Give me the straight dope about sodium

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  • wolfchild59
    wolfchild59 Posts: 2,608 Member
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    Just an anecdote - I've always been a salt addict for as long as I can remember. As in, drinking soy sauce straight from the bottle, pouring seasoned salt into my hand to eat it, putting salt on my watermelon, etc. type of loving salt. In high school, my best friend and i, being the stupid, bored teenagers that we were, would mess around at a local shiopping center after school. This center had a McDonald's and a drug store witha blood pressure machine.

    So, we'd go to the store, get our blood pressure checked and then head to McDonald's. We'd order and eat our normal (one McChicken sandwich meal that we'd split - it came out to $3.24 at the time and we'd split the cost on it to afford it. lol) But then we'd take out the handfulls of salt packets we'd grabbed while waiting for the food. We'd then lay it out in lines like little rows of salt cocaine. Grab our fat McDonald's straws and suck up and eat all of the rows of salt as quickly as possible (it was a race).

    After we ate all the food and salt, we'd head straight back to the drug store and retest our blood pressure. It was always more than amusing to see all the crazy numbers it would spike up to so quickly after the abuse we'd just done to our bodies.

    Mind you, at heart I'm still a salt addict and would gladly go to my fridge right at this moment and take a big ole swig of soy sauce, I just behave now, no matter how much it sucks. Heck, I can't even remember the last time I used my soy sauce, or any soy sauce. Even the last two times I got sushi (the only two times in many months), I didn't even use soy sauce with my rolls. >.<
  • humblemonkey
    humblemonkey Posts: 576 Member
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    Ok I have to get this out there too!!
    GATORADE IS NOT GOD.
    If you sweat EXCESSIVELY, you will lose electrolytes, therefore you should up your intake of HEALTHY things to replace them. Bananas for potassium, water, green leafy veggies for potassium and iron and vitamins, and MILK to add some calcium. GATORADE however is probably one of the most over-used products without people questioning the true value of it... In fact, research has been done that drinking a 12 oz glass of chocolate milk is 140% better post-workout than drinking the same amount of gatorade. Why?? Because gatorade is chock full of sugar and a bunch of unnatural additives. ESPECIALLY if you're looking to lose weight, gatorade is NOT your friend.
    What's more is that if you're working out and getting very hot, the sugar in gatorade is actually even more unhealthy. When I work at the infirmary for the baseball camp over the summer, we tell all the coaches to not let their players drink gatorade when they're feeling ill. Before we did this, we had one kid after another coming in vomiting after downing a Gatorade post-game. Even cutting Gatorade 2 parts water and 1 part Gatorade would be significantly better.
  • MBSNANA
    MBSNANA Posts: 149 Member
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    Sodium is one of the things I have to watch. Every morning I take a dirutic that my doctor perscribed along with pottasium. Large amounts of sodium does [for me] retain fluid. Then I have had people tell me to drink lots of water to flush it out. That does not work for me. My fluid is retained in my legs from years of blood clots. If I eat high amounts of sodium then try to flush it out with water I am just putting the water in but it does not "come back out" even with the dirutics. The only thing that starts it coming back out is to lower the sodim I am taking in and it will start to move. I am just blowned away by the things that have sodium in them. Baby carrots? That was a shocker. Not really that much but when you are watching sodium it all starts to add up. Interesting topic. Enjoyed reading everybodys response to this one.

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