Don't Drink the Salt Water

throats unslaked, with black lips baked. We could not laugh nor wail through uttered drought. All dumb we stood. I bit my arm, I sucked the blood and cried A sail, a sail with throats unslaked, with black lips baked agape. They heard me call gram Mercy. They for joy did grin, and all at once their breath drew in as they were drinking. All. Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from How Stuff Works dot com. Hey, you welcome to

stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick and Olst Coleridge invading your ears. That's right from his poem the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Uh. In the first chunk there, we're we're getting the famous lines about about being thirsty at sea, having no fresh water to drink, the ironic situation of finding yourself stranded and inst all this water and yet none of it

is sufficient for for human consumption. And then in the second section, the sailors are so thirsty that they turn to drinking their own blood h to to satisfy their thirst. Now, this is a horror movie of the Romantic period. Yeah, it has everything. It has ghosts, it has an albatross, it has c madness. Why is this classified as Romantic literature? I need to go back to my English literature education and understand what I think. It's about the spontaneous outpouring

of overpowering feelings, right, I think so. But it's just about people going crazy at see. Like one of my favorite lines is is as follows, I took the oars. The pilot's boy, who now doth crazy go, laughed loud and long, and all the while his eyes went to and fro ha ha quoth eeful plane. I see the devil knows how to row. That's great. It has a great tell offline too. Uh So it starts. I don't know if you remember the framing of the Rhyme of

the Ancient Mariner. Most of the poem is this crazy old mariner telling the story about how, you know, he killed an albatross and brought a curse upon his ship up and they saw death and all this. But the framing narrative is that there's this dude on his way to a wedding and the crazy old sailor just grabs him and starts telling his story. And as the poem goes on, the narrator gets totally horrified and engrossed in the old man's tail. But at first the narrator just yells,

unhand me, graybeard, loon. I often think of that when somebody is like bidding for my attention at work and I don't have time to pay attention to them. Now. One thing that's great about the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, in addition to how fantastic of a poem it it is, is it's got really great old school illustrations, like this Gustave dore A graving. We've got here of it, where everybody's huddled in fear as they're watching the albatross perching

on the deck. Oh. Yeah, the his his artwork always goes great with a kind of dark story, right, I mean his his his illustrations of the divine comedy, various biblical h stories that he illustrated. There's a there's a darkness to those woodcuts. Yeah. Now, the line that often gets quoted from the Ryme and the ancient Mariner water water everywhere, I think slightly misquoted as and not a

drop to drink. Uh, of course, signals the fact that you often, as a sailor, be stuck out in the ocean, and you might be very, very thirsty, and you're surrounded by water, but the water is not going to help you with your thirst. That's right. This is this is one of the most important survival facts out there, is that if you were stranded at sea, upon a desert island, upon a deserted ship, you name it, uh, do not

drink the salt water. Every survival handbook out there will tell you the same, no matter how how tantalizing it may seem, no matter how how logical the solution might appear, you should not drink the salt water. Because you're gonna You're gonna lose that race, because it is going to

catch up with you. Yes, you, you are going to lose the chemical race against the solvent wait, the salute the salt anyway, against this solution of in a c L in H two O. And I also wanted to think about how I think it's fascinating to make just a chemical compound such a grim apocalyptic figure in a poem like as a grim apocalyptic tale about death by

sea water. I think the rhyme of the ancient mariner is pretty much the best, but I often think about what sorts of chemistry is could figure into modern apocalyptic sci fi, and I think salt would be a really great one. So, Robert, do you want to hear my pitch for the sci fi version of the saltwater Apocalypse? Sure, though, I you're gonna you have quite a challenge here in capturing the same cadence you know. Well, no, it's I can't do the romantic poetry, but I'll try to do

the scenario. So the fact is, the Earth's oceans were not always as salty as they are now, because salt is not intrinsic to the ocean water. I don't know. Sometimes you think about, well, most of the water on the Earth is in the oceans. The salt water therefore, or vastly out numbers the the amount of freshwater out there, and out numbers is the right word, because it's not enumerated. But there's way more salt water than there is fresh water.

The vast majority of water is saltwater. Therefore, it would seem rational to to guess that this is the natural state of water. No, it's not. Freshwater is the natural state of water. The ocean's got salty, and they got salty from billions of years of rinsing the rocks. See Earth's crust is about two point eight percent sodium, the most common compound in rock salt being in a cl or sodium chloride. This is the same as common table salt.

