If salt is edible and water is, why is drinking saltwater not good for you? Like sometimes you have to swish warm saltwater around in your mouth and getting ocean water in your mouth is okay so why us drinking it bad?
In: Biology
To add to this, the LD50, or median lethal dose, of salt is around [3g/kg of bodyweight in rats](https://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Table.pdf). Typically, you can project similar numbers for people. This means that 50% of rats that eat this quantity of Sodium Chloride die. Great odds if you’re talking about free money, terrible odds if you’re talking about potentially dying.
This means that a 150 lb individual (roughly 68kg body weight) would have to eat 204 grams of salt to get something like a potential LD50 lethal dose.
If saltwater is a 3% solution by weight, for every 100ml of salt water you drink, you’d be getting 3g ofsalt.
For every liter (1000ml) you’d be getting 30g of salt. If you drank 4 liters- which is close to a US gallon, you’d be over halfway to the LD50 amount at 120 grams. Two gallons and you’d be over that, and in potentially lethal territory.
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