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Comment by scandox | Hacker News Reader

This didn't surprise me so much. In several hot countries I have noted people taking salt to relieve thirst. In Mongolia I drank heavily salted tea (the usual there) all summer and it becomes quite natural.

Maybe I'm missing some of the subtleties here?

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You'll notice the same behavior from long distance runners, cyclists, hikers, etc. At some point you start feeling dehydration because you're missing electrolytes. If your water intake isn't salted or packed with minerals in some other way, it just makes you thirstier and thirstier.

Especially when it's hot out.

This simple lesson was taught to us day one in boot camp when I was in the army, and reiterated constantly over the years.

We were required to take our salt packet out of our MRE's and eat the entire contents. The amount of water consumed (and flushed out through perspiration) throughout the day would have severely dehydrated anyone who didn't consume adequate (high) levels of salt.

I drink tons of water and I get lots of cramps, presumably from electrolyte shortage. Is there any way of knowing what the right amount of salt is to be consuming?

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

But the very best is beer. Garage Project Garagista more specifically.

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.

This is with every bottle you drink? So basically once I figure out the amount, I should put that much in every time I get a fresh glass?

Hey. If you're drinking lots of water and getting lots of cramps, don't ask people on the internets. Ask a physician, right? If there's something wrong with your kidneys, say, you won't make it better until you figure out what it is.

Very often people on the internet have more expertise in things than a physician. Also, physicians are often overkill for minor problems, the system would be overloaded if we went to them for every little thing.

No, this is only when I am going to exercise for an extended period of time, 30min+. I generally consume enough potassium from fruits and vegetables not to need any additional electrolytes in my day-to-day water.

Basically I don't consume sugar or alt-sugars so I make my own version of gatorade.

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.

Same: As a backpacker I worked in Kununurra, north of Australia, pruning 500 sandalwood trees a day. With 42•C, we drank 9 liters of water in 7hrs. Legend says a guy of the previous year didn't take electrolytes and died of dehydration. We literally soaked the portable waterproof batteries with out sweat.

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?

Goes back a lot longer than that, too. A large part of historical African trade was based around salt supplies.

Salt was virtually a currency in Roman times: hence, the word "salary" and how similar the word salt is in various European languages.

disagree, I went for a 5 hour fairly hard (~2000m of climbing) bike ride last summer in hot weather with no food and drinking only plain water (and not that much water at that, around 1l during the ride, of course I had a very large breakfast beforehand) without any issues whatsoever.

I am not sure about the whole "working out requires eating salt tabs", when I was doing triathlons a lot of people took them and it was amazing seeing all the salt that ended up on their clothing due to sweat/evaporation. I've always thought that if you really needed the electrolytes your body wouldn't immediately try to get rid of them via sweat.

Again of course this is n=1, I think maybe my n=1 is different because I am used to an extremely low sodium diet, but goes to show that when it comes to diet it's all a big YMMV...

I wish I were like you! Before salt tabs, I'd cramp up and be useless after a pretty short time on the bike - maybe 2 hours / 2000 ft of climbing on a mountain bike. Now that I add two of those nuun tablets to my 3 L of water I sweat less and never cramp up anymore.

My sweat has always been very salty my whole life. I wish I didn't need to supplement for longer rides but time has shown me that it is unrealistic for me to skip it for anything over around 1.5 hours. Under that, I don't bother, though.

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.

Yeah, I'm in about the same fitness boat as you. Just very different outcomes regarding salt in sweat.

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

AFAIK, this is usually not to relieve thirst, but to compensate for the minerals lost by perspiration.

Can thirst be related to salt deficiency?

Yes, your body has receptors that look for when the osmolarity gets too low (edit: I meant too high) in your blood. If it is, they will fire and induce feelings of thirst.

This is why the English salt tax was such a big deal to the Indians.

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