It's what you'd put on your food, and as slightly acidic rainwater and freshwater runoff rinses and dissolves the rocks of Planet Earth over long periods of time. It dissolves little bits of that sodium chloride and carries all of that sodium downstream and eventually into the ocean, and then this salt accumulates the oceans. Because the sun heats the ocean water causes it to evaporate, it forms clouds, and those clouds eventually rain the water back down on the land,

but the salt pretty much stays where it is now. Fortunately, there are natural processes known as salt sinks, and these help remove salt from the ocean and deposit it back on land or in the crust. And for this reason, the salt content of the ocean seems fairly stable for now.

But what if in the future the oceans became more like the fatally salty dead sea, where if you've ever seen what people look like when they swim in the dead sea, they bob like a bob blur like you just totally float on the surface because of the high salinity of the water. But also what you'll notice is you don't see any fish or any seaweed or anything. No macroscopic organisms can live in water that's salty, So we could have a salt apocalypse. They caught the dead

sea for a reason. Yeah, what if the whole sea was the dead Sea? I like it. I like it. You can eat that. It can even be the title dead sea. And then holand and then whatever sci fi year you want to go with, it's like dead sea the saltan ng. Yeah, alright, I like that. I like that. I guess we should talk a little bit about just how much salt is in the ocean currently. Uh just the what are the current sea salt levels to the ocean About a hundred pounds, right, Well a little bit

more than that. Uh So, seawater is saltwater to the tune of three point five average salinity, So that's thirty five parts per thousand and there. The crazy part here is that there's so much salt in Earth's oceans that supposedly, if you were to remove it all and spread it evenly across the surface, you'd have a forty story layer of salt. Now, it should be fairly obvious that drinking salt water is not a good idea when you're thirsty.

But there's a reason we keep returning to this idea in our fiction, right because in much of human history, there are lots of areas where you could get stuck out on the ocean without fresh water. I mean, we love those type of stories, right, I mean, the there're stories of of of man versus nature, a human being trying to survive and again, like I accluded to earlier, there is something deeply ironic about being surrounded by water

and not being able to drink any of it. What's that Simpsons episode where Homer starts drinking the salt water? Oh yeah, that's a boy Scouts in the hood where he misquotes the poem and says, water water everywhere, so let's all have a drink, and starts drinking palm full and palm after palm full of salt water until they just pull him away from the edge of the life raft. Um.

You know. It shows up other places as well, in in the Song of Ice and Fire saga, George r and Martin's Iron Islanders, the sort of love crafty and vikings of the series, the ones that everybody's always saying, give us more chapters with them, that's who I want to spend my time with. Well, yeah, I ended up feeling that way. I ended up feeling that way where real TV series. I was like, Hey, there's all sorts of stuff you could be doing with the Iron Islanders.

They're kind of cool. Oh sorry, I said that. Ironically, I feel like most people are just kind of like paging through the Iron Islands chapters like, come on, give me back to the other character. I feel like maybe I did at one point, but they reached a point in the Iron Islanders narrative where I got really invested in it. Well, they do have a really cool religion that has to do with an underwater god who has a major salt component. Yeah. Yeah, and then the whole

drowned god that that pops up in their religion. Uh, they have these priests, they have these ritualized drownings. It's sometimes a little vague, like to what extent it's just like a violent Viking baptism in the sea, or if there's some sort of supernatural element going on as well. But they drink seawater. They do drink seawater. I mean, you're gonna drink it as the priest is attempting to drown you. But then also it said that their priests

drinks seawater to quote to strengthen their faith. But you should not drink seawater to strengthen your body. So the thing is, yeah, humans need a lot of water, certainly, but we don't need a lot of salt. We can consume small amounts of salt, certainly. We do it all the time. Uh, we love salty foods and also we need salt to maintain our body chemistry. So it's it's not a situation where it's just a completely alien component. It's part of who we are. But we don't need

that much, but we absolutely do need some. Like at any given time, the average human body contains I read this today, about two hundred and fifty grams of sodium. That's about eight point eight ounces. Your standard cylinder container of Morton table salt, you know, the you know the can as salt, the big one. This is the one that larger than a soda can. Well, it's the twenty six ounces can. Yeah, exactly. Uh, that container of Morton

table salt twenty six ounces. So if you've got eight point eight ounces in the average human body, depending on your body size, more or less, about one third of those containers is inside you right now, that seems like a lot of salt, right, Like, if you put that much salt on a meal, the meal would be, I dare say, too salty. I think most people would agree with that. Yes, I want to tell a story that a friend of mine once told me. So, Uh, my friend,

she she's very smart outdoors person. She does a lot of hiking, and she knows how to handle herself in the wilderness. And she was out hiking one time on a trail in Zion National Park and it was out in the heat. And of course, you know when you're hiking out in the heat and the desert on the rocks, you know you need to take plenty of water with you and to keep drinking in order to keep yourself hydrated. And under that desert sun, dehydration and overheating can really

