similar to what happens with animals when they go into hibernation, like you see dyslipidemia and elevated triglycerides and whatnot. And you tend to see this really massive retention of sodium, water, and electrolytes broadly. So it does sodium increase blood pressure? Yes. Can you increase— can just a high sodium diet absent some other metabolic constraints, mainly elevated or insulin resistance, leptin resistance? I think it's really hard to get somebody to a a hypertensive state absent those other metabolic confounders. And I, I don't know where you are on that or if that's like a slippery answer or whatnot, but that's kind of my understanding of stuff.
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. It has the potential to, but you need other variables to be in place first. I recently went down the rabbit hole on this one and I'll release a, haven't released it yet, but I will by the time this drops, a separate video all about what you just talked about, obesity, leptin, and blood pressure. And when I was looking into the literature, you know, when you're talking about clinical medicine where people look first is New England Journal of Medicine. So I'm putting on my like average clinician hat, average academician doctor hat. Where are they gonna look? The old NEJM papers. And there was an interesting pattern that emerged, which was yes, higher sodium diets increased blood pressure,, but specifically in people with obesity. And there was like, you, there was this one experiment where they put people on a very high sodium diet or a very low sodium diet. Um, and it was a crossover trial. So everybody did both diets and the sodium restriction decreased blood pressure only in the obesity group, not in the lean group. And there was actually a dose-response effect. So they like mapped it out and as body fat percentage dropped towards like 30%, The blood pressure lowering effects of sodium restriction basically vanished. However, most Americans have supra 30% body fat. So then you get to the scenario where, yeah, your average American eating a standard American diet might be more sodium sensitive, but it's not just the sodium. It is the further metabolic context. And then these sort of experiments need to be done in animals. But there was a fascinating study which basically showed. It's gonna blow your mind. Fat cells, they release hormones. You mentioned one, leptin, and leptin does a lot of things. But what they found in this study was that leptin remodeled the vasculature at the blood-brain barrier. Mm-hmm. And specifically around the hypothalamus. So the hypothalamus controls a lot of things in the body and homeostasis, including blood pressure. So it can, uh, affect nervous system tone and basically the, there was like thickening of the vasculature around that brain region and effectively it changed the nervous system tone of the whole body, including, um, being the arteries that go to the kidneys. So in that way it could indirectly affect kidney function. Plus there are direct effects of leptin, again, released from fat tissue on the kidneys. They did show it was reversible. So if they then had the mice lose weight, their blood, blood-brain barrier vasculature then re-remodeled.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Like you could see the images, I'll pop up on screen now where like the vasculature, the basement membrane, basal membrane of these vessels thickens tremendously when there's an obese context because leptin signaling that way. And that will change the way the whole body responds to these electrolytes. So that parallels the human literature. In fact, if you go and you can look at particular genetic conditions, So one is called congenital, um, leptin deficiency. It is what it sounds like. Congenital, from birth, leptin deficiency. You don't make leptin. The interesting thing, because leptin helps control appetite, if you have congenital leptin deficiency, it's one very rare cause of pretty severe obesity. So here's a case where you don't have leptin signaling, but you have severe obesity. So if these sort of models apply to humans, What would you expect in this population? You'd expect to have an obese population, but that doesn't have high blood pressure.
Guess what? Mm-hmm.
Exactly what you see. They have normal to low blood pressure. Just as a little nuance aside, when you give the leptin back, they don't necessarily develop hypertension, but that's because you're not like super physiologically dosing it. You're just giving some back. So complicated, but stuff like that starts to puzzle the picture together of how there's different salt sensitivities and it can interact literally with body fat. More body fat, the simple version, releases a hormone that changes the way your body will respond to sodium. So that is my long-winded way of saying I agree with you. And yeah, I think sodium has definitely been over-villified, although there are, you know, seeds of truth in the common knowledge, right? It's just like a really deficient picture and complexity of the biology.
Yeah. And it, it's hard to decouple. So I, I think that 75, 85% of the sodium that Americans consume is as part of processed foods.
Yeah.
And these processed foods, usually the, the underpinning is some sort of, you know, highly processed carbohydrate, which we get, you know, really remarkable insulin signaling off of that stuff. It's very easy to overeat, but it's devilishly hard to decouple the sodium in that processed food from the processed food itself. And it's kind of interesting, folks, and you alluded to this, folks who are in that insulin-leptin-resistant state, you can put them on shockingly low sodium diets and their body, whatever couple of ions of sodium they encounter, they keep it, they don't excrete it. And so this is where low, lower sodium diets for folks in that kind of cohort it, it, the, it, it's pretty unimpressive what it does with their, their blood pressure.
