Hyponatremia

6

6x9base13

New Member
I've noticed that adopting what is generally a very healthy diet can have one ugly unexpected side effect.

Too little salt.

Almost none at all, actually - I used to get a fair amount from nuts, but I recently switched to raw, unsalted nuts and removed the one real sodium supply I had left in my diet.

Around the same time, I started feeling unusually weak and tired.

A little research suggested a condition called "hyponatremia" (too little baking soda, if my Latin serves me - table salt wasn't the main form of edible sodium back then). Which disrupts ion transfer across cell membranes and, amongst other things, makes you feel unusually weak and tired.

Bringing back the salted nuts and baking a big loaf of traditional Irish soda bread (which contains so much sodium bicarbonate that it tastes like Arm & Hammer with caraway seeds) has remedied the problem, but I'm wondering:

a) Had anyone else run into this issue?

b) Was it also an unanticipated side effect of an otherwise positive dietary change?
 
Don't know: I'm a heart patient on a pacemaker and the FIRST thing they asked me was "do you eat salt?" It's the number one enemy of the heart, according to the cardiologists and all the little pamphlets they give you. But that could be the hidden cause of my fatigue problems...never thought of it until you posted this. I need to research and see if there's some way to overcome it without eating salt. I'm forbidden it at all.
 
Well, the normal American diet contains far too much sodium - aside from the obvious salt content in fast food, many packaged and prepared foods contain a fairly large amount of it.

I've been eating practically nothing but fresh produce, milk, and salmon since the holidays - and it really was the removal of the one salted food I regularly enjoyed that brought on that issue. Looking through the nutritional information on the rest of the stuff I've been eating, I was getting almost no sodium whatsoever. Which, combined with a high water intake, a lot of sweating, and my love of espresso (caffeine being a pretty strong diuretic), meant that my body was flushing it out a lot faster than it was coming in, and no longer able to maintain equilibrium.

Perhaps you should speak to your doctor (and/or a clinical dietitian) about whether you're getting the right overall sodium intake. It's possible that the "no salt" order is made on the assumption that you're already getting at least the minimum (and probably then some) from the sodium content hidden inside your food.

~~~

Another contributing factor in my case might be that I dropped my sodium intake rather suddenly - from standard American fare over vacation (where I ate with my parents) to the extremely low-sodium diet I began when I resumed my normal eating habits, sans the daily serving of salty nuts. I think the abrupt shift in intake levels might have not have given my body enough time to properly adjust to maintain homeostasis.

I do remember dating a girl (a fourth-year nutrition major, actually) who combined a very-low-salt diet with an active lifestyle and didn't have any problems. At the same time, she could hardly eat standard spaghetti sauce because it was too salty for her, and I remember her saying that our rate of absorption adjusts to our normal intake levels like it was some sort of drug tolerance.

Just not instantly, I suppose.
 
My cardio program includes 2 x 1 hour walking per day. A couple of weeks ago, I was told (on another bodybuilding site) that I should drink one ounce of water for each pound of bodyweight, which I did. Two days later was a real scorcher (here in Brazil), and on my afternoon walk, I started feeling really bad. It couldn’t have been excess of water because I usually sweat like a pig. But yes, it was. I had drunk so much water that the salt got diluted. Then I sweat like a bear. The result: too little salt. After that, I read up on the topic – I should have done that before instead of trusting some bodybuilding article. I was surprised and shocked. Did you know that one marathon runner dies out of 50,000 during a race because of this condition? And if you investigate, you’ll find out that hardly any big marathon event ends without a runner or two passing away. To play it safe, I drink ½ ounce for each pound of bodyweight – and that’s much closer to what doctors actually recommend.
 
I looked into it and decided that it's not my problem. I eat some restaurant fare and also had an article some time back on salt that propends that every living thing has some salt in it, even the veggies you eat, so we get enough to live on without using the shaker. I virtually don't drink water at all (tho I should) but rather use decaf, fruit juices, shakes, teas, milk and the occasional Sprite. I should get off this coffee habit again; the tea worked for a while. I just don't really like it.
The only way I like water is no ice, some sweetener (very little) and maybe some lemon to make it NOT water anymore.
I'm wondering where you got that hook about the baking soda and what it might do for us or have to do with anything else.
 
[Goes to Wikipedia...]

Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, and a mineral deposit of that and soda ash (called natron - hence hyponatremia and sodium being Na on periodic table) used to be the most common form of sodium back in antiquity. It was used mainly for cleaning and preserving food, rather than as an ingredient chosen for taste.

It was also used for preserving people, apparently, and originally got its name from a valley in Egypt where they'd get the stuff for the sake of using it in mummification.

But yeah, table salt (sodium chloride) isn't the only form of sodium in most diets - sodium bicarbonate usually plays a part. Or, if you use it as the sole rising agent in bread-making, a rather large part.
 
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