DIY Re-Lyte: high-sodium electrolyte, minus the geological premium

Re-Lyte is the electrolyte SKU of Redmond, the Utah company best known for Redmond Real Salt — a sea salt mined from a buried Jurassic-era salt deposit in central Utah. The brand's marketing leans heavily on geology: 60+ trace minerals, ancient sea bed, unrefined, no anti-caking agents, harvested from a mineral-rich pre-pollution stratum. As a story, it is genuinely interesting. The Redmond deposit is real, the salt is genuinely unrefined, and the iron-oxide tint of Real Salt grains is a real consequence of trace mineral content. The question for an electrolyte product is whether any of that geology matters at the doses that actually reach your bloodstream.

It mostly doesn't. A 7g serving of Re-Lyte is mostly added sodium chloride and potassium chloride, with magnesium malate, calcium, citric acid, stevia, and natural flavors. Of the salt component, 99%+ is NaCl. The remaining trace minerals — manganese, iron, copper, zinc, etc. — are present at microgram quantities, well below the doses that produce any clinical effect. The 60+ trace minerals claim is technically true (they are detectable with mass spectrometry) and biologically irrelevant (you would hit toxic NaCl intake long before the trace minerals contributed a meaningful daily dose). It is honest geology marketed as functional supplementation.

Where Re-Lyte gets interesting structurally is the comparison to LMNT — the obvious peer, since both are high-sodium keto-leaning powders. Both use magnesium malate, a more conscientious choice than cheaper magnesium oxide. Re-Lyte adds 60mg of calcium where LMNT does not and runs higher potassium (400mg vs LMNT's 200mg). Current jar pricing makes Re-Lyte cheaper per serving at retail ($0.77 vs LMNT's $1.50). On the formula sheet alone, Re-Lyte is the marginally more thorough product. At the brand level, LMNT has tighter marketing and more dialed flavors — which is what most people are actually paying for.

What DIY matches: all of the formula, plus the option to use Real Salt at the same NaCl dose if the geology matters to you. 810mg sodium from a 60/40 blend of table salt and sodium citrate (or Real Salt if you prefer), 400mg potassium from KCl, 50mg of magnesium malate, 60mg of calcium citrate. Bulk cost lands in the 10¢ range. What DIY does not match: Re-Lyte's flavor system (the watermelon and lemon-lime SKUs are dialed) and the stevia + natural-flavor blend that keeps the drink palatable at this sodium dose. At 810mg sodium per serving, flavor matters — saltwater is genuinely hard to choke down without the brand's flavor work.

An honest framing: Re-Lyte is structurally a slightly better deal than LMNT — same magnesium form, more total minerals, lower per-serving cost. The Real Salt geological pitch is editorially clever but functionally meaningless at consumption doses, and the marketing leans on it harder than the formula warrants. If you like the brand's positioning and the flavor work, Re-Lyte at $0.77 a serving is reasonable. If you are going to DIY, you get the same sodium-potassium-magnesium-calcium profile for roughly 10¢ — and you can add Real Salt for the geological feels at a slight extra cost without changing any of the chemistry.