Episode 207: Let's Talk Salt - Electrolytes

spk_0:   0:02
Hello, everybody.

spk_1:   0:03
Hello, everybody. And welcome to the show the big show. The fascinating and wonderful show

spk_0:   0:12
Beans, bullets, bandages. And you I'm spice

spk_1:   0:17
and I'm Electra. Like,

spk_0:   0:19
uh uh, yeah, yeah,

spk_1:   0:23
I am electrolyte. You get paid

spk_0:   0:24
by the syllable. Your electro

spk_1:   0:25
me, Mr Electoral. I don't know, Lady Electrolyte man,

spk_0:   0:32
that sounds much more superhero. I like that better.

spk_1:   0:34
Electrolyte mine. I'm salty. And you know what? I sweat a lot because I've been riding my bicycle or working hard t sitting there in my desk at my desk, pounding away on my keyboard from the air conditioner isn't working. I end up covered in salt and I know why that is, and I know what's going on. And I know what needs to be replenished in my body to make up for what I'm sweating out water honor. Not shouting into the microphone. But what

spk_0:   1:11
it looked like

spk_1:   1:11
she was actually said water. If that totally blew away your microphone, he couldn't understand it. It's water, electrolytes and electrolytes. So, without further ado, what we're going to do is have our resident physiology person explain the deal of what do we need Woodward talking about electrolyte replacements both in good times and in bad, because it's the same thing. So

spk_0:   1:43
I'm coming at this from two angles to do. Because not only am I a physiologist to spends a lot of time thinking and talking about electrolytes from time to time. But I am. Which Mykola Salty sweater.

spk_1:   1:57
No question first, or you can give this from a starboard angle and a port angle could have salt water.

spk_0:   2:04
Never mind the maneuvers. Go straight at him.

spk_1:   2:06
All right. Lord Nelson said that that was his philosophy. And then he died,

spk_0:   2:13
but not immediately got away with it for a while

spk_1:   2:16
in Trafalgar. And so, yeah, pressing riddle.

spk_0:   2:21
I'm a salty sweater. My body's not really good at making me sweat. Sorry about the noise there. My microphones looked a little bit bounced on me. Come when you sweat, you have to You use the salt to coax the water to go out to the surface so it can evaporate you and cool you Water wants to go with salt is so you can pump salt to your surface and then the water follows the salt and then the water evaporates away and you're cool, which was the point of the exercise, but you've also lost in salt. Most people are a little bit better at being stingy about assault once they get adapted to working out in the heat. My body's not terribly good at that has been for the last several years. So I go on a nice long bike ride on the summer or something, and I'll come back and I'll look like I'm covered in a fine white powder and I brush my skin and it's greedy all over because the salt crystals on my surface I'm a salty sweater. But what that means is I've lost all that salt from my body fluids, and they're pretty important in there, too, because they control where water goes in and out of cells as well as to and from the surface

spk_1:   3:39
years. One thing I know when she comes in and starts to cool off and the sweat starts to dry, she looks like you know the side of the ocean where it has the leaves. The salt deposits is ring after bringing after ring of salt deposits, and you just almost like you. Uh, because when she sweats, she knows she is a sweater she not a stinky sweater low, which is good. It's very good, actually, neither one of us stinky sweaters, which is good.

spk_0:   4:21
That's because we sweat a lot. Comes from working in the

spk_1:   4:23
media sweat a lot. We actually sweat a lot. So anyway, pressing right along

spk_0:   4:29
when we say electrolytes, what we mean. And sometimes we're saying salt, we're kind of using the terms interchangeably. Electrolytes are charged mineral ions like sodium ions. Cool ride Iom's potassium eye on stuff like that. And when you get to ions of opposite charges to arm Orion's of opposite charges and you put him in a dry environment, they will cling to each other by electrical attraction, and the combination is called a sold so table salt is a sodium ion and a chloride ion stuck together. Repeat about a 1,000,000,000 times, and you got yourself a teaspoon or so table salt.

spk_1:   5:08
That's why they call it sodium chloride.

