Why all the bother about salt?
In much of the world, no A/C in the summer means sweating. Hard work means sweating. Worry increases sweating. All this sweating depletes salt and water. If you’ve ever ended a work day by slipping toward a well-deserved sleep, only to be yanked back awake by muscles spontaneously tying themselves in knots, you’ll understand the importance of this. And un-fun as that is, it beats the other outcomes of salt and water imbalance: heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and cardiac failure. Did you know that the biggest weather-related killer in the world is Heat? Monster hurricanes can’t hold a candle to heat when it comes to weather danger. (To be fair, candles never fare well around hurricanes.)
We did a podcast that talks about this, you can listen to it by clicking below.
Why is sweat a salt issue?
I’m a salty sweater. When you sweat, 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 where the salt is; so you can pump salt to your surface, the water follows the salt, and then the water evaporates away and you’re cool. Yay! But you’ve also lost salt in the process, as a cost of doing business.
Most people are a little bit better at being stingy about how much salt they lose once they get adapted to working out in the heat. My body’s not terribly good at that hasn’t been for the last several years. So I go on a nice long bike ride on the summer and I’ll come back and I’ll look like I’m covered in a fine white powder. I brush my skin and it’s grainy all over because the salt crystals on my surface.
Everybody loses salt when they sweat a lot. The problem is that all that salt came from their body fluids, and it’s pretty important in there, too. Salt in the blood is used not only to encourage water to go here or there, but also to cause the electrical activity that runs brains and nerves and muscles; plus countless other jobs. If you don’t have the right amount of the right ions in your body fluids, bad things happen — things that start with cramps and end with Dead.
Salts, ions, and electrolytes
The health folks, and their ads, talk a lot about electrolytes. What’re those, anyway?
It starts with small charged particles called ions. Sodium is an ion with a +1 charge. Chloride is an ion, with a -1 charge. When out of water, these two are strongly electrically attracted and bond together to make sodium chloride, which we call table salt. If potassium ions, with a +1 charge, bind to chloride ions, you have a different salt.
Drop salts into water and they dissolve, setting the ions free. Health folks call these small ion electrolytes. When we say electrolytes, what we mean is ions, such as the sodium and chloride ions that make up table salt. And there are other important ions too, such as potassium, magnesium, iron, and calcium. They each have their own jobs and they each have to be kept at the right concentration if you’re going to stay well.
Sweating loses water, of course
The obvious loss in sweat is water. When you get low on water, first your body starts trying to conserve it. One way it does this is by cutting down sweating. Your ability to cool yourself degrades and you’re looking at heat exhaustion and heat stroke and similar nastiness. When the water loss gets too much, your blood pressure drops. You can’t sustain hard work and may pass out when you stand up.
And sweating loses electrolytes
The less obvious – and thus harder to manage — problem with sweating a lot is electrolyte loss. When you sweat a lot, you lose a whole bunch of electrolytes — mostly sodium and chloride, but others too. Even if you’re getting enough water (good job!), you can have too many or too few electrolytes in what you’re drinking to replace what you’ve lost and end up imbalanced. And then bad things start happening with the way your brain cells work the way your muscles work … minor little issues like cramping, coma, convulsions, and potentially death
Early warnings that you’re losing electrolyte balance include cramps. Those are muscle cells having spontaneous electrical activity and contracting when you didn’t tell them to.
The more you sweat, the more likely electrolyte imbalance is to happen. The less adapted you are working in the heat, the more electrolytes you lose in each drop of sweat. And as I have found out over the past few years, the older you get, the more likely it is to happen because you aren’t as good at being stingy with the ions in the sweat.
Replenishing electrolytes
We’ve been conditioned. We’ve been sold sports drinks. And there’s salt tablets too. Oh, yeah, 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, especially track. Those were awful.
Let’s take a look at the flagship of the sports drinks. The original, as it were, is Gatorade. If you look at the label on Gatorade, what it’s mostly got is sugar water, folks.
Ok, sugar water can be useful if you’re working for more than an hour at a fairly high level out the heat. If you go that long you get to needing the sugar. The water’s valuable; you most always need that when you’re sweating a lot; but the salt is not really the right stuff. It’s got too much sodium and not enough potassium in it to really re balance what you’re sweating out. It also lacks trace minerals like magnesium. You don’t lose a lot of those in So it’s got some value to it, but not as much as you might guess.
The main thing when choosing a sports drink is to look at the ingredient list and make sure that there’s a significant amount of potassium in there. There will never be as much potassium as sodium and that’s ok; but there should be more than a few milligrams of the potassium.
Sports drinks as preps
Is it worth keeping sports drinks as a prep? Shelf life is a problem. They aren’t kidding on their ‘best by’ dates; when we’ve let bottles get more than a few months beyond that they’ve gotten nasty. Not toxic, but hard to drink because of the taste — and if you don’t want to drink it you’re likely to drink too little.
We keep a couple of boxes of the little single serving envelope variety. They have a longer shelf life and take up Way less room in storage than the premade drinks. They have two uses:
For extended work on hot days, I’ll take one early in the day to keep ahead of electrolyte depletion. Most of the day I’ll still drink water. I keep to the sugar-free versions. I like to eat, and drinking sugar is not often a good choice.
We also use them when one of us is in intestinal distress. Vomiting and diarrhea are significant electrolyte wasters; particularly of potassium. When food won’t stay down, we feed some sports drink.
Too much hydration?
One thing that’s rarely an issue but you should be aware of: You can drink too much fluid when you’re out working. Your body can only deal with X amount of water. For most people, the gut can only absorb about a liter an hour. And it’s possible to absorb too much and dilute the body fluids excessively. You have to really push the fluids to get there though.
Realistically, over-drinking water is really only seen in:
- Endurance athletes (several hour long events) who push fluids very hard.
- Very young children who are encourage to drink too much by having a bottle always stuck in their mouths. Baby kidneys aren’t as good at getting rid of excess.
- Very old folks or those with kidney problems for other reasons; for the same reasons as the babies.
Water instead
Don’t get carried away on the energy drink thing. For most people most of the time, water is the best hydration fluid. Pairing it with some fruit, which tends to be high in potassium, is a good choice. Vegetables too. A bowl of cherry tomatoes and cold water can make a really refreshing work break. (Ok, DID make a really refreshing break just yesterday.) Sure you lose sodium in sweat, but most people get more than enough sodium in their diets. When I’ve been working hard outside I’ll notice an increased craving for salty foods, and I go with that.
What about salt tablets?
Salt tablets are tricky to get right, but they can be useful.
For example, I play a very active sport. We had a team physician, a sports med guy who volunteered to take care of our team. He would help us 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. If he sensed weakness or quiver, he would dole out potassium gluconate tablets.
Potassium was our biggest problem. 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 us stretch out. He was not against us having a little extra magnesium, too. But table salt? Sodium chloride? Nope, we got plenty in food.
I do keep one bottle of salt tablets with high potassium and decent magnesium levels in the cabinet. I carried a few with me on a rim-to-rim Grand Canyon hike; and my partner and I both used a few. That kind of situation, with twelve plus hours of continuous effort in a hot and dry environment, is one of the few times salt tablets make sense to me.
Sources of good Salt is also something that wars were fought over. Roman Soldiers were often paid in salt thus the phrase “not worth his salt” and the root word for salary in Latin is salt. In addition to sports drinks and flavoring food it’s used extensively in non-refrigerated foods like jerky and Virginia hams as well as fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchee, and pickles.
Unless you happen to have a salt mine nearby maybe you need a 5 gallon bucket or more of salt put away? Cheap today, wasn’t in the 1800’s