Submitted 4 days ago by colourlesspony@pawb.social to [deleted]
Maybe.
A salt molecule is 1 sodium and 1 chlorine. If you measure by mass, the chlorine is about 50% heavier than the sodium, so salt is not 50/50, it’s actually closer to something like 33.3/66.7.
Another possibility is the addition of something like potassium chloride, which is similar to table salt. It obviously won’t contribute any sodium though.
It would be 40/60, not 33.3/66.7, if chlorine is 50% heavier.
You gave values for chlorine being 100% heavier, or sodium being 50% the mass of chlorine.
Just a drive-by ackshually. Carry on.
A salt molecule is 1 sodium and 1 chlorine. If you measure by mass, the chlorine is about 50% heavier than the sodium, so salt is not 50/50, it’s actually closer to something like 33.3/66.7.
TIL Thank you!
That’s very likely the case. Salt dissolves into ions in water.
The difference is that each ion could also occur from a different source salt besides sodium chloride. In a system with only pure water and pure sodium chloride, your proposal would work.
You could have e.g. sodium chloride and sodium carbonate in there or more likely sodium citrate, since you said sports drink. Those sodium ions are the same and indistinguishable, regardless of source. People who have to limit their sodium intake should not need to calculate the sodium content of each salt and then sum that up. Instead you get one sum value directly, which people can interpret much better.
In addition I think the reason is that they simply make a ICP-MS measurement and get one sodium cation value and the same for the other ions. Therefore they cannot combine the values,to a salt because they didn’t determine the sodium chloride salt content, only sodium cation and chloride anion content separately.
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
Do you have any examples? I’m not a chemist but I don’t believe you can have “chloride” alone as an ingredient. If it were alone it would be elemental chlorine, which is an entirely different animal and I sincerely doubt any drink maker would be putting free chlorine into their drinks.
A “chloride” on the other hand is a compound of chlorine already combined with some other element, which is presumably not sodium or you would’ve not said the sodium and chloride were separate. So you could have “potassium chloride” for example, but this would not turn into “sodium chloride” simply by existing in the same liquid as elemental sodium, because it’s perfectly happy sticking with the potassium and being potassium chloride.
Reyali@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’m not OP but I’m wondering if perhaps they are mixing up ingredients with nutrition facts or just marketing content?
Here are screenshots from a mix I was looking at just last night. Chloride is listed as one of the electrolytes, and it’s listed separately in the nutrition facts. But in the ingredients it’s just “salt”.
Image
Image
I’m just speculating though.
colourlesspony@pawb.social 4 days ago
Yeah, I think I did mix up the nutrition facts and ingredients. Or they changed the labels because I checked ononline and in a store and it says salt. I don’t see sodium and chloride though so maybe they did change the label.