sneak up on you. So the smart thing to do is not wait until you're super thirsty to drink some water, but keep sipping. Be very conscientious about keeping yourself cool, keeping water coming in. And this this friend of mine, as I said, she knows how, she knows what to do in the outside. So she was drinking plenty of water out on the rocks, but she noticed that she

started to feel terrible. She felt nausea, as she had a headache, weakness, and I think she said she was kind of confused and foggy, and normally in that situation you'd think, Okay, I'm out in the desert, I'm probably getting dehydrated. I need to rest and drink more water. But she kept drinking water and the symptoms didn't get any better, so she didn't know what was going on. They got concerned and she came back down off the trail and ended up at a shuttle station where they

called for emergency services. So what's going on? Right? It seems like the symptoms of dehydration almost but she had been drinking so much water it didn't really make any sense. So the paramedics arrived, they got the lay of the situation. They and what they eventually did was they got her to eat some pretzels. So the problem wasn't a lack of water, It was too much water deluding the salt content of her blood plasma, and what she needed to

bounce back were some salty snacks. All right, So that sounds like what everyone needs to bring with them on a on a hike from now and to just make sure you do have some pretzels tucked away for emergency use. I wonder if you need a rapid infusion of salt, like, what is the best thing to eat? I imagine the situation is fairly rare in America. Yeah, like, yeah, we do love our salt. Yeah, well, I I love salty

foods too, but like, what is it like Doritos? Or should you take a jar of pickles or a stick of pepperoni? But see, other people might see you taking that bag of Doritos or jar of pickles, would be on the hike, and they're gonna, they're gonna they might judge you for your your your choice in trail food. I guess you just need like a salty trail mix or packets of soy sauce, which will come back to

in a bit. Okay, Yeah, Well, I wonder if some people, in addition to their hydration when they're like running and exercising, they squirt those little electrolyte gel things, right, and those have some amount of salt content to help keep you balanced. Right. Yeah? Yeah, anyway, gross side note of the story she told me about the shuttle station. Uh, my friend, she felt so bad after she got down there that she vomited out on

the ground somewhere. And then later, while she was waiting around, she got to watch a wild fox wander over and start eating it. Oh well, that's kind of beautiful, really. Cycle, yeah, the cycle of whatever her life. She ate and then vomited and then something else got to you. Yeah, I mean she was. She was behaving much like certain buzzards do when threatened. You know, a vomit which a vomiting display that is either meant to scare off a predator or to distract it with a bribe. Yeah, here you

can have this. Yeah, have these pretzels, and you know in gatorade. So we totally need sodium to keep our bodies functioning right. If you don't have enough sodium in the body, this is called hyponotremia, and you can experience some really messed up symptoms. And in addition to what you heard about in that story, nausea, vomiting, headache, fatigue, and all that, you can on the far end of problems, if he gets bad enough, you can end up with

seizures in coma. So I mentioned that sodium is an electrolyte, that that's one of the reasons that it's necessary in the body and in a electro light is a substance that tends to dissolve in a solution and produce ions, or charged particles. The presence of these charged particles makes the solution a better conductor of electricity. For example, salt water is a much better conductor of electricity than fresh water. And if you want proof of this, you can look

up videos of salt water circuits. Have you ever seen one of these? Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I wouldn't advise you to try this on your own at home unless you really know what you're doing. Electricity and water can be a dangerous combination. But the basic setup is you've got a circuit, uh and it's connected to a battery and to a light bulb, and at one point on your circuit you have open wire ends that are

stuck down into a jar of water. So the electricity would need to go through the water to complete the circuit. And if you've just got regular tap water, especially if you've got something like distilled water, the bulb is not going to light up. It can't generate enough current to really complete the circuit. But if you stir some salt into the water, suddenly the boat the bulb will come

to life. And there's some kind of rough equivalence to that within within the body, Like the body is an electrochemical machine, and one of the ways it regulates itself and does its stuff is through electrochemical signaling and electrochemical exchange. So your body cells have membranes surrounding them, and these

membranes are electrically permeable. They can allow ions to pass through to balance electrical charge on the sides of the membrane, and by exchanging potassium ions and sodium ions across the cell membrane, the cells can for example, direct an electrical impulse, which means a chain of nerve cells can pass a message from one part of the body to another. But you can also think of sodium and potassium as one of the ways that stuff gets into and out of

a cell. This electrolyte exchange across the cell membrane can be used, for example, to exchange glucose to get glucose into the cell, and the body also uses sodium to maintain overall fluid balance and regulate blood pressure. So you need sodium. It's an important part of everything your body needs to do to survive. Without it, you would not be able to live. But like we were saying, you don't need a lot of it. It's interesting, isn't it. How you end up revisiting the body as this kind