spk_0:   5:10
Yeah, so you dissolve it into the water and you've got sodium ions and chloride ions. You've got electrolytes in the water. That's what we're talking about,

spk_1:   5:20
and you got hydrogen and oxygen forming molecules. All this living together in a happy not living.

spk_0:   5:29
Yeah, before you get any of the living going on. But anyway,

spk_1:   5:35
but anyway, if you have lots and lots of salt, water and lots and lots, lots, lots of salt, lots of lots of water, pretty soon you're gonna have sharks. Sharks are everywhere.

spk_0:   5:44
I don't think that's the real problem. No, no, it's

spk_1:   5:48
not sharks in there. It's assault. It's in your water. You got you know you've got saline.

spk_0:   5:56
Yeah, a lot of you assault water. There's a whole lot of sodium chloride in your blood.

spk_1:   6:02
Select a DVD sharks, right?

spk_0:   6:05
New. Still, though

spk_1:   6:08
your shirt, that

spk_0:   6:08
sounds like a bad parasitic infection. I don't want to think about from parasitology class, so I knew that would get him off the

spk_1:   6:17
top of that. We're pressing right long. You don't even want to know what's in those textbooks. Really. He's

spk_0:   6:24
learned not to look over my shoulder when I'm reading.

spk_1:   6:26
Oh my God, I mean, you see making me It's right now. It's scratching you,

spk_0:   6:34
So there's a lot of sodium chloride in your blood, and there's a lot of potassium salts inside yourselves, and the sodium and potassium between them control how much water stays outside cells. How much water goes in the cells? How much water your kidneys throwaway, how much water your kidneys keep what your blood volumes like, what your blood pressure is like, as well as how much cool off and when you get. It's also electrolytes moving across cell membranes that cause all your electrical activity like oh, thinking and heartbeat and stuff. So all sorts of things go very wrong when you don't keep the electrolytes at the right levels. So that's the problem. When you sweat a lot, you lose a whole bunch of electrolytes, mostly sodium chloride, but not only sodium chloride. And if you lose just the water, your blood pressure gets low and you start to feel faint, and you can't sweat enough to cool off. And you're looking at heat exhaustion and heat, stroke and stuff like that. But even if you're getting enough water, you can have too many or too few electrolytes in there. And then bad things start happening with the way your brain cells work the way your muscles work, the way your nerves work, like coma, convulsions, death, fender, bad things, potentially. Okay, Early warnings were usually things like cramps because that's muscle cells having spontaneous electrical activity in contracting on you. You didn't tell him too. All right, either. Okay, so this is why you gotta pay attention to it. And the more you sweat, the more likely it is to happen. The less adapted you are working in the heat. When you're doing this sweating, the more likely it is to happen. And as I have found out over the past few years, the older you get, the more likely it is to happen because you don't get is good at handling those ions. Just another name for electrolytes. So a lot of people want to replenish thes What's first thing comes to mind? We think about replenishing electro lights.

spk_1:   8:45
We've been conditioned. We've been sold sports drinks, yes, sports drinks. And the second thing that comes to mind comes back to my old Boy Scout days. Salt tablets?

spk_0:   8:57
Oh, yeah, when I was first well, when I was in high school, they would feed us salt tablets on those hot summer days. When we first started practicing sports at the beginning of the year, tracking were

spk_1:   9:09
awful. Those way had the tablets, we would eat track it would have, um, I don't know what always in salt was in it, and there's calcium in it and vitamin C was in it, and I don't I have no idea what was in it. Snake oil was

spk_0:   9:28
probably probably mostly salt. Now the flagship of the sports drinks. The original, as it were, is Gatorade. And if you look at the label on Gatorade, what it's mostly got, it's mostly sugar, water, folks, and sugar water can be useful if you're working for Maura than an hour at a fairly high level out the heat you get to need in the sugar. You always need water pretty much, but the salt it's got too much sodium and not enough potassium in it to really re balance what you're sweating out. So it's got some value to it. Not as much as you guess,

spk_1:   10:13
but they've reformulated a lot of that stuff from the original, too, to be fair.

