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Electrolytes

Y'all Water Tread Lytely or Urine Trouble


I think most people kinda understand how your body works with water and salt, but not always enough to make the right choice as to what the body really needs.

Your body has a complex way of controlling the concentration of things in your bloodstream.  As concentration is based both on how much of the solute (in this case lets called it sodium or salt) and solvent (water) you have mixed together, there's a lot of ways to mess around with the concentration.

You've probably seen some reports of runners who end up very sick from drinking too much water - what happens for them is they lose a lot of salt and water through sweating but if they only drink water to replace it, they end up with a comparatively larger amount of water than salt in their bloodstream and so their sodium concentration can drop to dangerous levels.  The same sort of thing can happen when you get very sick and are only hydrating with water and not salts (like are in broth, saltines, and anything that says it has "electrolytes" in it usually.  You're usually just looking for high salt content).  Getting dehydrated while you're already sick is the number one way to get sicker.  That and cable news binging.

Another fun fact is about how good your body is at absorbing water.  I've seen a lot of blog posts about how when you wake up you should drink some ridiculous amount of water because your body has been dying of thirst all night.  The thing is, there's only so much water your body can absorb at once, so if you go over that threshold, you're just going to end up peeing most of it out.  The better way for most people to hydrate is with multiple smaller sips.  It makes sense because if I were to tell you that you can survive on 64 ounces of water a day, you'd probably feel better if you did this slowly throughout the day instead of in one fell swoop in the morning.

If you have high blood pressure, you're usually told to limit your salt intake.  Same idea - if you are eating a lot of salt, it ends up in your bloodstream so your body retains water to try to even out the concentration.  Some people have kidneys that do this with too much gusto and bring back too much water and so they end up with higher blood pressure due to the extra fluid.  Less salt in the diet usually helps to balance this out to an extent.

"Salt" usually refers to sodium but as far as your body is concerned, there are a few other minerals that can fill that slot.  It's just that most of the other ones (potassium, calcium, magnesium) are predominantly inside your body's cells and not in the blood stream, so they have less of an effect when you eat or drink them (the exception being if you have dysfunction of your kidneys or are on medications that affect how well you eliminate electrolytes).

To summarize all that, when you do get sick, make sure to drink plenty of fluids, slowly over time, and be sure you are getting some sodium in your system as well.  If you get sick enough, that's basically what they hook up to your veins in the emergency department or hospital and rapidly makes most people feel better.
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