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RE: Seawater - 6/22/2008 7:57:07 PM

asyouwish72

Posts: 69
Joined: 11/2/2004
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Ummm... did we all skip high school chemistry?

If I might offer up a short review:

"table" salt = sodium chloride (NaCl), normally fortified with iodine. I know some people here have managed to twist this around to be a negative, but the fact is, iodine is a required nutrient which is hard to acquire in sufficient quantities from normal dietary intake, especially in areas where little seafood is consumed. Without it, your thyroid goes "oowie oowie oowie!" and you develop goiter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency

Sea salt is a more complex mixture of various salts. Approximately 98% of this mixture is sodium chloride (just like table salt), but there are also small quanitites of MgCl2 and CaSo4 (which incidently is wallboard, for those curious) and trace amounts of potassium, bromine, strontium, and a few other things. Many of these trace constituents are micronutrients, giving rise to the idea that sea salt is healthier than table salt, but in actual fact all of these other materials (excepting iodine, mentioned above) occur in surplus of normal metabolic needs from regular dietary intake.

If you think sea salt tastes better, by all means, use it. The health benefits are negligible (and you are actually hurting yourself if your diet is iodine-poor, but hey, live it up).

As to drinking salt water driving you mad, the logic here is backwards. If you get sufficiently nutty from dehydration, you may start drinking salt water, but as the metabolic cost of processing it (ie, excreting the salt) results in a net water loss from the body, it's (as previously stated numerous times) self-defeating (at least for humans- this is not true for many animal species).

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RE: Seawater - 6/25/2008 6:42:30 PM

tsatske

Posts: 2037
Joined: 3/9/2007
From: Louisville, KY
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quote:

As to drinking salt water driving you mad, the logic here is backwards. If you get sufficiently nutty from dehydration, you may start drinking salt water, but as the metabolic cost of processing it (ie, excreting the salt) results in a net water loss from the body, it's (as previously stated numerous times) self-defeating (at least for humans- this is not true for many animal species).

Hence, sea water will drive you mad. Actually, you were probably nuts before you started drinking it, already dehydrated. But if you took a normally hydrated person and they started drinking sea water just to see what would happen, they would dehydrate, (unless they drank enough non salted water to compensate, which is to say, significantly more than the normal amount they would need if the potable water was all they were drinnking), and, as a result of dehydration, they will go mad.
in the desert, when someone is lost and they are looking for them, they will sometimes find a water bottle or canteen with water still in it that they have walked away and left. This is always taken as a sign that they are becoming confused, due to dehydration (if they were too 'saving' on the water and not drinking enough), or losing salt, (if they only had normal water to drink)
salt is an important balance in your body - you must not get too much nor too little, or the results are dire.

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RE: Seawater - 6/26/2008 3:44:19 AM

Aswad

Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:

ORIGINAL: sub4hire

I grew up at the ocean...inhaled lots of salt water that I didn't want to.

Don't do that. At least, don't inhale warm salt water. There's no reason to risk being one of the select few people in our history to die from the brain-eating amoeba that live in hot springs and the like (unless you die from the desperate measures taken to slow its progress). Any time you feel like drinking or inhaling salt water, put a drop of it under a microscope to banish the urge to do so; it will most likely be very effective.

quote:

You get enough in your diet from processed foods already.

I think you meant to say "too much." Sodium to potassium ratios in a modern diet are off by a 6-to-1 ratio from what our bodies have evolved to thrive on. It's why some salts are mixed with potassium (a simple matter of harm reduction, for people who won't cut salt altogether). The best option being to adjust one's diet to give better ratios (IIRC, a GP on these boards mentioned that the correct ratio was 1:2, while we most commonly get 3:1 instead).

Health,
al-Aswad.

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