Biochemistry answers for common weight loss questions: Sodium. (warning, long and nerdy)

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  • stanmann571
    stanmann571 Posts: 5,728 Member
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    Interesting bit of serendipity that you posted this the day before new guidelines on blood pressure were announced.

    To be fair, the new guidelines simply redefine "pre-hypertension" to Stage 1 Hypertension. With little to no change in recommendations for care/treatment/correction... IOW diet/exercise/stress reduction.

    Although I do like the idea of using a 24-48 hour monitor to determine actual hypertension because there are so many factors involved in getting a good reading.
  • Aaron_K123
    Aaron_K123 Posts: 7,122 Member
    edited November 2017
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    Interesting bit of serendipity that you posted this the day before new guidelines on blood pressure were announced.

    Oh? Wasn't aware. Say anything interesting?

    Without looking at what they are I assume if it says anything about sodium it just says that if you have high blood pressure you should monitor your sodium intake according to doctors recommendations. I mean that is pretty much the one medical reason to care about sodium intake.
  • stanmann571
    stanmann571 Posts: 5,728 Member
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    Aaron_K123 wrote: »
    Interesting bit of serendipity that you posted this the day before new guidelines on blood pressure were announced.

    Oh? Wasn't aware. Say anything interesting?

    Without looking at what they are I assume if it says anything about sodium it just says that if you have high blood pressure you should monitor your sodium intake according to doctors recommendations. I mean that is pretty much the one medical reason to care about sodium intake.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/health/blood-pressure-treatment-guidelines.html
  • musicfan68
    musicfan68 Posts: 1,127 Member
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    I love stuff like this! And I finally realized why people with high blood pressure need to lower sodium. Thanks!
  • musicfan68
    musicfan68 Posts: 1,127 Member
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    I was one of those that tried to lower sodium a lot - started using no-salt, don't salt a lot of foods that normally would be. High blood pressure runs in my family, so I didn't want to get it, so thought if I could eliminate a lot of salt, that would be good. I actually have been using a little more salt since joining here. Threw out the No-salt and bought real salt. I drink quite a bit of liquid a day to keep kidney infections away, so realized I probably need more. And my blood pressure was 115/68 last time it was taken, so I try to just keep it at the daily recommended level now.

    Posts like yours, Aaron, are really helpful in understanding how and why. I hope you continue!
  • JoLightensUp
    JoLightensUp Posts: 140 Member
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    Great post. I'm interested in salt and thirst. I've always assumed that eating salty foods makes you thirsty, but is that true?
  • JoLightensUp
    JoLightensUp Posts: 140 Member
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    Aaron_K123 wrote: »
    Great post. I'm interested in salt and thirst. I've always assumed that eating salty foods makes you thirsty, but is that true?

    Well I'm not sure how "thirst" works from a biological perspective (ie what triggers you to feel thirsty) but it does make logical since that if you eat a lot of salt your body would benefit from you drinking a lot of water and therefore might have some sort of cue to trigger your thirst on the basis of how much salt you have taken in. I just don't know if that actually happens.

    There are plenty of examples where there is no biological "trigger" for doing an action that would benefit us. An example of this I can think of is the desire to breath. The urge to take a breath can be unbearably strong. You might think your body needs oxygen so when you don't have enough oxygen your body will scream at you to breath....but that isn't actually the trigger. The trigger for wanting to breath is a lot of carbon dioxide has built up in your blood and your body screams at you to exhale it. Your body monitors that carbon dioxide level, it doesn't monitor oxygen levels.

    If you walked into a room that was 100% filled with helium gas and breathed normally your body wouldn't be getting enough oxygen as you breathed in helium and breathed out carbon dioxide. You wouldn't build up carbon dioxide though since you'd still be exhaling so you wouldn't sense that anything was wrong. You wouldn't feel deprived, you wouldn't gasp for air you would go about your business until oxygen reached a critically low level in your body at which point you would pass out and then die completely painlessly and with no warning.

    So long story short biological "triggers" to do things aren't always necessarily logical in that way. It makes sense that you should drink water if you eat salt but I don't know if that "triggers" your thirst or not.

