Our understanding of the way the body handles salt may be wrong

The US recommended salt intake is limited to 1.5g to 2.3g grams of salt depending on some risk factors. Their 'low' intake was 6g and high was 12grams / day. https://sodiumbreakup.heart.org/how_much_sodium_should_i_eat

So, I am saying almost 5x the recommended limit for a month might not generalize very well. Sorry, 'Nope' is not going to cut it. Further, the human body climatizes to various situations over time suck as heat or altitude, I suspect salt intake is probably good example of that.

If you're wondering why you're so downvoted, your reply of "Nope." is at best lacking of any substance in a discussion and at worst offensive.

But the entire article is about the body using metabolic water, not dietary water, to excrete salt. So it wouldn't matter the concentration of the salt in the water you intake - your body would burn enough carbohydrates and protein to generate enough water to dilute it.

I suppose in a starvation situation you'd be in extreme catabolism and just make everything worse.

Drink isotonic fluids (one of the best: alcohol-free beer).

basic osmosis - water washes out the body's minerals. esp. tap water.

add a bit of salt to your tap water - it helps to retain water and doesn't flush out your deposits.

too much water and too much salt are both bad! had a dude in my village die after drinking around 5 liters on a dare - nervous system failure. it was so severe that he couldn't be saved.

Rule of tongue - if it tastes salty its too much salt.

Take a half full water bottle. Add some salt. See if it is salty yet, then keep adding until it is just barely salty. Then fill the bottle to the top. If you taste salt you added too much.

Note that with kcl, you start with less water, more like a quarter of the bottle, because the salty flavor is much weaker.

First of course do some research on your own don't want to give wrong advice, but generally I would say:

Start by making sure you're eating enough. Adequate salt quantity starts by getting it from your food and getting enough to eat. Second just (slowly) add small amounts to your food and see if that addresses the problem. If you're exercising or doing physical activities and sweating a lot while also drinking a lot of water, you likely need to add some salt to food. As others have said, it should not be such an amount that tastes overly salty. Start really small.

I did not expect to read my about my home town on a comment here... I have plenty of experience picking mangos on a family farm there and I can also say we drink insane amounts of water and sweat it all out. You can squeeze your clothes and watch the sweat pour out.

After the work day I'd always have an insane craving for a Bundaberg ginger beer. Maybe I'd be getting electrolytes from that?

That's interesting what you said about your sweat being salty; is be interested in seeing how much electrolytes you're excreting that way. Conversely, my sweat isn't salty hardly at all, I've noticed. I wonder if there is any correlation, because I ride 50 to 60 miles, single speed on street tires, up and down elevation no problem with just regular water, never have had a cramp as far as I can remember. I don't consider myself a very fit person, and neither would a dietician, fwiw, so I'm not just some type of anomaly, just your typical desk dweller who hits the bike path hard on weekends when time allows.

Plasma volume and salt concentration in sweat varies with where you're acclimatized, which could be a differing factor.

So you're saying I'm right! ;-)

Diabetes and inflammation is actually easily googled, but here is a respectable source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1087185/

PDF: The underappreciated role of muscle in health and disease

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/3/475.full.pdf

There is a long and wordy section about muscle and insulin resistance, some choice outtakes:

However, over the past few years it has become evident that changes in the metabolic function of muscle itself plays a more direct role in the genesis of insulin resistance than previously appreciated. (This is rebutting the idea that higher fat levels explain insulin resistance.)

as little as a single bout of exercise [thereby stimulating triacylglycerol deposition in muscle intramuscular triacylglycerol (IMTG) oxidation] can transiently reverse insulin resistance (44).

The section concludes with:

Regardless of the specific intracellular mechanisms at the molecular level, it is clear that insulin resistance is not simply the result of increased fat mass and release of FFAs into plasma at an accelerated rate, with the muscle responding to elevated plasma FAA concentrations. Rather, alterations in the metabolic function of muscle are central to the development of insulin resistance and ultimately diabetes.

I am not finding an exact point at which it explicitly says "Muscle loss causes insulin resistance" but that was my personal takeaway from reading this some time back. (On the other hand, maybe it does explicitly say that and I am just rushed for time and have crap eyesight, so maybe I am just not finding it. Whatever.)

I genuinely think it is a lot more complicated than that. My blood sugar is more stable than it has ever been and I have gotten off digestive enzymes. I wasn't doing anything to specifically try to fix my blood sugar issues. I was doing things like trying to get inflammation and infection under control based on the success of therapies like daily ibuprofen. I read up on that, inferred that if you can reduce inflammation, you can be less symptomatic, and used a dietary and lifestyle approach to do that. I did take ibuprofen daily for something like 5 or 6 years, but was eventually able to successfully control symptoms such that I no longer needed it. Somewhere along the way, I happened to see articles about the link between diabetes and inflammation. Inflammation and infection go hand in hand, so I think very likely infection plays a role in the collapse of pancreatic function in pwcf.

The low weight is also from the gut being all kinds of out of whack and just not absorbing nutrients. There are things that can be done to improve gut function. The gut is about 70 percent of your immune system, so I think efforts to repair the gut lead to many different good things, including better nutritional status and a more functional immune system.

Though the degree to which you can correct these problems no doubt will be influenced by which specific alleles you have, I think there is a lot of room for improvement for most people with CF. Maybe it won't make much difference if you have one of the variations where the CFTR just basically doesn't work at all.

I used to jokingly talk about "Pale Skin Disorder" as a metaphor for special needs in my kids. It works well as a metaphor for what I mean here too. If you have pale skin (low melanin production) and are easily sun burned, there are things you can do to protect against sunburn. You aren't doomed to simply be sunburned to the point of peeling all the time. But if you are an albino and totally lack melanin, it is a whole different ball game.

So, if you have a form of CF that is the equivalent of albinism where the CFTR simply does nothing or is outright absent, instead of one of the many variations where it has one of a number of different types of impairments, my assumption is that would be less responsive to dietary and lifestyle changes. Though I don't actually know.

Anyway, my apologies if I have offended. I rarely engage pwcf in discussion anymore as it tends to go bad places. Thank you for commenting.

Wow, so the blanket "high blood pressure = eat less salt" advice given by most doctors sounds not just unhelpful but flat-out wrong and dangerous.

fair enough, although I personally don't think that cutting bread and eating more potatoes is that big of a difference overall, it is a difference so hey, for all I know that might have influenced things. As I was saying above, n=1 after all.