Right. And it's also more a temporizing measure. It's a bandage. It's not addressing the underlying root cause.
Yeah.
So, right. You know, brings us back to ancestral principles and context, context, context. But with that, I wanna get off my scientific soapbox and get a little to the, the practical. You have a lot of experience coaching people, so finding the right balance, practically speaking, how can people figure out the right electrolyte balance for themselves? Cuz there's a lot of electrolytes, magnesium, sodium, potassium, like How do you start and how do you adjust as an individual to find your performance peak based on electrolytes?
A really good question. And your question may be far better than my answer. It, it's kind of funny for the guy that slings salt, you would think that I have this like completely pinpoint answer, like person A does this, person B does that. Folks oftentimes will ask, can I go do a blood test, you know, to figure out the electrolyte status? But the, the kind of, difficult thing with that is electrolytes are very tightly managed and they will, they will change rather quickly. Like we could be in a hypernatremic state, a high sodium state, and 15 minutes later the kidneys have largely sorted that out. So I, what I tend to do is encourage people to go largely by feel, which it is really squishy and wiggly for me. Like it doesn't feel good from like a, a science-based perspective, but I, I do like these, I, you know, broad brushstroke terms of how do you look, how do you feel, how do you perform? And I do think that there are some commonalities when folks are, are maybe in a low electrolyte state, brain fog, fatigue, cramping for sure. Like by the time folks are at a, a point of cramping, like they're, they're usually quite low in sodium and electrolytes generally, and probably, probably deficient in fluids also. So trying to stay north of that, I usually encourage folks that they're eating, if they are eating a minimally processed whole food diet and it's well understood that they, they do not have overt metabolic issues, you know, like if they've done an LP-IR score or something like that, or a waist-to-hip, you know, measurement that they're, they're generally quite healthy. I think that starting somewhere around 3 to 5 grams of sodium per day is a pretty pretty safe spot. There's some literature that, that suggests there might be kind of a U-curve that, that goes with sodium consumption. That 4 to 6 gram level might be kind of a sweet spot for a lot of folks.
Yeah. For what though? For performance, for mortality, for what outcome?
Just as a, for, so for that it was for mortality, but I think it's a good place to just dip one's toe in to begin feeling this stuff. So if, someone is really exercising a lot, let's say we, let's do like the most potentially extreme example we could find. Like I would say a ketogenic diet and somebody eating more in that like 3:1, 4:1 ratio of a ketogenic diet because their protein is quite low. I think somebody ironically eating like a carnivore diet, people forget that protein does induce insulin signaling. And so I think that a higher protein, you know, like a Sean Baker, 275 grams of protein a day. I think that there's enough insulin signaling there that we maybe retain a little bit more sodium and, and whatnot. So the, I think the most extreme case you could imagine, the person is lean, they intermittent fast, they exercise, they do a 4:1 ketogenic diet. Like the deck is as stacked against that person as we could get. I've seen folks in scenarios like that, like small women that end up running 8 to 12 grams of sodium per day to be able to maintain. And I'm talking a 125, 130-pound woman, you know, in that scenario. I think that that's the outer bounds. I, I, that I really hard pressed to imagine a scenario where the, the electrolyte needs are greater than that. It's hard to imagine even a gut capacity to be able to deal with that. Like at some point you end up with disaster pants from the osmolality of ingesting that much fluid and that much electrolyte. So I think you have distal, distal problems with that. If you, if you go too hard in the paint on all that, it's still problems. Yeah. I'm having distal problems. So I do, you know, for everything from like kind of health and longevity and I think the beat, health and longevity stuff, I think like that 4 gram and up a little bit range is probably not a horrible place. And then I, it's hard to imagine many scenarios where even the hardest training, lowest carb ketogenic athletes would need much more than about 8 to 10 grams per day. You maybe find some really edge use cases, but I think for the vast majority of people, somewhere around that, like 4 to 6 gram total per day. And I would love to see that come from some cool food sources like pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi. Olives are one of my favorite. I know you're a, you're a big fan of, of olives. You know, like a few of the Castelvetrano olives. I think it's 9 of 'em and you get a gram of sodium and you get all the oleuropeins and all that type of stuff. Like it, it's really some of these again, like chutneys, like out of Indian food and whatnot. The very highly salty foods, remarkably salty, you know, like kind of pucker your, your face salty. But I think leaning into some of these traditional foods as a means to backstop that, that sodium piece is a pretty slick way to do it and add some variety to your food. A lot of these things are probiotic. And so if your, if your gut is happy with that stuff, then I think that that's a great way to lean into it.
Yeah. If you, if you, it's interesting. If you just like lay out a bunch of high salt foods or perceived as high salt foods and you taste them, the salt amount doesn't always, I don't know if you agree with this, but the salt amount does not even that well correlate with how salty it tastes. So for example, if you look at the back of some potato chips, they taste salty. They're not even that salty.
Right.
But like if I, this is my favorite way to get salt in. If I am not being lazy, I make a homemade Caesar mayo. And I use anchovies. So the little tin of anchovies can have a couple grams of sodium and I dissolve the anchovies in olive oil and then blend it in with egg yolks and then like a hard cheese, like a pecorino or a Parmesan. And you can get like a couple tablespoons of this that has a couple grams of salt and then you just put it on like a protein and it doesn't even feel that salty and it's delicious, but it really packs in the sodium. So there's creative ways to do it. If people like cooking. But I love, yeah, the idea of like pickles, fermented foods. I'm definitely a big pickle fan, a big olive fan. I love that you dropped the oleuropein tidbit. It's a whole nother kettle of fish. Speaking of electrolytes, but that would definitely get me on my soapbox. I'm just screw it. I'm gonna say it anyway. Calcium's another electrolyte. So this compound that Rob was talking about in olives, it was recently identified in a hypothesis-naive screen of compounds that could help with muscle metabolism with age. So one of the really interesting things that happens with age is mitochondria powerhouse in the cell, right? Interestingly, calcium signaling, calcium being an electrolyte, is really important for coupling, um, muscle's energy demands to energy production. Actually, the calcium gets in and it changes, it's called the Krebs cycle dynamics. But with age, the, this transporter, it's called the mitochondrial, um, M-C-U-R, mitochondrial calcium uniporter, I think. I forget what the R stands for. I think that's correct. Anyway, it declines with age, but they found that this particular compound found in olives could boost it. So interesting. They've only done the studies in mice, but this compound, which is not a protein, at least in animals, could improve muscular endurance and even improve muscle mass. Tangential, really nerdy. I'll link the paper below if people are interested. I'll send the reference. But with that, I want to be respectful of your time, but I do want to wrap up by taking a step back and doing something a little philosophical by talking to you about what I hope you don't mind me characterizing as kind of the element scandal of last year. It was really instructive for me to kind of observe this going on. So if you don't mind me summarizing it, basically, What happened is there was some online communication and it came out that there was maltodextrin, which is a sugar in the electrolyte packs. Now it was kind of a much ado about nothing metabolically. It's like even at max, maybe there was like 2 calories worth of malto. And it was something that was like, you'd already disclosed this, it was in the background of the website, but because of the nature of what it was, which was like a flavor carrier, it wasn't on the label and people saw it as not transparent in trying to hide something that they saw as kind of like, you know, an ultra-processed food, a sugar. And then there's just amplifications with like, you know, the relative amounts. It's a miscommunication, not important. People can go back and review that if they want. The point is I found it really interesting because I saw how the optics unfolded poorly, not to any fault of your own, but did. But I also like could see it from your perspective where it's like, yeah, this was always here. We just closed it and it kind of needs to be here for these reasons. Like once you go through the processing, having a company generating these sticks, there's complexity to it. It was always there and it's not really affecting you. So why whine about it? But I was really impressed by how you handle the situation. And I want to talk about that because I think there are lessons that can be, uh, divulged just with respect to like trust broadly in medicine and public health by how you and your colleagues handle the situation. And just to be clear with everybody, I have no financial motives in this. I have no affiliation. This was something that I watched unfold and have curiosity in as someone who is newly emerging as a public figure. But I just want to talk to you about that.
