There's a moment in every supplement rabbit hole where you realise the marketing has nothing to do with the science. I had mine standing in front of a wall of electrolyte drinks at a health food shop, looking at four bestselling brands that all advertised "minerals" while sourcing their sodium from the same industrial sea-salt processor in California. Same salt. Same minerals. Different colour packaging.
The salt is the formula. The sodium is the dose. So if every brand is using the same salt, every brand is making the same drink — and the only thing left to compete on is sweetener strategy and influencer marketing.
We didn't want to compete there. So we went looking for a salt that wasn't a salt.
N°01The problem with sea salt.
Sea salt — including all the "Himalayan pink" and "Celtic grey" varieties — is roughly 97% sodium chloride. The other 3% is a mineral fingerprint that varies by region but is generally thin, inconsistent, and dominated by whatever the local seawater happens to contain.
That's fine if you're salting pasta. It's not fine if you're trying to actually deliver minerals into someone's cells. The bestselling sports drinks list "electrolytes" on the front of the can but contain only sodium, potassium, and maybe a token magnesium — three minerals out of the 70+ your body uses every day.
The bestselling electrolyte drinks have nothing to do with electrolytes. They have to do with thirst, and thirst is a much easier problem to solve with sugar.— Internal IONIQ formulation memo, March 2025
N°02Why hydroxyl ions matter.
Hydroxyl ions (OH⁻) are the negatively-charged half of water dissociation. In your body, they pair with hydrogen ions (H⁺) to maintain acid-alkaline balance.
You can't drink alkaline water and fix this. The stomach is pH 2 and will neutralise any external pH within minutes. What you can do is deliver hydroxyl ions in a form that bypasses gastric breakdown — and 9× fire-roasted bamboo salt is, to our knowledge, the only food-based source where that works.
N°03What we built around it.
When we set out to make IONIQ, we had a simple rule: every ingredient has to have a clinical reason to be there, at a clinical dose, and the dose has to be on the label.
That meant 9× fire-roasted bamboo salt as the base. Then layered on top: clinical-dose potassium and magnesium, Cognizin® citicoline and L-tyrosine for cognition, Rhodiola for adaptogenic support, ALCAR and taurine for cellular energy.
N°04What people report.
The most common feedback we get isn't about performance. It's about feeling, baseline, normal. Less brain fog at 3pm. Fewer headaches. Better sleep on training nights.
That's what proper mineral replenishment plus a real nootropic dose actually does. It's not exciting. It doesn't make a great ad. But it's the difference between a body that's running properly and one that's quietly running on fumes.
We're trying to put them back together — starting with the salt.
