Why does sodium-heavy liquids like pickle juice, chicken noodle soup, or saline hydrate you better than regular water when you’re dehydrated, but salt water dehydrates you?
In: 925
what makes you think it does?
Its about the concentration of salt.
If you have two liquids with different concentrations of salt next to one another they will eventually mix and equalize.
Cells have a membrane tha can let some stuff through, but some stuff it cant. It cannot let salt go through, but water can.
So if you have a cell with somewhat salty water and very salty water on the outside the cells water will be sucked out, so that the concentration of salt equalizes.
Salty water can be healthy, if it has the same salt concentration as your body. Thats what a saline solution is that you get in a hospital. However, salt water from the ocean has a way too high concentration
As with everything you eat, it’s about quantity. You want enough of it that it aids you (in this case the salt helps the body in a variety of ways, but the most critical being conducting nerve impulses, your muscles to function, and maintaining fluid balance), but you don’t want too much of it so that it kills you (kidney isn’t super fond of too much of..anything, really. Salt being especially hard for it). Salt water simply has too much salt in it.
You can also die of drinking too much fresh water as well. If you find yourself drinking more than a liter an hour, you need to consider cutting back, otherwise, again, your kidneys are going to complain about their workflow and kill you.
While we’re on the topic of salt and hydration; salt isn’t the only electrolyte your body needs. This is why sports drinks exist (on top of just being a highly expensive sugar drink that companies can make a lot of money from). For your everyday needs, you’ll get these electrolytes from other things. But in especially harsh environments (say, a marathon), it might run low on some of them, which sports drinks can help replenish
You need electrolytes for your body to properly absorb the hydratey goodness of water. Sodium is a source if electrolytes.
Osmosis is a complicated system, and something that our bodies rely on to function. It is the mechanism with which our cells control flow of material in and out of them. All life being just basically potential and concentration gradients.
So when you are dehydrated, you have lack of water in your body and cells. Right so just adding more water doesn’t actually solve the problem, it can make you worse. There is such thing as water poisoning. Now if you drink water that is too salty, that is basically poison to your cells, since due to physics of concretion gradients wanting to even out, your cells need to spend energy to keep their correct chemistry. Then your kidneys will try to remove that extra salt and for this they need water. So you dry out even more.
So what if you drink just the correct mix of water and salt? Which is like 0,3-0,4% if I recall right. Well then your body and cells have way easier time keeping the correct potential and concatenation gradients.
Keep in mind that water without electrolytes (salt), will dilute your body, meaning that overall you will have less electrolytes (salt) in your body; which are things you need. But drink too salty and your body will end up using more water than you drank to remove the salt.
There is actually a horrific way you can achieve a balance at which you will just survive by using salt water. This involves using salt water enemas. You will be sick and miserable, but you won’t die.
A lot of people on keto/low carb diets will actually supplement to rehydrate each day with saltwater. However, it’s like 1/2 a teaspoon to 1 gallon, so it’s NOT the same as ocean saltwater, where the concentration is so high your kidneys will fail processing it.
Why do people in ketosis need more electrolytes? It’s because being in that state means your body uses electrolytes much more quickly! Source: was on keto to help with inflammation from an autoimmune disorder. I’d still be on it if being alive wasn’t so goddamn expensive.
Many of us Multi-day fasters make our own DIY electrolyte drink. Sports drinks only have trace amounts to top up electrolytes lost through sweat.
My mix is 1L ice cold water with ice in an insulated flask to keep it cold.
1/2 tsp of Himilayan Pink salt for some sodium chloride and trace minerals.
1/2 tsp of food grade Epsom salts for magnesium.
1 tsp of ‘No-Salt’ salt substitute for Potassium Chloride.
1 tsp of Sodium Bicarbonate (Baking Soda) for the bulk of the Sodium requirement.
Baking soda for most of the sodium and the drink always being ice cold means this drink doesn’t taste salty. I hear it tastes a bit like Coconut water though I’ve never had that myself. To me it doesn’t taste like plain water but doesn’t taste of anything in particular either. I can drink this stuff all day
As the relative proportions of the electrolytes and the dilution is correct, this is effectively Saline drip and one can drink as much as one wants cause you’ll just piss out the electrolytes you don’t need. Get the proportions and dilutions wrong and then drink too much and you can end up dehydrating and losing even more of an electrolyte you might be low on in the bodies effort to get rid of the excess of the electrolyte you ended up taking too much of per unit volume of water.
Salt water has about ten times as much salt (35g/l) in it than pickle juice or chicken stock (3.5g/l) and about 40 times as much salt as blood (0.9g/l). The human body goes to great lengths to make sure that its blood always has about the same amount of salt per liter because things start to go wrong if it’s off by too much.
A shot glass of sea water has more salt in it than a whole liter of what the body would actually like. A cup/quarter liter has more salt in it than you need in a whole day. The body can’t properly work with this much salt. And it has only a few options available to get rid of it:
* Sweating: This is the body’s preferred way to get rid of salt and it can do up to about 1.5g of salt per liter of sweat. The body would need to sweat out about 22 times as much water than you just drank to get rid of all that excess salt. So one shot glass of sea water would set you back almost a liter of water via sweat. A cup would set you back about 5.25 liters.
* Urine: urine can theoretically go up to around 15g/l of salt. That would still require at least twice as much water than you just drank to get rid of the excess salt. But these are theoretical maximum values. More likely you’re looking at a lot more.
* Vomiting: this is the emergency “return to sender” option. It get’s rid of all the salt water but also also the rest of your stomach contents which is a good bit of water that it now needs to replace.
No matter how you slice it, it’s a very bad outcome for the body.
Now let’s compare that to drinking too much chicken stock or pickle juice. Let’s say that you somehow drink an entire liter of pickle juice. If the body needed to get rid of all that salt that that would set you back about 1.3 liters via sweating. Via urine the body could possibly do it with a little less than a liter but let’s call it a draw.
How about isotonic drinks like Gatorade. These actually have less salt in them than the body needs on average. If you exercised a lot and only drank these you’d be giving the body more water than salt. One way the body can deal with this is reducing the amount of salt in your sweat as you continued to exercise. Sweat doesn’t need salt to cool you so the body can to some degree make less salty sweat to tweak the ratio of what if keeps in the body. Also you’re probably going to eat something eventually, which will provide more salt than water. So isotinoc beverages are a decent compromise between no salt or potentially too much salt.
What about water? Water has almost no salt in it. So if you drink a lot of water the salt in the body gets spread out more and is harder to use. To a degree the body can still use sweat, urine and vomiting to try and get rid of a good chunk of water but not without sacrificing *some* amount of salt along with it. Creating the opposite problem from drinking salt water. People have actually died from this but it’s very rare. Usually in water drinking contests.
So what do hospitals do when you come in dehydrated? An infusion of 0.9g/l salt water. regardless of what the ratio was in your body it will be mixed and mixed with the ideal ratio until you have both enough water and a good ratio of salt too.
**TL;DR It’s not that more salt is better than less salt. The *correct* amount of salt is better than an incorrect amount of salt.**
Final footnote: Salt is not the only electrolyte that needs to be balanced this way but it is the one we need most of and as such is generally the first one to go wrong.
Why not just ask what hydration is if you don’t understand it fully? Lol
The Jewish deli by me makes the best chicken noodle soup w matzo balls it’s literally my cure when I’m sick.
I don’t know why it’s so expensive but I’ll drop 50 bucks on two quarts and that’s usually my go-to when I’m sick I drink everything the broth too.
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