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.
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