    Interesting. Thanks. Your initial post got me thinking about whether thirst drives might be altered for those who were accustomed to a salty diet. I will have to go and do some reading as I am now curious about how that all works!
  • Djproulx
    Djproulx Posts: 3,084 Member
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    Great information. Thanks for sharing.
  • HellYeahItsKriss
    HellYeahItsKriss Posts: 906 Member
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    @Tariq_1997 -- to answer your salt question
  • RuNaRoUnDaFiEld
    RuNaRoUnDaFiEld Posts: 5,864 Member
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    Aaron_K123 wrote: »
    Aaron_K123 wrote: »
    I have thought about doing this on the regular, that is why I made the title I did "Biochemistry answers for common weight loss questions: Sodium" so that if it is popular at all or people find it useful I might do another that is "Biochemistry answers for common weight loss questions: XXXX" for another topic, probably answering where your weight actually goes when you lose weight. Don't want to commit just yet though, not sure if this sort of long-winded technical description is something people actually want. If it stays up for a while or gets a lot of discussion I might do another.
    I would really enjoy this!

    I'd have fun writing others if people are interested. Biochem or molecular bio perspective on weight loss or myths/misconceptions associated with weight loss. Not sure if forum posts are the right format or a blog, or maybe some sort of sticky area if that is of interest to the moderators/admins and people would like it (not to sound overly arrogant just a thought)

    I don't find your posts arrogant at all.

    I learn from them and that can only be a good thing. Keep posting them.

    I'd personally love you to post one on the relationship between magnesium, potassium and sodium balancing. I've been curious about it since I took part in the 800g a day fruit and veg challenge.
  • stanmann571
    stanmann571 Posts: 5,728 Member
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    Aaron_K123 wrote: »
    One interesting property of osmolarity is it doesn't matter how big the dissolved solutes are. If you had 100 dissolved glucose molecules (C6H12O6) in a solution it would have the same osmolarity as a solution that had 100 dissolved sodium ions in it (Na+) even though glucose is a much larger molecule than sodium which is just a single atom. Since salt is NaCl and in water NaCl breaks apart into 1 Na+ and 1 Cl+ that means 100 molecules of salt turn into 200 dissolved solutes. So 1 M salt would have an osmolarity of 2 M. Not only that but salt is literally just two atoms and it seperates into single atoms so it doesn't take very many grams of salt to equal a mole where it would take many more grams of glucose to equal a mole and glucose is a small molecule. So salt has a huge bang-for-buck in terms of osmolarity.

    Minor nitpick. I'm pretty sure the above is not correct from a chemistry perspective.

    That may happen in the body, but it takes more than just water.
  • stanmann571
    stanmann571 Posts: 5,728 Member
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    Aaron_K123 wrote: »
    Aaron_K123 wrote: »
    One interesting property of osmolarity is it doesn't matter how big the dissolved solutes are. If you had 100 dissolved glucose molecules (C6H12O6) in a solution it would have the same osmolarity as a solution that had 100 dissolved sodium ions in it (Na+) even though glucose is a much larger molecule than sodium which is just a single atom. Since salt is NaCl and in water NaCl breaks apart into 1 Na+ and 1 Cl+ that means 100 molecules of salt turn into 200 dissolved solutes. So 1 M salt would have an osmolarity of 2 M. Not only that but salt is literally just two atoms and it seperates into single atoms so it doesn't take very many grams of salt to equal a mole where it would take many more grams of glucose to equal a mole and glucose is a small molecule. So salt has a huge bang-for-buck in terms of osmolarity.

    Minor nitpick. I'm pretty sure the above is not correct from a chemistry perspective.

    That may happen in the body, but it takes more than just water.

    I disagree I believe my statement is correct as written. NaCl is ionic (the atoms are connected by an ionic bond not a covalent bond) and it does disassociate into Na+ and Cl- in water. This process is not biological in nature, its physics, it doesn't require a body to happen. If you have some information to suggest otherwise I'd be interested in seeing it but I'm confident that what I said is correct. 1 mole of NaCl put into 1 liter of water would have an osmolarity of 2 due to that dissaociation. Posted a video earlier about osmolarity and in it there is an example of NaCl.