of chemical equation. But for the most part, it's a self regulating chemical chemical equation, provided that you have you have your your your typical resources around you. Yeah, unless

there's something really wrong with your inputs. Generally, if the body is healthy, it's going to be balancing the sides of this equation on its own, and so the body usually tries to keep the sodium content very stable between about a hundred and thirty five and a hundred and forty five milli equivalence of sodium per liter of water in your body. And mill mill equivalence is a measure and chemistry often used to measure the amount of solute

and a solution. In this case, it's sodium and water and there are one thousand milli equivalents and an equivalent. So notice that's a pretty tight range for normal sodium levels right on to one forty five mill equivalents. Means that the body needs to be constantly managing its retention and excretion of sodium to keep those levels in the

optimal functioning range. But having too much salt is I would guess a more common problem than having too little, and certainly just as potentially harmful, and drinking seawater puts you at immediate risk for over salting. Your body and your cells can basically start to get like salted slugs. It's not good. It's not good. It's really it's really kind of diabolical. The way it plays out, it seems

like some sort of the punishment from the inferno. So basically what happens is humans were eating and drinking a lot to dilute our salt intake. So you're fine normally, if you have a salty meal, it's not going to kill you immediately because you can drink water to make up for it. Your your kidneys will help you excrete all that salt over a period of time. There's a reason you have that super gulp of sugary soda water, right right, But yeah, if we consume to much salt,

the body has to dump it. But that that body has to get rid of that salt the only way it knows how through urine evacuation mode exactly. But the human kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water, so it cannot it can't get rid of it as fast as it's coming in. To get rid of all that excess salt from saltwater, you have to urinate more water than you drink and this is the path to do you die of dehydration, becoming thirstier and thirstier with every gulp. It's one of those faiths

that is not only cruel but ironic. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna get more into this situation. What happens when we do drink saltwater? And another outline question, does it lead to madness? Does it lead to sea madness? Than? All right, we're back. So, Robert, we've talked about how the body needs sodium to survive, but if you have too much of it, it's going to be a big

problem for you. And if you start drinking seawall or when you're thirsty, it will not cure your thirst, but will take you down a bad road. That's right, the road to doom. So the body tries to compensate for fluid loss by increasing the heart rate and constricting blood vessels to maintain blood pressure and flow to vital organs. So you're you're also most likely to feel nauseous, weakness and even a sense of delirium. But if you become

more dehydrated, the coping mechanism fails. If you still don't drink any water to reverse the effects of the excess sodium. The brain and other organs receive less blood, leading to coma, organ failure and eventually death. Right. So, as we've said several times, now, if you're thirsty out on the ocean, don't drink the sea water. That's right. And the delirium condition there that that underlies the whole idea of sea madness. Right,

you could become delirious from drinking the seawater. We see a good bit of that portrayed, I think in the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, even though well I don't know if it ever establishes in the poem a cause and effect saying like, oh, somebody he drank the seawater and then they went mad. I can't remember. Is that in there? At least you get that vibe. I mean, it could be that this, this character, the old man from the sea, is just making up this whole story.

He could be may he just drank seawater right just right out of the bay and walked up to this guy on his way to the wedding. There's really no uh, no epic survival story to to relate. Now, if this guy was going to an ancient Greek wedding. It's possible he may have been on his way to drink some seawater himself, right, yeah, this so this is interesting. I I was not aware of the medicinal consumption of seawater prior to researching this episode, but I ended up running

across it and it's it's fascinating. So we mentioned the fictional Iron Islanders earlier, a seagoing people in George R. Martin's book who who honored the sea and believe their god lives under the sea. And uh, this of course lines up with a number of different traditions of ocean going people, particularly the ancient Greeks, who were a sea faring culture, and they placed a lot of emphasis on the power of the ocean and the if you anger Poseidon, it could really come back to bite you. Oh yeah.

