best clean electrolytes? tired of the sugar dye bombs.. Whats actually just salt and mineral?

Got recommended to get the best clean electrolytes for the gym earlier this year and was surprised how much junk is in the popular brands? I was like why did the RN emphasise on ‘clean’ lol but then i picked up a tub of the neon sports drink powder everyone has in their pantry and the ingredient list had three dyes and two sweeteners before you even got to the actual sodium and potassium. Real eye opener tbh 

Ive since started actually reading labels instead of just buying whatever's trending on here and compared what's out there by what's actually in the packet, not the marketing on the front:

LMNT (goes for $45 for 30 packets). Sugar free. no artificial dyes, sodium is high at 1,000mg per packet, which is great if you're sweating heavily or doing keto/low-carb, but that's genuinely too much sodium for a normal moderate workout and can sit weird in your stomach if you're not actually losing that much through sweat. Great for summers tbh

Redmond Re-Lyte ( this one is cheaper for $25-30 for 30 servings). Sugar free. Similar to lmnt but that has a cleaner label approach, meaningfully lower sodium in this tho (about 800mg). They use their own mined salt instead of a lab blended sodium source which is good. downside is the flavor lineup is smaller and a couple flavors are genuinely hard to find in stock

Liquid I.V. ( approx. $25 for 16 packets). Not sugar free. This was the easiest to actually find in a regular grocery store and was "cleaner" than the neon stuff since it skips the dyes, but it does have added cane sugar (about 11g per packet), so it's not actually in the same sugar free category as LMNT or Re-Lyte despite being marketed alongside them

DripDrop ORS ( a good $30 for 16 packets). Expensive bcs it started as a medical grade oral rehydration formula, has more sugar than the other three because it's built for rapid rehydration (illness, real dehydration), not daily gym use. But its good to have on hand for when you're actually sick, overkill and unnecessarily sugary for a normal workout day

The spec that actually matters more than "clean or not clean" is sodium per serving. and it varies a lot more than ppl expect between these. LMNT's 1000 mg makes sense if you're an endurance athlete or you sweat heavily and salty but that same dose is more than most people doing a normal hour at the gym actually lose.

Went down a bit of a rabbit hole on this and found a study that actually measured how different drink compositions affect fluid retention not just how fast you absorb them. worth a read if you want the actual research instead of taking any brand's word for it: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8465972/. Sodium content is one of the biggest factors in how well a drink actually keeps fluid in your system versus just passing through, which lines up with why the higher-sodium options here feel different than plain water for heavy sweat days.

at this point I'm mostly reaching for Re-Lyte day to day and saving LMNT for genuinely heavy sweat days, but curious if endurance folks here would push back on that? Any thoughts on that?