    The reason ionic substances dissolute in water is because using NaCl as an example the Na and Cl atoms are not covalently bonded to one another, they stick to one another because sodium (Na+) is positively charged while chloride (Cl-) is negatively charged and the opposite charged attract eachother. Thing is water molecules have slight charge as well. The oxygen atom in water is a lot more electronegative than the hydrogens and attracts the hydrogens sole electron closer to the oxygen atom. This causes what is known as a dipole moment whereby the oxygen is partially negatively charged and the hydrogens partially positive charged. That means the sodium atom will also attract to the oxygen in water while the chlorides will attract to the hydrogens. As there are a lot more water molecules than Na and Cl molecules they end up surrounding them to make multiple contacts. This interaction ends up pulling the sodium and chloride atoms apart.

    saltwater2.jpg

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBfGcTAJF4o

    That is just a result of the interaction of charge from physics, nothing biological about it. It also happens with any ionic bond. Polar solvents (like water) dissolve molecules that are connected through ionic bonds.

    IF that was true, then boiling salt water would leave sodium instead of salt.
  • stanmann571
    stanmann571 Posts: 5,728 Member
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    Aaron_K123 wrote: »
    Aaron_K123 wrote: »
    Aaron_K123 wrote: »
    One interesting property of osmolarity is it doesn't matter how big the dissolved solutes are. If you had 100 dissolved glucose molecules (C6H12O6) in a solution it would have the same osmolarity as a solution that had 100 dissolved sodium ions in it (Na+) even though glucose is a much larger molecule than sodium which is just a single atom. Since salt is NaCl and in water NaCl breaks apart into 1 Na+ and 1 Cl+ that means 100 molecules of salt turn into 200 dissolved solutes. So 1 M salt would have an osmolarity of 2 M. Not only that but salt is literally just two atoms and it seperates into single atoms so it doesn't take very many grams of salt to equal a mole where it would take many more grams of glucose to equal a mole and glucose is a small molecule. So salt has a huge bang-for-buck in terms of osmolarity.

    Minor nitpick. I'm pretty sure the above is not correct from a chemistry perspective.

    That may happen in the body, but it takes more than just water.

    I disagree I believe my statement is correct as written. NaCl is ionic (the atoms are connected by an ionic bond not a covalent bond) and it does disassociate into Na+ and Cl- in water. This process is not biological in nature, its physics, it doesn't require a body to happen. If you have some information to suggest otherwise I'd be interested in seeing it but I'm confident that what I said is correct. 1 mole of NaCl put into 1 liter of water would have an osmolarity of 2 due to that dissaociation. Posted a video earlier about osmolarity and in it there is an example of NaCl.

    The reason ionic substances dissolute in water is because using NaCl as an example the Na and Cl atoms are not covalently bonded to one another, they stick to one another because sodium (Na+) is positively charged while chloride (Cl-) is negatively charged and the opposite charged attract eachother. Thing is water molecules have slight charge as well. The oxygen atom in water is a lot more electronegative than the hydrogens and attracts the hydrogens sole electron closer to the oxygen atom. This causes what is known as a dipole moment whereby the oxygen is partially negatively charged and the hydrogens partially positive charged. That means the sodium atom will also attract to the oxygen in water while the chlorides will attract to the hydrogens. As there are a lot more water molecules than Na and Cl molecules they end up surrounding them to make multiple contacts. This interaction ends up pulling the sodium and chloride atoms apart.

    saltwater2.jpg

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBfGcTAJF4o

    That is just a result of the interaction of charge from physics, nothing biological about it. It also happens with any ionic bond. Polar solvents (like water) dissolve molecules that are connected through ionic bonds.

    IF that was true, then boiling salt water would leave sodium instead of salt.

    No...it wouldn't. As you boil the water the water molecules vaporize into a gas leaving the solution and going into the air. Sodium and chloride do not vaporize and remain behind. As the water molecules depart the amount of water molecules versus sodium and chloride molecules decreases over time and the attractive forces between the positively charged sodium and the negatively charged chloride ions begin to dominate and they once again attract one another reforming an ionically bonded NaCl crystal. Again this isn't specific to table salt, it would be true of any ionically bonded molecule in any polar solvent.

    Sodium is a reactive metal, chlorine is a gas.

    Google agrees with you, but it still doesn't make sense.