Yeah, and I wanted to thank you for reaching out to me. We did not know each other at that time. I think probably our names had gone by each other in passing. I had definitely been following your work, and you reached out to me, and I, I think it was kind of a litmus test, uh, with the initial phone call of like, is this guy going to be super defensive and reactive? And, you know, you basically unpacked what the, what the story was, which you did a great recap on that. It's It's interesting, you know, we, we've learned a lot from that, not the least of which, like, we really have always tried to have understanding about our supply chain. That was where, like, the first discrepancy between the 4 milligrams and the 400 milligrams of, of malto emerged, because at year 1.5, 18 months, we started doing inventories of it, you know, pinging our suppliers and like, hey, you guys claim that we have this. Is this really what the, the truth is? And that's where we discovered that. And we've only leaned into that more. And it is funny, I got to be— got honest truth. I kind of understand now why manufacturers and whatnot don't go into their, their supply chains because it's like turtles all the way down or like Russian dolls. What we've discovered, every layer of the supply chain, there is some level where the FDA or whoever the governing board is that deals with You know, whether it's sodium coming out of the ground or whether it's something like, you know, citric acid or malic acid or something like that, there are these provisions where it's like, well, under these guidelines, you don't have to mention XYZ, you know, if it's under, you know, some parts per billion or, you know, whatever. So when you go really digging deeply into that stuff, you're just constantly finding another layer, another layer, even the stuff that are supposed to be excipients that weren't divulged on the front end are now, you know, there's stuff in the excipient that is the excipient of the excipient. And it's crazy. We've been working for the better part of a year now to get as, as deep into that as we can and have a searchable database so that when you get a lot, you could, you know, QR code scan it and be able to go to like if you want to see the where we get the sodium from, it's this place in Pennsylvania that's like a deep earth mine where they, they mine it with water. Pull the water out of the ground and make a brine and dry it and do all that type of stuff. But we, we really leaned hard into wanting to be even more transparent, provide more information. And I, the, the funny thing is the, the, the degree of detail is actually going to piss some people off because like, well, there's this thing and that, and it's like, yeah, that was a surprise to us too. And there was this other thing and this other thing and this other thing. And my hope is just that people over time when they really— when they start asking questions of, say, like other, other people in the space, whether it's electrolytes or not. Well, what have you guys done on this topic? And they're like, well, we haven't looked into it at all. And my hope is that people will go along for that ride with us and understand that we put an enormous amount of time and effort into trying to go about as deep into this as is humanly possible. And I— every time I think that we're at the bottom of that well, like we've opened the last Russian doll of, of an ingredient supply chain, you know, Scooby-Doo investigation, we find one more. And so it seems to be an almost never-ending story, particularly if you end up modifying supply chains at all. You know, like we ended up onshoring as much of our supplies as possible. Virtually everything we get is from the Americas now. Like we don't source anything out of Asia or stevia is out of Central American and North American stuff like that. So I don't know if that fully answers your question, but it, you know, it's— we really leaned hard into trying to get some, some great transparency into it, but it's been remarkably hard. And the irony is, even though we put all that work into there, there's going to be some people pissed off about it. Like the fact that they're able to see into it at all is almost worse. I understand to some degree the sentiment of some companies where they're like, we just don't divulge. Like, we follow the FDA guidelines, which we don't need to divulge things below certain levels, and they just run with it because it's almost easier in a way because you, you don't, you don't provide the fodder for people to then come and criticize the process.
Yeah, you know what they say, ignorance is bliss and multidirectional faith. Um, but in all seriousness, you can steal that, it's not trademarked. Um, I, my feelings are both of confusion and admiration. Confusion from the business standpoint. Mm-hmm. Um, because if I put on just my business hat and my marketing hat, the position you're in, as I see it, is if you can feign ignorance, it is advantageous because there's a negative selection bias in the population. Mm-hmm. And it takes effort, a lot of concerted effort to get this information and make it transparent. To potentially to your detriment. And the admiration comes in where, I mean, what I'm hearing is you're not overcomplicating it in your mind. You're doing it because you feel it's the right thing to do. And again, my disclaimer here, or lack of disclaimer, is like, I have no vested interest in this. I just find it interesting because it's how I try to operate, with authenticity and transparency, even when it has the potential to hurt me. And I'm talking more, you know, a personal level, not a business level yet. But it's interesting to see how different, uh, companies and individuals play that game or don't play that game. And I just have to say, I, I admire how you handled the situation then. And then I just admire the overall approach, saying like, you know, here's what's in it. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, here's why. Evaluate for yourself. I think on balance people see that and it is good for, for brand longevity. I think— and when I say brand longevity, I don't just mean Element, the company, I mean like any individual. The people that I see rising to the top right now across platforms, they're not the people that I necessarily agree with or necessarily like. Um, some I do, But the unifying theme, be it Huberman or Rogan, again, I'm not bucketing these people in a lot of ways. However, those people and a lot of the people that maintain a lot of, uh, attention, they're authentic to who they are. And I think there are very few— they can apply to the company level as well. So I think about that. Um, and, and I'm not going anywhere particular with this. I just thought it was a nice place to end off because that is how we met each other. And it's something that I think I mull over a lot with respect to like, what is advantageous to disclose, but also what is the right thing to disclose? Because at the end of the day, my feeling is I have my criteria on which I judge a person. I judge their quality of information. I judge them as a source of truth, but I think it's paternalistic for me to apply my criteria or like to impose my criteria on my audience. So if my audience straight up directly asks me about my religious or political beliefs, I'll tend to disclose it. I'm like, if you really want to discredit my scientific perspective on whether or not our religious beliefs align, I think it's a little bit silly, but in the end, I do feel like it should be people's right. That was a lot of philosophizing. Before we close out, any further thoughts on that?