And of course, really most of the Greek gods were terrible entities to even attract the attention of much less tick off. But Poseidon does fit feature into a number of these tales. I mean, in that what happened to Odysseus he made Poseidon that yeah, he's he's kind of the central antagonist of that one, isn't it. But the Greeks they sometimes added seawater to wine to to adjust the flavoring. Um Kato the elder reportedly served it to his slaves, a mixture of wine and seawater to keep

them energized. That doesn't sound like an energy drink, well, or does it? Like the electrolytes. I guess you know, it's kind of like ancient cruel gatorade. I guess all energy drinks are cruel, but that that is crueler than usual. Yeah. Now, during the eighteenth century, physicians took inspiration from the works of Hippocrates and Celsus and they revived the pract this. Uh now, one of the classical approach was to sweeten your saltwater, your sweeten your seawater with honey. The British

like to dilute it with milk. This sounds gross and just a big glass of salty milk to uh, you know, to to enhance your constitution. I guess I'm trying to imagine how salty it was like. As we've said that they're they're electrolytes in some sports drinks, So is this going to end up being about as salty as gatorade or is it going to be like a salty salty drink. Well, I think we find one possible answer in an excellent two thousand thirteen Atlantic article by Addie Brown titled the

historic Healing Power of the Beach. I'll include a link to this article on the Landing page for this episode of Stuff to Put Your Mind dot Com, because she gets into not only the idea of drinking saltwater, but just this idea of the beach as a place where one might go to heal oneself, which is which is an interesting topic onto itself and one that I find myself believing in and yet yet unsure of the scientific

you know, underlying truth to it. Well, it seems like part of a broader phenomenon, especially in the eighteenth century. I can think of of people who have a disease being prescribed by their doctors, not to like take a drug or I mean, though that did happen too, but to go to a specific climate. I think about, you know, keats being prescribed you need to go to like a

Mediterranean climate to get well or something. Yeah. But as she points out in the article, there was a time when hanging out of the beach that's what peasants did. It's only as this, uh, this resurgence of the healing power of the beach becomes a thing that you see the higher classes heading out there as well. Now. In this article though, she points out that in seventeen fifty Dr Richard Russell published a treatise titled A Dissertation on the Use of Seawater in the Diseases of the Glands,

particularly the scurvy, jaundice, King's Evil, leprosy and the glandular consumption. Okay, so the King's Evil, the King's evil. So the King's evil was a swelling of the lymph nodes associated with the tuberculosis. But of course the idea was that this condition could be cured by the touch of a royal royal person who was blessed by the divine right of king. We know now that that that that cure does not work. They're probably a great way to get syphilis. Just looking

back on the history. Wait, was this also known as the SCROFULA Is that I think I've read that? Yes, I believe so so Dr Russell. He he prescribed a lot of seawater, including to one of his patients who who suffered from leprosy, and he required uh this particular patient to sprinkle himself with seawater and quote drink a pint of seawater every morning during nine months without any intervals, and he reported a full recovery. I don't believe that a pint of seawater that is a lot of salt. Yeah,

I would think so. I kept thinking about it during my recent trip to the beach, like what have I? What have I followed Dr Russell's advice and I myself just drank a pint of this stuff every morning just to kick off the day. Now here's a question I wonder.

I wonder if maybe people were in some cases not drinking enough fresh water, and that by getting people to drink seawater it made them thirsty, so they would end up drinking a lot of fresh water to make up for it, and that that would actually increase their overall water consumption and make them healthier. Well. But of course then that depends on their access to fresh water. Does it result in the drinking more fresh water? Does it result in them drinking more beer? I don't know. I'd

say the answers probably beer. So if you were if you are stuck at sea or on a deserted island or what have you. Obviously beer would be the better choice. But but let's say you definitely have to drink seawater. You should not drink seawater. But let's say it starts looking like a good idea, how might one go about that? Wait a minute, didn't we say you shouldn't do it? No matter what? Exactly all the survival manual say do

not drink seawater. And yet you will find particular survivalist who say, look, you shouldn't drink seawater, but here's how you do it. Here's how I did it and survived. All right, Well, let's hear some salty prescriptions. Okay, So once again, to be clear, there are accounts, and sometimes rather disputed accounts, of individuals surviving their or their ordeals at sea through the balance consumption of seawater. Balance. So that means not just like ladling it out and drinking it,

but maybe mixing it with consumption of freshwater or something else. Yeah. Noteworthy examples of this include French biologist Alan Bombard, nor Even Norwegian adventure thor Hira Dhrynch and sailor William Willis. I'm gonna talk a little bit about bombard here. He lived through two thousand five, he went to an Oceano graphic institute in Monte Carlo to develop ways for people lost in small boats to survive. This after he and a friend survived in a boat for five days with

only a half kilogram of butter. Of butter, what is that supposed to say? Water butter? Just butter? Yes, butter, That not water butter. So what he's saying is, you know, if if there's no fresh water around, you're saying, drink butter. That what we're being told here basically. But now, during his his time in Monding Carlo, he concluded the drinking limited quality quantities of seawater and fluids pressed from raw fish and eating raw fish and plankton that this was

