The Sodium Effect

First thing’s first…I set up an Instagram account for the Nutrition Effect! This is so I can post pictures of the things I’m eating to give you ideas for your own meals. A question I get asked a lot is “what do you eat?”, and I figured an Instagram account full of my meals would answer that question. The username of the account is “the.nutrition.effect”. I hope you all check it out!

Alright. It is time to go back to the regular scheduled program. There are a lot of minerals that are important for normal bodily function. There are more minerals that are essential than the ones I’m going to talk about, but some are needed in such small amounts that either their purpose isn’t known, or their absence isn’t noticed much. In other words, if I can’t pronounce the mineral name (simply because I haven’t heard it talked about enough…and because I’m not the best at pronouncing things), I probably won’t mention it. Plus, let’s be real—dessert and food is much more fun to talk about than minerals, and the faster we get through these, the more fun we will have.

And…I got off track. Again. I promise I am going to talk about sodium now. Most, if not all people, have heard of sodium because of two things: 1) It’s delicious and 2) Humans eat way too much of it. Just like any other nutrient, Sodium has so much more behind it than its application to cooking and food. It regulates tons of stuff in our body and can cause harm if consumed in excess amounts.

Sodium is an electrolyte, a charged particle inside of the body, which is most often seen as “Na+”. Usually, sodium circulates through the body right outside of our cells, and this helps regulate water balance. Whenever you ingest a lot of sodium (usually through salt), our body goes nuts. Fluids (particularly water) do not like to be near electrolytes (Salt tends to dehydrate things. If you don’t believe me, drop a spoonful on the next slug you see), so they move from an area with a high concentration of sodium to an area with a low concentration of sodium. To help you imagine this more accurately, I have an experience from this past week that might help y’all visualize this a bit better:

This weekend I was at a wedding reception for a couple of my friends. Right after we (I was with some people) saw the happy couple and gave them hugs, we entered the reception area. Which was super small and slightly crowded. So we went to a little garden bench that was secluded from everybody else where there was much more room to move around and breathe in. We may not have had a table, but we had room to stretch our legs. Now why did we decide on that spot? It was table-less and people-less. There are two reasons. 1) With the exception of the bride and groom, we didn’t know anybody else at the reception. And 2) We were overwhelmed with how crowded the area was that we decided to sit away from it all. Eventually, more people started moving away from the crowd to where there was more room even though there were no tables to rest around.

Using this analogy, imagine that every person at the reception was a fluid molecule (let’s use water for simplicity), and every table at the reception was a sodium molecule. At the beginning of the reception, there were just a few people there, so they felt comfortable sitting around the tables. But as more and more people arrived, they were pushed outwards away from the tables and the rest of the people. This allowed them to be less overwhelmed (and socialize less, I might add…though that is just an added bonus) and move around more.

Does that make sense? It’s one of those things that can be hard to imagine without seeing it in a laboratory. Long story short…fluid molecules are just antisocial. 

However, this fluid balance is especially important for your kidneys. If the body doesn’t have enough water, the molecules move away from the sodium, and the kidneys know that they need to hold on to the water and make you pee less. The natural response to this is to be thirsty. So make sure to drink your water!

If the body is well hydrated and the sodium molecules are swimming in water molecules (see what I did there?), then the kidneys don’t care about holding onto the excess water, so they send it to your bladder.

Aside from water balance, sodium also plays a role in nerve impulses and muscle contraction (muscle contraction is really just one long and complicated nerve impulse). Both of these processes are really challenging to explain without diagrams and the ability to ask questions, but I can provide a real life example showing what happens when you don’t have enough sodium in your body:

So I’m a long distance runner. And since I am a long distance runner, I get cramps in my legs occasionally while out for runs. For the longest time, I thought those cramps were simply caused by me being tired and my body letting me know that it was done with running for the day. But as I talked with my running coach, I found out that most fatigue cramps are caused by lack of electrolytes (mainly sodium and potassium, K+) in the body. To prove to you how much sodium you lose while exercising, you can try licking your arm after sweating for a while. Yes, you will look really weird and people will probably judge you, but I can promise that your arm will taste salty. Well, there are all of your sodium molecules, leaving the body! Just leaving like they don’t care about a pain-free workout.

Anyways, since sodium is involved in muscle contraction, if you don’t have enough sodium, then your muscles don’t contract right—hence the cramps that you get when you’ve been working out for a long time. Because of my newfound knowledge, I started taking those nasty Gel electrolyte shots around mile 7 or 8 of my races. Almost immediately, I feel a difference in my pain level and can continue on with my race exhausted, but not cramping. And here is a picture of me running last summer. Pardon my face, but I am at about mile 13.05 of the 13.1 mile race. 

Now that I have talked your ears off about some of the important functions of sodium, let’s talk about food sources. Most Americans get their sodium from processed foods, and by default are eating more than twice the amount of sodium they need. This is why there is an increase in the diagnoses of both hypertension and heart disease. Sodium also inhibits the use of calcium in the body, so if you consume abnormally high amounts of sodium, you are at risk for osteoporosis as well (a disease I talked about in the Vitamin D post).

If you aren’t one to eat a lot of processed foods, there are other foods that contain sodium as well: rice pilaf, ham and lunch meat, cheese, cottage cheese, and canned vegetables. Most homemade foods will contain sodium as well since many are seasoned with salt. Plus, homemade foods taste so much better if you have the time and resources to do make them.