No, no, I, I really appreciate your, your thoughts. And again, I appreciate you originally reaching out and just being willing to like, hey man, what, what's the story behind this? And letting me talk about that. It is interesting and I think it's something, you know, we're at this interesting point where our food systems are being really heavily scrutinized. And I think that that's good in a lot of ways. Some of my concern is that I find that folks absolutely love majoring in the minors. And there's a bunch of stuff out there that like they just love, whether— and people can hate me, but it's like seed oils and some of these other things. I just, I don't see the boogeyman quite the same way that a lot of other people do. And I'm willing to absolutely be wrong about that. I would love— I love being proven wrong because then I can be right then. Like if somebody improves my understanding of something, it's like, okay, cool. Like, I really don't have any ego attached to that. Like I've been successful to the degree that I have, cause I have smarter people around me and I learned shit from people all the time, you know? And so, but I, part of my concern around all of the current kind of zeitgeist around health and, and, you know, like ingredients and stuff like that, I feel like people have gone so out into the weeds that they've kind of forgotten, you know, like sleep, food, exercise, community, like those things still are where the rubber hits the road. And we've talked a fair amount in both episodes about like n=1 medicine and it's like, okay, here's the overarching idea. Now here's where this applies to an individual. I fully acknowledge that there are details that folks need to address individually, but at that, that broader like population level, I think we're kind of missing the forest through the trees with a lot of this stuff. And that concerns me. And that is part of the reason why, though, I'm endeavoring to be as transparent with Element as we can. We have no interest in being acquired, IPOing. We're gonna run this thing as a privately held company for as long as the world deems it worthy of, you know, being around. That may be a fool's errand, that may be a great idea, but what it's encouraged us to do is to make decisions around a 5 and 10-year time horizon. And so that it's a very different thing than like trying to, cover up inconvenient, you know, occurrences that have happened in our history and trying to paper that over so that, you know, Nestlé or somebody can acquire us and we can, you know, breathe a sigh of relief and split. We just stood up a research foundation, the Give Us Salt Foundation. We just did our first $500,000 grant to the Stanford Ketogenic Diet Research Center where they're looking at ketogenic diets for bipolar and schizophrenia in children. And so Giovanni Saffi and— yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're actively looking to— to— our charter is health through hydration. So we feel like we get to pee on the totality of health and we really leaned into this, this metabolic health space. So part of what we're trying to do is parlay some of our success into helping folks in this metabolic health world to do the basic research that needs to be done. And it is an interesting time, like the funding landscape has changed, you know, for good or ill, it's changed dramatically, you know, and so we're really trying to, trying to lean into that. So we're here for the long haul. We really want to support and help people and we'll continue to grow. Just as an aside, our Lemonade and 4 other flavors, and I can't remember which flavors they are, are now malt-free. All of our, all of our like sparkling have always been malto-free, but yeah.
Yeah. Not, not great.
But within, within another 6 months we should be post, post-malto in all flavors. So we've, we've been working to do that too.
All right. So yeah, responding, adapting to the evolutionary pressures of the market to a certain degree.
Absolutely. Yeah. Gotcha.
Yeah. But this has been fantastic, Rob. I'll have to have you back. Thanks so much for your afternoon.
Thank you. It's a great time.
Uh, last thing I should have asked in the first one I didn't. Is there anywhere you want to direct my audience where they can learn more about you, what you're doing, your socials, Element stuff, anything before we sign off?
Probably the main place I, I do, to the degree I do any writing, it's, uh, substack.robwolf.com. I really try to avoid social media. Um, I'm so grateful for young piss and vinegar infused people like yourself who are carrying the torch and getting after it, because, uh, my time online is just about done. So thank you for doing, doing what you're doing.
Yeah, I like getting in trouble a little bit. I like provoking, actively provoking, hopefully, but I'm learning to have a little bit of fun with it. Uh, anyway, thank you so much, Rob. I look forward to the next time. Take care.