spk_0:   10:18
Yeah, I checked out the Gatorade bottle last last year, though, so I don't think it's very much changed some of the other sports

spk_1:   10:25
Dr Seo GI to. They have a the different line entirely. The G two is a totally different.

spk_0:   10:33
It had a little more potassium. It was better.

spk_1:   10:36
There's one they sell around here a lot because perhaps come out. They're the distributor. Is power, eh? I think Pepsico that I may be wrong. It's Coca Cola. What are the two of their distributor, Power AIDS distributor. A lot around here, and it seems to have better ingredients in it.

spk_0:   10:56
The main thing, though, is to look at the ingredient list and make sure that there's a significant amount of potassium in there. But it's not overwhelmingly sodium, but there is a decent amount, like hundreds of milligrams per serving couple 100 maybe of potassium.

spk_1:   11:11
Now they do have sugar free. So it's not even sugar water versions of this stuff. Yeah, but it's still the sodium or potassium still is what you gotta pay attention to. Okay, so

spk_0:   11:25
when you want to make sure it's a usable amount of potassium and not almost all just sodium chloride, which is cheap, people like taste. But

spk_1:   11:37
so what? What are you recommending? Your doc? You? She's not a doctor. I'm not a doctor

spk_0:   11:43
and I'm not playing one.

spk_1:   11:44
So what do you reckon? We're ending here? This Mrs electrolyte.

spk_0:   11:51
First and foremost, food.

spk_1:   11:54
Food? Well, no, not food. Food. Oh, buy food. You mean that will gel? Stop that. You suck in that. Has all the sugar in it too childish for announced

spk_0:   12:04
by food. I mean, salty snacks, like peanuts are a pretty good choice when you've been working a lot in the heat. Yeah, that doesn't have a lot of task a minute, but the vegetables do.

spk_1:   12:16
But won't that make you thirsty?

spk_0:   12:18
Why, yes. So drink right up. Drink what? Oh, absolutely. The best rehydration fluid on the planet for across all circumstances, on average is water.

spk_1:   12:33
I was in all in all seriousness. What got me to think about this as I was getting a little hydrating yesterday. So what did I D'oh! I popped out a couple of bottles of water, Quick. Just actual face, cold water. And the thing is, it tastes really good with your Thursday if you're not thirsty and you're just trying to push fluids coming. Yeah, but, man, if you're thirsty, I just call the water. You just You can just suck that stuff down.

spk_0:   13:02
Now people will say some pretty squirrely things about the temperature of water being important. Mostly, it's about palatability. It doesn't take you. It takes you one calorie, 1 1/1000 of a dietary calorie, a literal calorie to heat, one gram of water, one degree. See, that's kind of the definition. The temperature is not important, except as it pertains to how much of it you'll drink. There is a thing, such a thing as drinking too much water when you're working out in the heat. But you got ah, really, really push fluids to get there

spk_1:   13:35
right now. One of those things about water is that you do have to actually realize is you could drink too much water when you're out writing because your body can only deal with X amount of water. It can only absorb X amount of water, a difference per person in difference with us about

spk_0:   13:51
a leader an hour roughly.

spk_1:   13:53
Yeah, I could do a little more than that because I'm a big guy, but not a huge amount more than that. So drinking more than a leader an hour.

spk_0:   14:03
It's sitting around in your gut, waiting to be processed in most cases,

spk_1:   14:07
and you can feel a little bloody and stuff like this and I will tell you, though, uh, if you are gonna know you're going to be heading out in doing some exercise is gonna start burning off the water. It's okay to start early, start an hour before you go out, and that is good sides and bad sides. Like, if you're cycling is, the good side is you're going to stay hydrated. The bad side is you're gonna have her stories. You have to stop in water of the trees.

spk_0:   14:40
Although the pro cyclists, they don't stop. No, just at least the guys just do it on the roll.

spk_1:   14:48
And here's Here's a true straight world champion U S champion cyclist Georgie in Campy has peed on spice.

