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[–] 235 points 8 months ago (3 children)

It's almost like the amount of salt matters.

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  • [–] 111 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Water: good

    Hyperhydration: exists

    The dose makes the poison.

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    After all breathing pure oxygen is incredibly bad for your health.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Everyone that has breathed oxygen has died or will die. Breathing oxygen is 100% fatal.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago

    Yup, human kidneys suck at efficiently filtering out salt and can only do so at a relatively low maximum concentration in the urine. The moment you take salt water that is of higher salt concentration than that, your body uses more water than what you took to eliminate that salt.

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  • [–] 147 points 8 months ago (16 children)

    If only he'd gone the next step and actually looked up how electrolytes work.

    This is how conspiracy theorists actually think, they do a single Google search, fail to understand the answer because typically they have the intelligence of a lump of cheese, and form a totally incoherent theory as a result. Once the theory is formed, any evidence to the contrary is disregarded.

    Flat earthers primary reason for believing the earth is flat is that otherwise water wouldn't form puddles and lakes it would always be flowing downhill. This makes perfect sense provided you've failed to achieve a 12-year-old's understanding of gravity. Which of course they have failed to achieve because of the aforementioned intellectual deficiency.

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  • [–] 20 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    they do a single Google search, fail to understand the answer because typically they have the intelligence of a lump of cheese, and form a totally incoherent theory as a result

    I mean, it's more complicated than that on two levels.

    Firstly, sports drinks like Gatorade were formulated for a very specific kind of short term high intensity activity (specifically, playing football in Florida during the summer). But for lower intensity and longer term exercising (anything over two hours - long distance running / biking / swimming, most notably) its generally worse for you than water. So expressing a degree of skepticism is warranted. That's doubly so in the face of endless marketing and native advertisement in sports media.

    Secondly, when you get into the dietary sciences and start running into contradictions between the more well-established benefits of drinking water relative to the dubious claims of marketing agencies, it can easily become difficult to determine what is and is not bullshit. Because Google itself has been marketed as a valuable tool for research and analysis, and because so much of our academic infrastructure has been privatized (Google being a prime example), even the most intellectually curious and level headed can become overwhelmed with the task of "Doing Your Own Research".

    Flat earthers primary reason for believing the earth is flat is that otherwise water wouldn’t form puddles and lakes it would always be flowing downhill.

    The primary reason for believing the Earth is flat is that the ground is flat in much of the country. People don't natively intuit that the earth is round, they have to be told or to engage in some fairly non-intuitive experimentation. To grapple with the idea of a round earth, you have to start taking second and third hand accounts at face value or get reasonably good at geometry and have a certain bedrock faith in the accuracy of your calculations.

    I'd argue that flat earthers are more curious and often more intelligent than their "I believe the earth is round cause that's what they told me" set. And its often this curiosity - combined with some error in logic or bad initial data - that leads them to try and prove the unproveable so doggedly.

    But so many people fall into the trap of believing intelligence leads to correctness. You can be very smart and still end up with a very wrong answer. What's more, if you're surrounded by people you don't trust (because you believe you are smarter than them), it can be difficult to convince you of your own failings precisely because you don't have enough of an intellectual peer base to understand your reasoning, spot the mistake, and demonstrate a counter-example.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    "This is how conspiracy theorists actually think"

    I'm not sure why this generalisation was required? Many 'conspiracy theories' have been proven to be true, and not ALL theorists believe ALL of the theories. It's easy to discredit somebody when you label them something and then say that those that are labelled are idiots.

    edit- downvoting something without replying to it is how you get an echo chamber

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    [–] 63 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    You can drink a little amount of salt water and probably come out ahead... Drink too much and you get into a death spiral though

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  • [–] 19 points 8 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 38 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Because your kidneys can filter out a certain percentage of salt, and that's based on the blood concentration

    But if your blood goes above the level where the water is being drawn out of your cells and drying them out, you'll be dehydrated from the inside out

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 30 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Salt is hydrophile, which means it attracts water.

    • To much salt (outside cell) now attracts the water in the cell to the outside -> less water in cell, cell dehydrated.
    • To little salt (outside cell): salt in cell attracts water from the outside, but now salt levels in the cell are diluted (these are actually needed in your cell to function).
    • Just the right amount of salt: cells can now directly use the water without diluting the salts they contain and continue working as normal
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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

    Real worried we're going to enter a Richard Feynman level why spiral

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  • [–] 46 points 8 months ago

    It's what plants crave!

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  • [–] 35 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Isn’t this the plot of Idiocracy?

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  • [–] 52 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    It's a major plot point. Brawndo, the Thirst Mutilator, has been put into almost everything in place of water ("water, like from the toiler?") And consequently kills the crops.

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  • [–] 23 points 8 months ago* (3 children)

    Fun fact: the further into the Baltic Sea you go (ie the farther you are from Copenhagen), the less salty it is. Around Stockholm iirc you can just drink the water straight up and rehydrate instead of dehydrating.

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  • [–] 30 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Yeah, but drinking the Baltic sea's water, one of the most if not the most polluted sea of the world, will cause you other problems 😅

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    [–] 18 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

    Apparently there's on average 3.5% salt in seawater, so you could probably drink 1 liter 100 ml daily and be fine assuming you supplement it with something "else". you know what..

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    You can't supplement it with your urine, because your urine will be containing the salts you're trying to get rid of.

    If you had an ample supply of urine from someone who was extremely well hydrated, maybe.

    But yeah no you shouldn't be drinking seawater at all, it's just too salty. You're expending more water of get rid of the salt. Coffee or tea would be fine despite slight diuretic effects, but ocean water is just too salty.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    You won't die immediately, but there's no way that consuming 35g salt/day won't lead to severe health issues down the line ...

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    [–] 7 points 8 months ago
    [–] 7 points 8 months ago* (3 children)

    I mean it does make me wonder why electrolyte water is good but sea/saltwater is bad. The types of salts? The ratio?

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    [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    How stupid do they think we are?

    That's not the question to ask. Anon should be asking: How stupid is everyone, as a group?

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