Sugar-free electrolytes and the sweeteners they use

A product qualifies as zero sugar here only when its label declares a sugar value of exactly 0g. A blank sugar figure is never read as zero, so products that simply do not declare sugar are excluded from that group rather than quietly included.

Zero sugar is independent of everything else on the panel: sugar-free mixes exist across the whole declared sodium range.

Sugar-free mixes still need to taste of something, so they use sweeteners declared in the ingredients — commonly stevia, monk fruit, sucralose or acesulfame potassium, sometimes with citric acid and natural flavours. We record the ingredient list as published, so you can check which system a product uses before buying it.

Sweetener choice is a taste and preference question. We do not rank sweeteners, and we make no claim about their health effects.

Some products declare carbohydrate deliberately, because a long or hard effort is a case where drinking fuel alongside sodium is the point. On our running and endurance category pages, declared carbohydrate is treated as useful rather than penalised, while the everyday and gym pages prefer lower declared sugar.

So the honest answer to whether sugar-free is better is that it depends on the session. Choose the panel that matches what you are doing.

The zero-sugar category lists every product with a declared 0g sugar panel and shows the sweetener alongside, and the database lets you filter on the declared figure yourself.