spk_0:   15:02
He peed on my foot one day when we were standing. We're in a fairly isolated spot because we didn't want huge crowds around us, and we knew a nice we could ride a bike trail to where the road would go by and the pro cyclists would go by on their pro bike race and almost nobody else would be there. So we did that. But he had noticed that almost nobody was around and then decided that was a good time to relieve himself. He comes over the hill and, oh, he's coming over to my so always came over to my side of the road, All right?

spk_1:   15:35
Just removed through this church from the side. And there you are.

spk_0:   15:40
Yeah. Um, I had a choice whether to miss the missed the shot or

spk_1:   15:46
write something just to pay their drawers that they can't pull over there, just pee their drawers right on. That's part of it.

spk_0:   15:53
So, like, you got to tell you the photo shoot the photo. I was taking his face, people his face. So don't go there, friend.

spk_1:   16:02
Now I love this thing to keep in mind when you're talking about this kind of stuff, and this is in all seriousness, is it's really easy to tell when it's hot out that you blowing through the water. But when it's cold out, it's often something. It'll it'll catch up while you sneak up on you. You may be out cutting, cutting wood in the cold, and you're working up a sweat, but it's cold out and you just don't feel the same pressure.

spk_0:   16:39
When you're breathing hard, you actually breathe off a lot of vapor through your lungs

spk_1:   16:43
right, so you don't feel it as much, but you still have to get to stay hydrated in the cold.

spk_0:   16:51
So for the fluid replenishment, water's nice the if If you're getting it from food, you don't want it to be all processed food cause then again, you're back to all the sodium chloride. Sodium chloride is valuable, but you want some potassium, too. Vegetables have more potassium. Some fruits, like bananas, have nice potassium. And when we get to working really hard, like I'm on a, I have an active sport. And we had a physician, volunteer sports med guy volunteer to take care of our team, and he would help a stretch out at halftime, and he would gauge the strength of our muscles and how much quiver we had when we were resisting pushes on the muscles. And he would dole out TASI um, gluconate tablets because there are the biggest problem we were having. We would be drinking in a fluid, but we would be getting potassium depleted and it would be in impeding or muscle contraction. He could sense it when he was helping a stretch out and he would start doling out the taxi, um, gluconate tablets.

spk_1:   17:59
Would you got an old doc around? And he's no doc. I mean, he's a He's a guy who's been around for years. He knew Hiss stuff. Still does know his stuff some just the other day. Hey, does the staff. And you know, when a doc like that tells you something, you listen to it because he's not one of these. Everything needs a big prescription kind of guys. So anyway, so was that both points or did you have another point? Both angles.

spk_0:   18:30
The two angles were the physiology side and the fact that I get into trouble with it a lot because I'm such a salty sweater and I have to really watch it. I get cramp, Ian the summer if I have a day where I go for a bike ride and then I mowed the lawn and then I spend a few hours working its place. Pretty soon, all that sweating starts to add up, and I'll start getting night cramps and things.

spk_1:   18:53
Yeah, now that's the other thing, too. I was gonna mention she doesn't necessarily get cramp while she's doing it. Should be sitting there in the chair and

spk_0:   19:03
your hormonal states naturally shift. When you sleep, you change how much salt you're trying to save, because, frankly, you're trying to help yourself sleep through the night without having to wake up with a full bladder. And the hormones that control getting rid of salt have something to do with that, too. So you naturally change your hormonal status at night. I can manage it well enough during the day. But if I've depleted too much during the day, as soon as I start to fall asleep in the hormones start to change. I'll start cramping every time I start to move, and that's not a lot of fun. So also, if you're there, you're pretty close to heat stroke and you're pretty close. Do incapacitating cramps when you're trying to work so plenty of fluids. Water best you want to take salt in and I don't know about you, but I start getting salt hungry when I start getting salt. Depleted hunger is usually not a very good gauge of what humans need to eat. We don't have an actual, you know, need for ice cream, but you sure get ice cream hungry or whatever. But salt hunger, at least with me is the thing. But make sure you get a good amount of TASI um, with it not just sodium,

spk_1:   20:20
and we have we have some things that we know. Wait, we'll look at a food. We'll say there's miles on that food because we'll know what we can eat that that will really propel us a lot of miles. Now, this may sound a little strange, but I know a really good food to eat before cycling is a subway sandwich, a tuna sandwich,

spk_0:   20:40
miles and tuna

spk_1:   20:41
miles and tuna. There's lots of miles in to tell you there's also miles and peanut butter,

spk_0:   20:46
and they're this sport I play. There are some of the people I play with who will not happily play if they cannot have their bananas about potassium.

