The Chloride Effect

I was convinced that I had never heard of chloride before until I realized that it is typically accompanied by another mineral: sodium. That's right, folks--sodium chloride (or salt) is essential to our body's functioning. Well, salt isn't necessarily essential (it raises blood pressure to unhealthy levels), but the minerals that make up salt are essential, and that's basically the same thing...right...? I wish because salt is a flavor enhancer and makes food taste really delicious.

But sadly, salt is not the reason we need chloride. Since it has a negative charge, chloride helps balance out the positive charges of sodium and potassium in the body. Hopefully you will remember that when an atom inside of our body has a charge, we call it an electrolyte. The body tries to keep the positive and negative atoms in balance with one another so electrical potentials aren't created. (Unless, of course, we are talking about nerve impulses, where electrical potentials are needed, but that is another topic for another day). 

Chloride is found and dissolved in water, and since water makes most of our body, chloride is found in and around literally every cell. This helps keep the water between the inside and outside of our cells balanced. At the end of the day, we typically want our body neutrally charged, and the negative charge of chloride helps counteract the positive charges of potassium and sodium.

Besides sodium chloride, there is probably another substance you have heard of: hydrochloric acid, one of the strongest acids in nature, contains both hydrogen and chloride. And hydrochloric acid is really good at one specific thing: digestion. Because of this, our stomachs contain hydrochloric acid to help digest and break down the food we eat into smaller particles. This helps the small intestine, when it receives the partially broken down food, to continue to break it down and absorb the needed nutrients. 

Occasionally, the hydrochloric acid goes nuts and begins to break down the inside of the stomach, creating an sore. This is called an ulcer. Having had ulcers myself, I can attest that I never truly understood how strong hydrochloric acid is until I experienced it eating away at my stomach lining. It's pretty nasty stuff, but the vast majority of the time, it does its job of digestion and nothing more. I just thought I would mention this because it is absolutely insane how the body can house such a strong acid and hardly ever suffer any consequences from it. It's truly a miracle, once you think about it.

I would usually say something like "and the miracle doesn't end there," and I don't want to be over cheesy, but this next part is actually really cool: we don't have to do anything to make sure we get enough chloride in the diet. This is one of the few nutrients, if not the only one, that we have to keep track of at all. Unless you are extremely sick and losing a lot of fluid through vomit or diarrhea, then you just do you and eat what you would normally eat. Since the most abundant source of chloride is salt, and salt is found in every meal ever (whether home cooked or store bought), we get enough of chloride to never have a deficiency. Though salt does have a bad reputation, at least it keeps our fluids balanced and our stomachs digesting.