the way to go. Well, it'll come back in a little bit later in this episode, but that maybe part of the strategy employed by some organisms that live in the ocean exactly, but this case, like I said, it's it's a little uncertain exactly how that all this shakes out. He later put it to the test and claimed that while the raw fish and plankton tasted like lobster, biscuit. First it grew tiresome. Oh, it grew tiresome on the

on the lifeboat. Yeah and uh. And then a critic comes along, and doctor Hans Lindeman, who lived UH ninety two through two thousand and fifteen, he tried to follow his advice and drink seawater to survive on two short voyages, resulting in dangerous swelling of his feet and legs. And he ended up charging bombered with cheating, saying that he had he'd probably used secreted provisions to survive in this test. And uh, and and I believe he he suggested that

it was probably beer. To come back to our mentioned of beer earlier. Now, he's not the only word on the whole issue of how much seawater should you drink? According to the paper Metabolic Effects in Rats drinking increasing concentrations of seawater by z Eton and R. Yaggle, published in Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part A UH Physiology found that yes, drinking seawater wind dehydrated is quote not beneficial and causes impaired renal function. But you put comes to shove.

They recommend the following. Oh, so they actually got some results that might be useful to save lives. Yeah, now these are from These are with rats. But they say when the concentration of seawater in the drinking water is gradually increased, there is a gradual increase in water uptake and corresponding urine excretion. At fifty seawater the maximum uptake and excretion is reached. Following this, there is a decline and appetite water uptake in urine secretion. So this is

this is what they say. It is suggested that when a man is stranded at sea, it is not advisable to drink all the fresh water and then be compelled to drink seawater when be hydrated. It is better to slowly increase the seawater uptake. This will prolong the time before seawater needs to be drunk and result in only minor metabolic changes. Return to freshwater will be followed by

an immediate return to normal homeostasis. Now, I want to come back to soy sauce for a second, because, as it turns out, there there are, of course other ways to acquire salt poisoning, such as the two thousand thirteen case reported in the Journal of Emergency Medicine in which a nineteen year old Virginian man drank a quart of soy sauce what apparently on a dare, and he he developed a hypernatremia. So it's the opposite of the condition you were talking earlier. This is too much salt in

the blood. Then this is super dangerous because it essentially turns your brain into jerky. Now, if I had to guess, I suppose I could, I would guess that if the body detected that much salt going in through the digestive system, it would just immediately rejected through vomiting, you would think. And yet in this case, he drank down the the soy sauce and then he started complaining of of these

symptoms that he was feeling nauseous. Because in this case, he he drank enough to go into a seizure and had to had had to be picked up by the ambulance taken to the emergency room. So so what happens here is that the water ends up moving out of the brain into the body to equalize the salt concentration, and this can cause the brain to shrink into BLEI.

So at once he arrives at the emergency room, they had to pump one point five gallons or six liters of sugar water into a system, and his levels normalized after five hours. The hippocampus, however, a region of his brain, showed signs of trauma for several days before returning to normal. So we've said, don't drink the sea water. Also, don't drink the soy sauce. Don't you don't drink the soy sauce, and certainly don't slam the soy sauce. Not to demonize

soy sauce. Big fan of soy sauce. Now. Interestingly enough, in the paper, authors Carl Berg at All reports that in ancient China, salt ingestion was a traditional method for suicide. This led me to a paper. Yeah, this this the floored me as well. That sounds like the result of like some sick brainstorming session at a salm movie writer's meeting where they're trying to come up with like the most horrible way to kill somebody. I agree, I I was. I was a little doubtful of it, so I ended

up doing a little more research on it. This let me do a paper in jama titled Suicide by Drinking a solution of salt by sea Herman Barlow sounds good, right, except it's a nineteen twelve paper, so that it's it's you know, not definitive. But in this the author says, quote, salt is taken for suicidal purposes, sometimes in a common saturated solution made with water as the solvent, and sometimes

in the brine from salted crowd. Poisoning by salt usually presents a picture of high temperature and pulse purging, vomiting and spasm um. Yeah, I couldn't find anything else on this. Really. I found that I found some some information about the nature of suicide in Chinese society, and in the book Chinese Society, Change, Conflict and Resistance uh and and in this author is seeingly an author Kleinman. They write the quote suicide is not simply authorized in the China. The

tradition as an unnatural death. It was to be avoided, and it was in some text not to be mourned. Suicide was polluted and polluting. I wasn't able to find much more about traditional Chinese suicide practices other than that. Yeah. One of the types of claims I'm often the most skeptical of is just sort of like generic claims about cultural practices in some culture other than the one writing

about it. Yeah, and especially when drinking salt water as a means of killing yourself is it does seem nonsensical. It seems like they're much better ways. It seems like this, this would be the sort of thing that would want to be driven to in a survival situation or in a case of some sort of severe mental instability. Yeah. But if you are out there and you know of a more authoritative source about this, police send it our way. This would be interesting to know. By all means. All right, well,

we are going to take a quick breaking. When we come back, we'll ask the question, do any animals drink seawater? And if so, how all we're back. So, when you think of ocean dwelling animals, if you're like me, you probably assumed that they just must have some way of drinking saltwater to hydrate themselves. That's what seems obvious, right, But this isn't necessarily the case, not for all of them.

I found a good explainer in this Scientific American article by a marine biologist, Robert Kinney of the University of Rhode Island about how animals that live in the sea consume saltwater. Specifically, he was focused on mammals, and one of the things he pointed out is that it's not that marine mammals are like these salt monsters with ten

percent salt in their blood. In fact, despite the fact that they live in this salty environment, the salt concentration in their blood is not very different from that of terrestrial mammals. So they're they're insides are a lot like our inside. So their blood is generally about one third as salty as sea water, which is kind of close to what ours is. But some sea dwelling mammals get water not by drinking from the ocean and purging the salt,

but from their food. This kind of goes back to Bombard's recommendation where he said, you know, maybe you can get uh some freshwater content by pressing the flesh of fish or something like that, or or of marine plants. You've heard a million times that the human body is, you know, however many percent water three water or whatever. I think the real figure is something close to by mass. Well. Other organisms are also largely made of water, and if

you eat them, you can get water from them. But sub marine organisms also actually do drink the brine wine. So how does that work? Well, they're basically two different approaches. One approach is that they act as osmotic conformers. Okay, what does that mean? So marine plants and invertebrates they

have no mechanism to control osmosis. So their cells are the same salinity as their environment thirty five for ocean dwellers, and that means saltwater intake doesn't disrupt their physiological equal librium. So that's plants and invertebrates that they basically say, Okay, we're just committing to salt life exactly. But what about vertebrates? All right, this is where we encounter osmotic regulators. Most fish, as well as reptiles, birds, and mammals control osmosis in

a variety of ways. For instance, salmon you specialized cells on their gills called chloride cells to cope with osmosis. Chloride cells can excrete excess salt, allowing a fish to take uh in water without dehydrating. Okay, so you can imagine that in some senses these might work kind of like the like the water purifying plants that that get fresh water out of the ocean water through some process

of reverse osmosis. They've got a membrane and it allows water to come through from one side to the other, but keeps the salt out, or maybe the way the body works by purging salt in the other way, like it can excrete salt through a membrane while retaining the water content. Yeah, I think that's a that's a good

way to put it now. I recently returned from a trip to Florida, and I was sort of churning over a lot of this salt research while I was down there, as I was encountering manatees both in the wild and uh in an aquarium set situation, as well as some exhibits with a number of different aquatic reptiles. So one

example was the American crocodile. It excretes salt through the use of modified salivary glands called lingual salt glands in their tongues salty tongues yea, and these allow them to tolerate partially salty water or even full seawater in some species. And similarly, the green and loggerhead sea turtles have salt glands near their eyes. Um salt glands are also found in sharks, raised skates, seabirds and a few reptiles. Marine iguanas are a great example of this. They have nasal

salt glands that dislodge the salt through this splendid nasal blast. Oh. I wonder if that's why sometimes you see those marine iguanas looking so crusty on the face. Probably so, there are a few different I want to say. It's probably the end of the BBC series with Attenborough where you get to see some of these these iguanas swimming under the water and then coming up on the surface to just blast that salt out of their nose. Okay, well,

how about some mammals. All right, Well the manatee is I think that the perfect example to look to next. So among the Sirenian species, you have both strict fresh water inhabitants such as the Amazonian manatees. These are like river manatees. Yeah, and then you have strictly saltwater inhabitants like the marine doo gongs. Now, if anyone's not familiar with the doo gong, it's essentially like a manatee. It looks like a manatee. Uh, kind of a gray Mitchell

entire man. Yeah, except its tail is more like that of a whale or you know, even I guess a mermaid as opposed to the the the West Indian manatee, the manatee that you encounter in Florida, has this kind of paddle tail. And yeah, the West Indian manateee is is really most interesting because it inhabits both fresh and salty water and of course the brackish waters in between. Now, given their vulnerability, the manatee has received quite a bit

of study. According to the University of Central Florida's Physiological Ecology and bio bio Energetic Slab, manatees and fresh water seem to get a great deal of water from the food they eat. Their voracious herbivores, after all, consuming around nine percent of their body weight per day, and they weigh up to twelve thirteen pounds or so. They're they're large animals. Plus they also drink a lot of fresh

