First published at 19:24 UTC on September 23rd, 2019.
Welcome to the second part of my series on electrolytes. Electrolytes are minerals in your body that have an electric charge. They are needed for a variety of functions for your muscles, nerves, and pH and fluid balance. In the first video I covered…
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Welcome to the second part of my series on electrolytes. Electrolytes are minerals in your body that have an electric charge. They are needed for a variety of functions for your muscles, nerves, and pH and fluid balance. In the first video I covered potassium and its relationship to sodium. So I figured it would be best to talk about the “big bad” sodium next. I would have to say that sodium is probably one of the top 5 most demonized nutrients, right up there with things like sugar, saturated fats, and cholesterol. So this should be a pretty fun topic to discuss. I will go over why sodium is so important for our health and how it’s gotten such a bad reputation lately. I will also go over the differences between all the different kinds of salts like table salt, sea salt, himalayan salt, etc.
Now a lot of times sodium is referred to as salt and visa versa. And that’s because salt is mainly composed of sodium and chloride. So even though we realize there are other elements to salt than just sodium, we can generally link the two terms as similar things.
Salt was a highly valued currency in ancient times. Yes, that’s right. It wasn’t only a commodity back then, many times it was the actual currency. Wars were fought over it. The Latin word salarium meant “salt money.” See the connection. That is how important this substance was to everyone at that time. Now I know some of you may be thinking, “well of course, they didn’t have refrigerators back then to keep food from spoiling.” And while that is a good point and salt was their preservation mechanism, there were still many other reasons for salt being such a big deal. Like staying hydrated for one.
Sodium affects the fluid balance all throughout our body. Mainly regulating blood volume. It is just as essential for life as breathing oxygen is. Recent research has also suggested that eating salt can reduce the risk of infection and kill harmful bacteria. This is due to it boosting classical macrophage activation...
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