How can drinking sea water kill us if we can eat salt and drink water?
In: Biology
Kidney’s can’t make urine from a concentration of salts higher than 2%. Seawater is about 3% salt concentration. So as you drink it, salts accumulate in the body, driving up your salt levels. The body tries to flush it by creating urine, but since urine has a lower salt content than seawater, the body ends up dehydrating.
If you drink a pint of seawater, the amount of water the body needs to flush to get rid of the salts is about 1 1/2 pints. It’s a quick painful death. (compared to say, starvation)
It’s actually a little bit safer to drink your own urine for a short period of time.
You dehydrate yourself. The salt in sea water is a lot. So when you pee, you don’t get rid of all the salt in your body. You would have to pee more than what you actually have to remove a lot of the salt. So all that salt can dehydrate and kill you.
Water not very salty, salt eats water, our body filters can only filter so much salt, salt water too salty, makes body dry up, human get too dry human die.
“Drinking sea water” doesn’t kill you, but deyhdration does.
Typically if you’re in the position of drinking seawater, you’re about to die of thirst (marooned, lost at sea, a few other literally nightmarish scenarios).
Saltwater dehydrates you (the salt is saltier than the water is watery, if that makes sense).
If you’re already dehydrated, drinking salt water hastens the effects of dehydration. Your cells will try to maintain an equilibrium between salt and water. If you put salt water in yourself, the cells will keep the salt but purge the water. Then they dry up and you die.
So, if you’re already dehydrated, drinking salt water makes that process happen faster, hastening the effects of dehydration.
This is to say that if you go drink a glass of sea water, you probably won’t die, but if it so happens that that’s all that’s available, you’re probably fucked anyways and the sea water will help you along. Which, let’s be real, would probably be fine at that point. I can’t imagine anything worse than being lost at sea.
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