spk_1:   20:56
There's a referent of hers who really, literally will not go out there unless she's eating a banana. You want to tell her, you know, maybe four hours ago, you trouble she that banana. But, oh, she won't do it. It's almost like a talisman,

spk_0:   21:09
and the referees in this sport are not standing there on the sidelines. There were people

spk_1:   21:14
there bust in town. We're running up on the sidelines. You know, there, really? They're taking things much more of a work out, some of them than the participants.

spk_0:   21:28
So if you're into buying the electrolyte packs, that might not be a bad thing. If you for your bug out bag. If you think you might be walking in the summer, they have those little of drink packets. Make sure there's a decent amount of potassium as well a sodium in those guys.

spk_1:   21:45
Another good thing is the energy bars look, watch the energy bars. I know, for example, we're not. We don't represent any company here, but I know for example, Cliff has a really good formulation going on with their energy bars as faras the proper salt. Really, They do a really good job on everything. They're probably, I think, the best anyway.

spk_0:   22:08
Yeah, some energy, energy bars and things are more like glorified candy bars, and some have the science behind them and that

spk_1:   22:15
you take you take it before one of those chocolates and you drop that in your in your back pocket of your cycling jersey. Okay, you go 20 miles,

spk_0:   22:27
and when you're cycling guys, you're leaning over. So the sun is warming up that cookie in your back pocket

spk_1:   22:31
and then your sweat. Of course, it's in a plastic container, so you know it's not like gross or anything, and you get there and then that thing is nice and warm. It is a cookie, and it's not like those mean race across America people. We've told that straight before. I think race across America. We were like, What guy was coming in and, you know, great scripts, Mary. It's a bicycle race where they just don't get off the bike. He's right the way, all the way across America. As far as I can staff the bike as little as possible guy comes into town, we're in the middle of Missouri. It's like I can I have one of those cookies, His manager said. No, you can't have any cookies. So you get to Ohio

spk_0:   23:15
cookies in Ohio. Guy gets back on his bike cookies. Okay, I

spk_1:   23:21
got to get to it. Moves I. Ohio is nowhere near Missouri that it's a cross.

spk_0:   23:27
The States is a long way on a bicycle. Books

spk_1:   23:29
they are. Even skinny states like Illinois, Indiana, are reserve states and there are states you get a world long states. Well, I was wide state, Nebraska, Nebraska. We did the Wisconsin North to south in Wisconsin and we didn't have the shortest possible wakes up for nor counting which we went around the thumb because pretty, but that was gorgeous. But, you know, when you get out of these long multi day bike rides, you just really have to start paying inches that stuff. So anyway, we're gonna wrap this up

spk_0:   24:08
dehydrated, but keep salts and look for potassium is, well, a sodium. Don't overdo it because it'll spike your blood pressure. If you eat too much of salt, watch your body weight. If it starts going up or your clothes start feeling tight, you're retaining too much water. You're probably overdoing it a little bit. If you're getting too late and your urine is getting dark, then you're probably under doing the hydration. If you're cramping, try a little more potassium and maybe some sodium, right. At least that's what I do when

spk_1:   24:39
I got a position. When it comes to working out, though, and in the hot or working in the hot, you wanna pee about clear you don't want to be yellow. If European yellow, that means you need thio. That means more water. Frankly, this this is something that comes from the army. Is it? Something comes from from pretty much anybody who does this kind of thing they want. They want you to be pian white being clear.

spk_0:   25:07
It always should be clear. Pretty much colorless,

spk_1:   25:10
right? If it's really, really yellow and it's not first thing in the morning, any to be fair, you know, that's probably means there's, ah, time to get more hydration in you. All right, we're gonna hang this one up and we'll catch the next time. This is Mr and Mrs Electrolyte.