Eli5 what’s the purpose of sodium or salt in our sweat? I understand sweating is supposed to cool us down but why is there salt in sweat.
In: Biology
~~”Eccrine gland components.
Within watery eccrine sweat fluid are numerous other components, including: Sodium (Na+). This is released to help maintain the sodium balance in your body. It’s what makes your sweat taste salty.”~~
It’s from balancing the salt content in your body.
Your body functions best when it maintains the right balance of salt and water. This is why hospitals hydrate people with saline solution instead of pure filtered water. Add too much water without a comparable amount of salt and it throws off the balance.
*Extract* too much water without a comparable amount of salt and it also throws off the balance. If your sweat didn’t contain salt, then by sweating you would be concentrating the salt in your body, which ultimately wouldn’t be very good for you.
Pure water without any salts dissolved in it doesn’t really exist anywhere in your body, so it would be nearly impossible to eject water without salt. Like other comments have said, it’s not so easy to push water away from sodium ions.
Something others haven’t mentioned yet is that the body doesn’t really move water from compartment to compartment. It moves salt and water follows the salt. This is true for your urine, your sweat, and really for the water balance of every single cell in your body. Cells can stop water from moving, but they can’t really push it – they just push salt and water follows.
It’s all about maintening a constant internal environment. Your bodily fluids have salt in them. If you sweat pure water, the fluids would get too salty. The easiest way to avoid this is to sweat salt along with the water
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