water while it's there. Uh, there's um I've heard from people who've grown up in Florida the whole ancidote about how you can you can and absolutely should not, um

fee give a manateee fresh water from a hose. Yes, actually that article I was talking about earlier by that the marine biologist Kenny He writes about that he said, when given a choice of manatees and some pinnipeds, will go to a freshwater source to drink it, and that sometimes people who live on salty waterways in Florida will like put out a garden hose to watch the manatees come over and drink from it because they like it

better than the salty or brackish water. And of course the danger there with with the West Indian manatee is that is that you do not want them associating food or fresh water with humans because interaction between humans and manateees, particularly interactions between boats and manatees, this is the leading cause of death for the species. Yeah. Now, now that's of course when they're in freshwater. Yeah, they can get

the fresh water all around them. In salt water, however, they seem to limit their direct salt intake and have been observed to cease the consumption of sea grasses when their salt levels get too high. So the sea grasses I assume are saltier than some of the other things, yes, exactly. Yeah, that this grass is in the salty environment and is alt here Now. One of the interesting strategies that Kenny mentions is that he says some seals will actually eat

snow to get fresh water. Well, I grew up eating snow, don't. Didn't you have snow creams when you're a child? Wait? Hold on, what is a snow cream? How is that different from a snow cone? A snow cream? Is you you were allowed to go out into the snow, You get a bowl of snow, you bring it inside, and you put like sugar and milk on it and you eat it. That Okay, I have not in you know this is real. I would I would do it as

a child up in uh Up in Newfoundland, Canada. You get that brown slush from under the tire and you only go for the white stuff. You leave the brown and the yellow alone. Uh And And I have to add I I do not know to what extent this is still done. I have not introduced it to my son yet, but I do have fond memories of doing doing this as a child. Well, I did not expect to learn that today. Well, now, you know, you learn something new to do with milk and sugar every day.

And hey, and if you want to throw some salt in there. Then you have the curative properties of that as well, you know, for your leprosy. Right well, I think you actually need salt if you're gonna go ahead and make full on ice cream. Right well, that's true. Yeah, if you're gonna go all the way, you're gonna need the salt. So there you go. Well, and then perhaps there are some snow cream experts out there practicing snow

cream eaters that can weigh in on this. Now, also a survival tactic among some seals and sea lions is apparently too actually get some salty water in their system and just they just purge the heck out of it. Like Kenny writes that measurements have found that among seals and sea lions, their urine can be up to two point five times as salty as seawater. Remember how we talked about how our urine can't get as salty as seawater, so we can't net purge salt, We're just gonna accumulate it.

But seals and sea lions apparently can. They can be up to two point five times as salty as seawater, meaning it's seven or eight times saltier than their blood and that is some salty urine. So, but they have the kidneys of a creature that has evolved to thrive in a salt water habitat. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They think that the kidneys have evolved to have these different types of structures, these longer loops that allow for more purging of water out of the concentrated solution, that they will

eventually end up excreting in their urine. Curiously enough, apparently, at least at the time Kenny was writing, he wrote that we don't yet fully understand how whales and dolphins hydrate themselves, just because it's it's harder to study them in the wild. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, the sea retains so many of its mysteries, just as the ancient mariner would have it. Yeah, I think I think that the old man they know what the gray haired loon I

would agree with us there. So I know you're out there thinking like, okay, onhand me, gray beard loon, it's time for this episode to wrap up. Should we wrap up? Yeah, let's let's go ahead and wrap it up. Hopefully we provided, you know, a decent overview of of salt water. Why we can't drink it? Uh, some of the arguments for drinking it, and instructions on how to drink it if you absolutely have to. Uh. We do want to drive

home though, do not drink saltwater. Do not do not leave this podcast thinking that you should try a couple of pints. Now, what should their opinion be on snow cream? I don't know, I have I have not researched it recently. I probably should to see see if I should let my my son eats snow the next time it snows here in Atlanta, Georgia. But yeah, I would. I would love to hear from people who are a little more

up on the science of eating snow. Likewise, I'd love to hear from anyone who has uh who either has a story of not consuming enough salt or consuming way too much of drinking seawater. I mean, it's we have a number of listeners. I imagine some of you have been in survival situations before. I'd love to hear what it was like. And I know we've heard from some listeners in the past who have actually lived and worked on the high seas. So what what tales did you

hear out out on the waves. Indeed, let us know, uh, Hey, in the meantime, be sure to check out stuff to Blew your Mind dot com. That's the mother ship. That's where we will find all the podcast episodes. You will find some videos, some black post links out to our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Also, hey, wherever you listen to us, be at uh apple Podcasts,

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more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean, water water everywhere, and all the boards did shrink water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink