Sea water

(Consensus is Politics) #1

I grew up in San Francisco. For most of my 11 yrs there was one more street to the beach (47th ave and Cuttler).

In school, and the Scouts, it was drilled into us not to drink sea water. It’s too high in salt. You would eventually die of dehydration if you kept drinking it.

Now I wonder. What if you are in Ketosis? How long could a person in Ketosis drink sea water? Seeing as our kidneys are letting it out instead of holding it back.

Not that I want to go drink it. But I remember back in the Scouts, we were told that if we were stranded on a boat at sea, we could stretch out our water supply by adding 1/4 of its total with sea water. So 4 gallons of drinking water can become 5 gallons.

These things just pop into my mind all the time.

(Jan) #2

Oooh…interesting! I have no idea. But great question!

(Duncan Kerridge) #3

Sea water is about 1g of salt per fluid ounce. You probably could sip it, but it would be pretty grim.

(A ham loving ham! - VA6KD) #4

If I recall correctly, you need more than 1.5x of fresh water to flush out the salt content of seawater with the way the osmotic processes of the kidneys work. i.e. if you drink 1L of seawater, then you need to drink an additional 1.5L of fresh water. 1L of sea water has about 35g of salt - that’s a lot even by keto measures. I guess if you reverse that math, drinking 1L of seawater results in 1.5L of extra water excretion over and above the initial 1L of seawater… If you can’t meet this need, you’ll dehydrate rather quickly.

I remember watching (the hillariously silly) Bear Grylls demonstrate that in dire circumstances you could fill your anus and large colon with salt water and you’d absorb some of the water through the intestinal wall, but the big caveat was that the (explosive) side effects would be rather unpleasant and the gain was very minimal…to be used VERY sparingly in an utterly dire situation only. There’s video on YouTube if you really want to see it!

(Consensus is Politics) #5

I’m curious as to what will happen still. That 1.5 L of fresh water to 1 L of sea water was also assuming “normal” kidneys retaining sodium by default? Right? But Ketogenics tends to skew things a bit. Would excess salt spill out faster from a Ketonian vs a Carbonic? :sunglasses: In my geekiness I’m already thinking comic book superhero’s here :cowboy_hat_face:

(A ham loving ham! - VA6KD) #6

I think that is based on if you ingest 35g of salt, you need 2.5L of water to flush it out in order to maintain a salt balance in the body. As a ketoer, you might ingest a couple of extra grams per day to compensate for the couple extra grams your kidneys more readily flush out, but ultimately, there is still a range of salinity that has to be balanced in the body for the various biological actions to occur normally.

(Sophie) #8

Ummm Gross! :confounded: