Help Your Body Heal Ep. 2 - Salt And Sweat | Biological Programming For A Niche We No Longer Live In

It is a beautiful day I am grateful to be alive and share this day with you today we're going to talk about the second episode in the series help your body heal this episode is about salt it is called salt sweat and inflammation or biological programming for a niche we no longer live in the goal of this talk is to talk about why salt is important for our body what It does for us and how our body uses it the overview of this talk is first we'll talk about salt particularly sodium but also potassium and

then we'll talk about how the body uses it how it stores it we'll talk about where salt is found in nature and the niche that humans had lived in for the bulk of our existence so we've been around for about 300,000 years and it's just in the last 10,000 years that we've settled down into this Type of Agriculture uh living where we're pretty sedentary but for the majority of our existence 290,000 years uh we were living as hunter gatherers that were moving around a lot so I will talk about that Niche that we lived in

a niche is uh is a word that describes um an area of the universe that is is particularly suited to an animal so all animals they have different Attributes uh skills adaptations um uh and animals end up finding a particular uh way of life that other animals are not that good at living like that but that one animal is and that is their Niche and I'll talk about um the niche that humans have lived in for the bulk of our existence and uh what does salt have to do with that and what does that have

to do with us living now in our modern Age uh once we talk about that we'll get a better idea about how much salt is good for the body and it's really a balance of salt intake by our diet and salt excretion uh that's through sweat and urine in that uh balance is really how much salt you're eating and excreting so we'll talk about um both of those things what are the common foods that we eat these days how much salt is in them also um what are ways that we can improve the Balance by

excreting more salt uh through exercise and sweating warm weather saunas things like that also importantly you know salt is necessary for life so if you don't get enough you get a condition called hyponatremia that just means that you don't have enough sodium and that could be fatal so I'll talk about what you might feel if you're not getting enough sodium putting all that Together we'll talk about how to help your body heal now that we live in a modern Agricultural Society where we don't have to move around very much and we live in climate controlled

rooms with well a lot of us do uh with air conditioning or you might live in a cold climate where you don't need to uh sweat very much um so that is the overview of what we'll talk about today so to get started we'll talk about what is sodium so sodium is a Metal ion it is uh it's found well it's found in rocks which um not is not that common in in the mountains uh but occasionally you'll see like goats or deer find some rocks that have salt in it and they will lick that

uh it's much easier sodium is much easier to find near water so like uh dried up or lake beds that are evaporating you can find Salt there and Then of course the ocean the ocean has tons of salt uh humans have been farming salt or harvesting salt from uh dried up seawater for a very very very long time um but if you're not by the ocean or if you're not by the lake salt is actually very hard to come by um when I was hiking or multiple times when I've been hiking or backpacking I'll run

into animals in the mountains such as mountain goats or deer Or well those are the two that I'm thinking about in particular and sometimes they will follow me uh I remember one deer followed me for I think like two or three miles it might have been more uh that deer followed me and my friend and followed us to our campsite until we peed and then um when we peed on the dirt Uh once we walked away the deer went to where we peed and started chomping on the dirt uh to get the salt so if

you imagine if we were the deer that salt is so valuable that you you'd be willing to eat the dirt that someone else peed on now I I find that very hard to imagine that I would be in a state where I would see someone else pee and then I would go eat the dirt that they Peed on uh but the animals they want the salt so bad that they're willing to do that so that shows that there's something very valuable about it so what's so valuable about sodium salt for our body well well our

body is mostly made up of water so me here I forget the number I think we're like 2/3 water but that water is not pure water you know pure water has like nothing except for H2O in it but that's not what's that's not how the B the water is in our bodies in our bodies uh the water is a salt solution so wherever the sodium is there's usually water um I'll go into that in more detail because it's a little bit more complicated than that but wherever the water is there's going to be sodium on

the outside of our cells so our whole body is made up of little tiny cells there's a lot of Them uh on the outside of the cell is salt water sodium water inside the cell so here's a cell there's water and sodium on the outside that's where like blood vessels are that's where like in between the cells there's like um cartilage collagen those kinds of things just kind of that hold the cells to each other but inside the cells there's actually not much sodium it's potassium So that's a different type of salt so um it's

a balance of sodium and potassium so potassium's inside sodium's outside um if we don't have enough sodium on the outside then we get dehydrated the there's not enough water flowing through our blood vessels to keep those cells alive so you need blood flowing by with water and nutrients like glucose which is sugar you need oxygen and glucose so oxygen and sugar flowing Uh flowing by to keep these cells alive and in order to do that you need sodium to have the water so if you don't get enough sodium you can't keep your body alive so

that's that's how valuable sodium is now now potassium you also need potassium because you need potassium to fill up the water inside the cell so the cell is like a like a sack there's all kinds of different shapes of cells um if you can just Imagine um like a sphere or a block cell it's filled with potassium you need potassium to fill that up and in fact nerve cells so you know I used to be a neurosurgeon so I used to work on nerves and nerves communicate by exchanging sodium and potassium and other uh ions

um across the surface of the the cell and it sends an electrical signal down this cable called an axon and that's how nerves talk to each other that's how your brain works that's how Your brain senses everything else in your body is through the movement of sodium ions or so salt uh from inside to outside the cell and then back to the outside so it's sodium is necessary for us to deliver oxygen and sugar to the cells to keep them alive it's also necessary for our brain and our nerves to communicate with each other um

so that's just two functions that salt Does the uh a third function is it's in our sweat now that's very important and this brings us to the second part of the talk uh which is what is the niche that humans have lived in for the bulk of our existence majority of our existence so for well it's thought that we've been around for around 300,000 years so that's a really long Time but the um the way we live now has been around since 10,000 years so and the way we live now is you know we have

very intensive farming we're growing Foods on on large parts of land and we have a lot of food and because we have a lot of food we have a lot of people um but not everyone is farming actually only a small fraction of us are farming The rest of us are doing other things uh so we don't the majority of us don't have to move around very much anymore but this is not how humans have lived for majority of our existence so of the 300,000 years that's thought that we've been um around uh 290,000 of

those years uh we were hunter gatherers so living in small tribes um walking and running uh through the Wilderness uh we were gathering plants Berries vegetation and hunting now sweat is very interesting because not all animals sweat so I'm sure some of you have heard of stories of uh like people chasing pigs until they they die they overheat because they don't sweat so you can you can chase a pig and you can keep chasing it and keep chasing it keep chasing it and eventually it will fall over dead because it it can't cool itself off

like we Can um my dog my dog doesn't sweat she pants so she pants to stay cool but panting is not as efficient as sweating at cooling off because uh when you pant you're just evaporating water on the tongue in the mouth and then in the in the lungs but when you sweat like we do you got sweat on the whole surface area your body from your head down to your toes and your fingertips and that evaporation of water That has sodium in it cools you off and that is really critical to the niche that

humans have lived in for a long time and that Niche is being able to cool off and run so there's a very interesting book called Born to Run uh by I think is Christopher MC McDougall I don't think he's related to U uh Dr John McDougall who I learned Unfortunately he passed away um I the last video I talked about John McDougall and uh I I read in the comments that people said he passed away about a month ago so that's with a heavy heart because I'm very grateful for for his work in trying to

help people be healthy uh he's really great man uh and uh yeah I'm just very grateful that he chose to live the way he did uh but this book Born to Run is by I think Christopher McDougall let me just Double check that because I want to make sure I give him the right credit yes Christopher McDougall and uh that book is about um it's about running but there was very interesting stories in it uh where where uh he was talking about um a I think it was a Paleo Anthropologist uh but an anatomist uh

uh specialist who really examined why why are our Bodies shaped the way they are what function do these the shape of our body have and uh why do we walk on two feet uh because we have four limbs most animals walk on all four limbs uh even our our ape cousins uh they spend a lot of time on all fours like gorillas and chimpanzees uh but but we don't um and so this this is uh this is very critical to our talk but it's kind of a small digression but We we'll go there so what

does salt have to do with running and with the niche that we live in so humans have kind of interestingly shaped body we have let's see I'm trying to get my head in this view here but there's there's a there's a big notch back here if you feel on the back of your head you'll feel this bump anatomically it's called the inan But that's not really important what's important is that there's a bump and then there's if you feel here there's this thick band of cartilage you can't actually feel the bones right here you can

feel the bones down here but like right here between this bump on the head and the first bones you can feel you can't really feel the bones because there's a thick band of cartilage here And uh what the uhu that anatomist figured out is that that only exists in animals that run so if you look at animals that walk they don't run they just walk they actually don't have this bump and thick band of of uh cartilage uh what it does is it helps stabilize our heads when moving very quickly when running um so when

you're running you know you're moving your body and Then this allows your head to stay stable so you can see um while your body is turning and rotating very quickly all right so we got that adaptation and we walk on two feet we're we're bipedal and what that does is it changes the way that you breathe when you're running so when you're running well when my dog doie runs you know she's got all fours so she Will pull the ground with her front paws and then her back paw will grab the ground and then pull

down and then her front paw will reach out grab the ground and pull down so um because she uses all fours she can can only breathe when her body stretches out when her front paws reach out in front of her then her lungs expand and then when she pulls her front paws down and does essentially Like an abdominal Crunch and she breathes out so she's limited to breathing one breath per um per gate stroke so okay so um that's how duie breathes when she runs it's also how cheetah breathe and lions breathe when they run

and deer but we're different uh we run on two feet and our arms are free so when we're running our arms they're Swinging to keep our balance because our legs are are going back and forth but we're not limited to taking one breath per stride we can breathe that however much we want because our our arms are free and our rib cage is free to breathe multiple times each uh each stride all right so that's those are two adaptations that uh humans have that give us an advantage uh when Hunting animals the third thing is

that none of those first two things would matter if you can't cool off you have to be able to cool off in order to keep going and so this is where sodium salt really is integral to this whole thing humans lost their hair on most of their body so if you look at chimpanzees and gorillas they have hair All over the place not on their face but on a lot of their body um we lost a lot of the a lot of that hair I we still got hair in you know under the armpit pubic

hair and then some hair on you know some hair on the arms and legs and chest but not that much instead we've got Exposed Skin and that skin sweats and that's that's made possible by salt because um I was saying earlier that the water doesn't really Exist in its pure form without any salt in it uh it it it's it goes where the salt is so the way our salt glands work is they excrete the sodium and then water follows the sodium out into our the outside of our skin and then that's where it evaporates

and then you can sometimes see dried up salt on your skin face or clothing and that's to cool us off so those are three three things that humans do that Really set them apart from other animals they're able to run they have the anatomy to run and keep their head stable so they can see while you're running we run on two legs and that allows us to uh breathe multiple times per stride so we can breathe more we can get more oxygen into our body than other animals and we sweat a lot so we can

cool off even with heavy exertion of the Muscles which generates heat or in hot environments so if you look in in like Africa in the in the savannah in the middle of the day it is just way too hot for animals to do anything they they just rest in the shade they don't do much but humans can still move around in that really hot weather because we can sweat and cool off so you know that gives us some advantages over the other animals um and I think this is this is what defines the niche that

we lived in for a long time because we're not the fastest animal uh a deer can easily outrun us um same thing with bears and lions and cheetahs and a lot of other animals but while they can outrun Us in the short term we can outrun them in the long term so because we can cool off and we can breathe better our endurance is longer we can run for a very long time and a deer Might spurt ahead so this let's pretend that this is the let's see this is the deer so this is the

deer this is human deer might be really fast but then it has to rest because it overheats human it's running not as fast sees the deer the deer says oh no the hunter is coming I got to run so it's it runs away but then it overheats and it has to rest but the human doesn't have to rest it just keeps keeps going and then the deer will say oh no the Hunter's getting Closer it spurts away but the human contract the deer and see it or follow its hoofprints and eventually the deer overheats and

it can't run anymore and then the hunter has the deer so our our Niche is that we we are endurance Runners we can sweat we can breathe well and we can operate in very hot environments because we can cool off when other animals they can't really move around that well so that's the Niche sodium is integral to our the niche that we lived in and sodium is very hard to come by so whenever our body came across sodium uh it it developed a way to store it very efficiently so that the next time we see

an animal and we want to go hunt it it's available to us so we can sweat so there are um so yeah there's a way that the body really efficiently Soaks up this the sodium from whatever we eat whether that's plants uh or the the prey that we killed it will take that sodium and it will very efficiently extract it and store it away in our body uh and we're going to talk about storage like how does the body store the salt because if if you're running for a long long time you need to be

able to re access those stores and generate Sweat um and well I guess I'll talk about that now let's see here yeah okay we'll we'll talk about storage so uh well just to recap so what we talked about was the niche that we liveed in for a very long time why sodium is so integral to our ability as humans to have an advantage over the other animals around us um so how do you how does our body store it because it's hard to come by So how does our body stored inside our body so that

we have it with us whenever we wherever we go so we talked about how sodium is in the water the fluid uh but it's always kept at a very particular concentration so if you wanted to store more salt in your body in the fluid you'd have to carry more fluid around but if anyone has picked up a gallon of water or you know four liters of Water water is really heavy so storing salt in the form of a saltwater solution is not is not an efficient way to store water what you want to do is

you want to store Salt and it's insoluble form that means like a solid form where it's super concentrated uh like the table salt that uh you might have at home like an assault Shaker that's super concentrated it's just salt sodium and chloride is is Table salt um what you want to do is you want to store the salt without the water because water is so heavy so the way our body does that is it stores uh salt in skin and muscle and uh other areas that have collagen so collagen is uh uh is a is

a molecule it's it's a type of molecule in our body that is that makes up cartilage and uh other connective Tissues like skin also bone has collagen uh excuse me U muscles uh blood vessels uh they all have collagen and uh the way that the body stores the salt is uh actually mainly in the skin and some in the muscle uh but probably in those other organs I just mentioned like bone cartilage uh it stores the sodium ions by attaching it to negative ions in in a protein uh glyos Amino glycans I believe that's What

they're called uh and it Sol it stores them in a solid form away from the water and that's that's inside the skin muscles bones cartilage now that information was not known when I was doing Medical School uh some really smart doctors uh there's a doctor named Yen Titi TI T Ze who works in Singapore um he did a lot of this important work Uh to try to figure out where does a body store sodium and uh a lot of this was discovered in um the late 2010s uh so that was after I did Medical School

uh so so yeah now we know the body stores the salt in an insoluble form without water in a very lightweight form in the skin and muscles and connective tissue now that's important for the spine um and that really deserves his own talk so that's that's How how how does degenerative disc disease these occur but we'll we'll talk about that in a later episode this one just going to focus on on salt and um what we can do to have a good salt balance all right so the body stores it in salt and it it

generates fat because fat you can surround the fat with a salty brine uh uh so skin muscle and generating Fat so um there's different kinds of fat there's fat that's just underneath the skin called subcutanous adapost tissue um you know if if I had no fat on my face I would look pretty Gastly I would look like a skeleton you so I got fat here I've got fat here but I also got fat on my inside my belly that that fat not good fat that's called visceral fat um there's also fat that can occur in

between the muscle fibers that's also not good fat that's um the ABD the Visceral fat and then the fat that's in between the muscle fibers those are uh fat stores that the body made U uh to store excess salt that that that we eat so I I have I have some visceral fat which I'm trying to work off uh using this information but but it it is there um yeah uh the body generates that fat um to store excess salt okay so it's not that the body Is it's not that the body is a douchebag

body that is uh doesn't know what it's doing now it knows exactly what it's doing and it's trying to help you and me uh survive uh because a body doesn't know that we live in um modern agricultural civilization um it's program it's it's the program that the body is following is is the program that helped really well for 290,000 years of us running Around in and chasing uh prey that can't cool off as well as we can so so in that program our body wants to store away salt whenever we come across it so that

we can have access to it to chase our prey and catch that uh Woolly Mammoth uh and and be able to eat uh eat the meat uh uh also run and walk to forge berries and and vegetation uh and move with the Seasons move with the herds um that's that's how Our body is programmed and and that's that's why it is storing salt in in these uh what we call bad fats visceral fat fat in between the muscle fibers um in in those times you didn't come across salt that much so you know when you

did the body could temporarily store away the salt there but you'd end up using it up and those visceral fats and fats in between the muscle fibers would go away and there Would be no problem but then today uh you know we're not chasing deer until they overheat um you know we're sitting at a computer or a lot of us are um or sitting at a desk or sitting on the the sofa and we keep eating salt and we keep making this bad fat visceral fat other fats and we just get bigger and bigger and

bigger and bigger and bigger and then all sorts of things happen our sugars don't function right We get diabetes we get uh inflammation which means um the body is not healing well um in fact it might be even attacking normal tissue and um I'll talk about that uh I'll talk about that right now so um when when we eat very high salt diet so more salt than we need and we continuously do that what happens is the body is storing away the the salt and making more fat to store away more salt uh And in

the process excuse me in the process uh it changes our immune system and the bacteria that live in our gut called the microbiome I'll talk about microbiome in the next episode uh the Fighting episode but it the the high salt changes the microbiome and it changes our immune system into a what's called a pro-inflammatory state now that that sounds like a bad thing which is it is a bad thing in the way that we live where We don't move around and we don't sweat much but it was actually a very good thing back when we

did move around a lot and we sweated all day long uh because what it would do is it would it would make more fat store the sodium in the skin and then we'd have it for the next time but but now the high salt actually it activates the the immune cells that are used to repair repair things and fight off infections it makes them Aggravated and then sends them into a pro-inflammatory state where they they sometimes attack normal tissue and cause autoimmune problems but also they don't they don't heal things as well uh uh because

they're busy making sodium Stores um so so yeah if if we get too much salt and we're not using it our body ends up breaking down it doesn't heal that well we get overweight we have fat in the wrong Places um that is meant to be used but we don't end up using it and so that's where the problem comes in so we live now in an environment that is not like the Niche that we lived in for the majority of our existence so there there's a balance of of um you need enough salt for

what you're doing for how much you're sweating okay so this is really the the Crux of this whole episode is you want To get the right balance of sodium for how much you're sweating now the try to figure that out cuz luckily now we got science and we got we can measure sodium amounts and all kinds of foods um and so uh this is actually very helpful for us to figure some things out uh if we look at hunter gatherer tribes that are alive today they get around five got a Visitor hello good morning duie

just woke up all right so um if we look at our hunter gather U tribes that are still alive and you know and kind of living the way that most people used to you know they're in isolation and like the Amazon or uh places like that um anthropologists have gone and they've actually measured how much sodium and Potassium hunter gatherers uh typically eat and that is around for sodium it's around 700 milligram okay 700 milligram now um and then for potassium it's 11,000 mg versus 700 so and Hunter gather other tribes their ratio of sodium

to pottassium is 1 to 16 yes 16 1 to 16 but in um in our society we flip that around backwards you know um the average person nowadays is eating Instead of 700 milligrams of sodium we're eating like 3,000 something like 3500 I mean it Koreans I'm Korean uh or my my parents grew up in Korea but in Korea a lot of Koreans eat 10,000 milligrams of sodium each day uh with salty foods so 10,000 versus 700 Mig and also our pottassium intake is is Lower um and so uh the average person nowadays gets 3

3500 or so of sodium and like 2300 or something like that of potassium so really the way our bodies function the best is how these hunter gatherers are are eating which is just enough sodium to provide Cooling and sweat and hydration but not too much and a ton of potassium to balance out the sodium because they They really are kind of like Yin and yanging they kind of counteract each other you know sodium's on the outside of the cell pottassium is on the inside um and so it's it's a balance um potassium and sodium okay

so so nowadays we're eating way too much sodium and not enough potassium uh so that's that's sorry I lost my train of thought there let's See okay so I think the next part here is to just really kind of get an idea like what is 700 Mig of sodium like how how much is that based off of common foods so let's go let's go online we'll go on an online adventure and we'll figure out how much sodium is in just regular Foods so let's see here let's look up a slice of bread slice of bread

Sodium 147 mg and a typical white bread slice large 30 G okay so one slice of bread 147 milligram if you have a sandwich you usually have two pieces of bread so that's three about 300 milligram of sodium so if you trying to shoot for 700 mg of sodium which is what these hunter gatherer tribes are doing Doing and you have two slices of bread you already are at almost halfway to your daily sodium limit and that's not including what's in between the bread if you put sandwich meat let's let's see let's look up pastrami

I'm just coming up with some some kind of meat all right one slice of pastrami in between the that bread it's 300 mg all right so now we're already at 600 mg and we haven't even put in cheese yet so let's say a slice of mozzarella cheese Mozzarella cheese one slice oh that's the low sodium let's see just the regular one oh wow now that's six slices all right so one 1 ooun of whole milk mozzarella cheese 178 milligram all right so now we're at 700 and 80 about so we're we're already Over the daily

uh limit for sodium based off of hunter gatherer tribes uh you know they're eating around 700 Mig of sodium in the whole day and with our um pastrami mozzarella sandwich I didn't even put mayonnaise or mustard in it let's just look up mayonnaise mayonnaise it's 88 that's just one tablespoon and then let's look up mustard 57 mg all right so I I don't Even know how much we're at now 780 uh I mean we're we're we're coming up on 900 or 1,000 milligrams in our one serving of um a pastrami sandwich with mozzarella uh mayonnaise

and mustard and we're we're already over um 700 milligrams for the whole day and that's just one meal that's just like lunch okay so if you look at other Foods I mean we'll look up a slice of pizza I love pizza tastes so yummy one Slice of pizza 14in regular crust but you only have one slice that's 640 Mig that that's already the very close to the maximum daily limit that these hunter gatherer tribes are doing that's one slice and I have I don't think I've ever eaten just one slice of pizza because it's so

yummy uh you know you want to eat two or three or four sometimes even the whole pizza if you're like really hungry if you eat the whole Pizza let's see here one pizza wow 5,000 milligrams I was eating some potato chips last night so let's let's look at how much sodium is in potato chips let's see which one was I eating I was eating Kettle Kettle potato chips with honey Dijon flavoring uh yeah honey Dijon kettle potato chips sodium one serving 250 Mig I probably had two servings so I Probably had 500 Mig of sodium

and just the potato chips which were a snack after I ate breakfast lunch and dinner so that wasn't very good that wasn't a good choice for me yesterday but it was very yummy and it's very hard not to eat yummy things um uh so that's why this talk is actually really important I mean for me for other people how do you help your body heal how how do you help it stay healthy Uh because we've got all these easily accessible Foods oh one more thing is let's look up how much is in a Chipotle burrito

now okay we won't look up Brands because I don't want to catch some Flack from some Corporation all right one burrito with beans says two pie two pieces so I guess two two burritos oh bean burrito with beans beef And cheese okay yeah it's about 1,000 milligrams for two pieces I I assume that they mean smaller burritos because sometimes restaurants give you a giant burrito that's like this big and and yeah that's going to be over a th000 milligrams of sodium I remember looking up there's a restaurant that I used to get burritos from down

here until I saw how much sodium they put in there it was like 1300 milligrams so like twice the limit Of the hunter gatherers what they're eating all right so you know this shows how easy it is to eat too much sodium and our body which is programmed to say oh sodium is so hard to come by whenever we come by it we're going to store it away in the skin and the fat and the muscles uh when when when we have food like this this you know processed foods which are high in salt Uh

it's very easy to eat too much sodium now if you now in contrast we're going to look at unprocessed Foods let's look up broccoli one serving of broccoli 49 milligrams so it has some sodium not that much let's look up kale um sodium in K sodium in K 29 milligrams okay now we're talking double digits rather than Four digits we're not talking about thousands of milligrams we're talking about like 50 or 30 uh um let's look up sodium in chickpeas 3 Mig oh that's in a tablespoon let's just say one cup yeah about 48 um

how about brown rice oh only 10 milligram and then let's look at a potato like a sweet Potato oh about 73 Mig so a little bit more but oh oh and then we'll look up some fruits how much is in blueberries I like blueberries one cup of raw blueberries contains only one to 1 half milligram of sodium okay so hardly any sodium but tons of potassium look 112 Mig of sodium potassium versus only 1 milligram of sodium in a cup of blueberries Um all right so this this I think this I think is is the

key to why um what I talked about in the first episode why patients who eat mostly plant-based and low sodium heal the best because I think that while these unprocessed Whole Foods plant-based foods are very low in sodium um some fruits have only like 1 milligram and then uh the vegetables and like tubers like uh you know sweet Potatoes potatoes you know they have 50 70 milligrams in a serving but uh these processed foods like a slice of pizza has one slice has 600 and if you eat the whole pizza is 5,000 okay so so

you definitely want to stay away from proc says Foods because they're going to give you way too much salt way more than you actually need and Whole Foods whole a whole food which means unprocessed uh plant-based food has very Little sodium and lots of potassium because you need more potassium than sodium um so I think that's why the patients who eat that way are actually healing very well staying healthy now the question is can you eat meat and and be healthy because the first talk I was talking about how um in the research studies and

in in watching my patients the patients who ate mostly veggies and fruits and whole grains they were Healthier than the ones who ate a lot of meat and uh there are a lot of um a lot of doctors and patients who who have done um a carnivore diet and uh they got really healthy they they yeah a lot of health problems went away and I think that you can do that uh it doesn't you don't have to do a plant-based diet um but you'd have to be extra careful though um let me show you uh

serving of chicken let's see chicken sodium All right so one cup of diced chicken 115 milligrams of sodium so that's like that's like double what was in well not quite double but yeah double what was in like um broccoli or potato uh and way more than what's in like 100 times more than what's in a a blueberry a serving of blueberries so um can you eat well let's look at another another Um meat or look at fish let's say salmon Salmon's yummy 117 Mig in a half filet or 59 Mig in 100 G that's actually

not that bad and then um beef let's look at Beef 61 milligrams in serving a beef okay so this is without any salt added to it now you if you eat beef um if you eat beef and you don't put any salt on it it well it really Doesn't taste as good you know it you really want to usually add a lot of salt to it to make it taste good same thing with chicken I mean I think in the supermarket the a lot of the chicken has salt brine injected into the meat I don't

know if they still do that but I knew I know they used to do that um so these numbers here are if you don't add any salt to the meat okay so can you stay below 700 milligrams a Day uh eating a carnivore diet the answer is yes you can but it's a little bit harder because there's more sodium in animal Foods than there are in the plant Foods maybe not that much but probably by a factor of about two or one and a half okay uh and you in order to make it taste good

you usually have to Salt it um so so this is where it gets very tricky to do a Carnivore diet and help help your body stay healthy is possible but you have to be very mindful about what you're doing uh so do you have to be vegan or vegetarian or or mostly Whole Food plant-based well no you don't but um if you are primarily animal food based you have to be extra mindful about what you're doing in order to help your body be healthy okay so um I think that's very important to to to realize

and I I've been kind of Realizing that as I've been researching for this talk okay so we talked about what are the common sodium levels in the different foods all right so what um in this last part I'm going to talk about it's a really it's really a balance of how much salt sodium you intake and how much you sweat and uh and we'll talk about what what's a good number a sodium number to shoot For and how does that number change based off of environmental factors and exercise factors okay so American Heart Association says

ideally we should be getting 1500 Mig of sodium maximum in the day okay so that gives us some some some leeway so 700 no you need at least 500 migr in the day just to function okay so we looked at hunter gatherer tribes they're getting around 700 milligram so they're they're really just right above the basic minimum you need To survive each day which is 500 so these Hunter gather tribes are getting 700 they they're giving their bodies a little leeway um about 200 milligrams each day but American Heart Association is recommending ideally we should

get a maximum of 1500 milligrams they say for sure don't go above 2300 milligrams which almost all Americans do uh and probably most most people in developed countries are are um over that 2,300 milligram sodium limit uh but ideally they say be at500 milligrams or less so in my mind that healthy range is probably 700 mg to 1500 mg of sodium um but it is a balance because if you're sweating a lot if you're living like our hunter gather ancestors and you're you're sweating all day long let's say well you don't even have to be

living you don't have to be Chasing deer you could be working a construction job you know um uh building a highway in the middle of the summer in the heat in the sun you're moving heavy stuff you're standing outside and you're sweating nonstop all day long well you're losing sodium pretty rapidly just to cool off and not overheat in that situation you actually need need to replenish that salt so you Need to eat salt here you need more than 700 mg of sodium if you live in Mexico and you don't have air conditioning and it's

really hot and you're sweating all day long you need to eat salty and I think that's why a lot of cuisines in U a lot of cuisines in hot areas are actually very salty so if you think about Mexican food You've Got U Salsas guacamole you got corn tortilla chips that are salted you've got uh uh well Burritos we already looked at could be upwards of a th000 milligrams um of salt uh yeah if you live in a very hot environment you need to actually eat salty if you're sweating a lot now you could live

in Mexico or India where it's really hot and be in air conditioned rooms all day long and you don't actually sweat in that case you really need to be sticking with the 700 to 1500 mgram sodium uh limit in order for your body to function Properly okay so it's really it's really a balance of salt intake and salt excretion through sweat now now an advantage that we that we have we can kind of hack hack this biological programming and that um if we want to eat salty still like if we just really like the taste

of salting the food or having food that has salt in it uh you can excrete the salt uh you can Hack your body's biological programming by inducing sweating so that can be exercise uh but it could also be just sitting in a hot tub or a sauna so uh many cultures in cold climates I'm thinking like like um Scandinavians you know like Finnish people Swedish people they they have saunas so they have traditionally they have develop ways to make the body sweat artificially essentially by heating their their local environment uh Like in a in a

bath house or a dry sauna they are creating a very hot environment so their body sweats and excretes the salt and there is there's health benefits for that in fact the health benefits of going to a thermal uh spring so that's like a hot water uh spring heated with geothermal activity canic activity U the health benefits of sitting in those Warm Springs and sweating uh was written about even in like 400 BC in in Greece Uh Greek um I guess there were Physicians uh doctors they were writing that if you go to a thermal Spa

not a spa thermal spring uh and you sit there in the waters uh it cures problems of the skin bones and joints okay so somehow they knew in 400 BC that sweating in a hot environment Repairs skin problems and joint problems now how do they know that I have no idea because they didn't have the science that we have and it's really just in the last 10 years that we figured out that Sal is stored in the skin and bones and joints and collagen uh I didn't know that we didn't know that in when I

was in medical school in 2004 uh so these ancient Greek docs they they actually knew if you go and you sit In a hot tub essentially it's a hot tub uh this geothermal spring you're GNA actually fix skin problems and joint problems because you're excreting excess salt okay so humans are really smart I mean they're able to figure things out and oh this is an important point you don't actually have to know the exact mechanism of how everything works you can just figure out the hack the hack is if you sweat more you can be

healthier it can balance Out uh increased salt intake or ex excess salt intake that's not needed all right so you don't need to actually know the science to benefit from it you can just use the heck so it it's a balance sodium intake versus salt excretion if you live in a cold environment uh I live in the Pacific Northwest it is cool about um majority of the year summer some some months in the summer is it can be very Warm but majority of the year is kind of cool and cloudy and rainy uh and I'm

not sweating even if I go for a run run outside if it's cold outside and it's rainy I'm not sweating very much so up here um I need to eat less salt less sodium and more potassium uh now that being said I went for a very long Mountain hike uh it was 22 miles U this like three or four days ago with my buddy whiskey Ry and uh we hiked all the way up into the mountains and then back down through this Valley it was a through hike 22 miles and I brought uh granola bars

that had sodium in it about I brought like six of them uh because they're they're highly dense easy to package and they're light uh lots of calories but each one had about 150 milligram and I brought about six of them so that's 6 * 150 I can do math um Somewhat 300 600 900 milligram okay so I brought 900 milligram of sodium with me and I hiked 22 miles uh and I was sweating because it was warm and I was climbing up mountain mountain I was really exerting myself and sweating pretty much all day it

took 14 hours to do and I actually started running out of salt in my body uh and I I I think I developed uh short-term hyponatremia which means not enough sodium in my in my body and so this is really important Because you you know most people suffer from having too much sodium in the body and that causes all sorts of ailments you know obesity um diabetes problems because of the metabolic dysfunction inflammation where your body doesn't heal but there's also the danger of having too little so let's let's look up uh what happens if

you have too little sodium so hypon nmia symptoms and I'll tell you what what I experienced too Um what I experienced in uh in when I ran out of enough sodium uh was that I was getting a headache I got a headache it was just kind of generalized headache up here and I felt lethargic and my thinking was slowing down like I I usually whiskey Ry and I Converse during our hikes the whole time just talking about whatever uh but both of us uh towards the end there we we couldn't really talk very well because

we were so so tired one but I think it was actually I didn't have enough salt uh I should have brought a salt packet with me um but I didn't during that time because I thought I had brought enough all right so symptoms of hypon nemia let's see if we can enlarge this because this is super important because you do not want to die from not having enough salt nausea and vomiting well that that would be really bad headache I think Headache is probably one of the first ones uh that's interesting because um one of

the reasons why we think sodium is named sodium is because in Arabic uh headache is named uh suda suda s u da a uh which means headache uh and salt was used to to treat headaches because back then I guess maybe it was harder to come by salt still and so if you get a headache if you have some salt headache Would go away uh confusion loss of energy drowsiness and fatigue restlessness and irritability muscle weakness spasms or cramps and if it's really bad seizures coma and then death should be down here but they don't

list that okay so if you're having these feelings nausea vomiting mainly heada headache confusion loss of energy Um uh restlessness irritability the these types of things and you've been sweating a lot uh and um then you really want to think about uh do you have enough salt and you may you may want to have something that's salty all right so we talked about kind of upper limits and lower limits of the salt balance I think that covers pretty much all the things that I wanted to talk about yeah yeah so Um uh just so to

recap our bodies developed in a very special Niche where we were endurance runners in a hot environment and we had an advantage over other animals because we could cool off and we could run and we could breathe and deliver more oxygen to our body and and we we are not the fastest animals on land but we have the best endurance and so we could hunt these animals okay and so and sodium is really hard to come by and you need Sodium to sweat to cool off so our body's got really good at at absorbing the

sodium from our food and storing it away in our skin and muscles and and the collagen in the bones and joints U and so in today's environment where we don't live like that anymore or most of us don't we eat too much sodium and that causes our body to constantly store up the sodium in unhealthy ways in unhealthy fats like visceral fat uh fat in between the muscles and you I I've Seen this actually in when I used to do spine surgery I would see um the patients that had really bad joints I would cut

through the skin and first of all the skin was thicker so you know a younger well not not even a younger just a a healthier patient that might have had a disc problem uh if I cut through their skin their their skin would be maybe that thick and it be soft and and and stretchy uh easily would slice through And then there there'd be just some fat underneath uh and then you reach the muscle and the muscle would be completely uh just red muscle fibers but in an unhealthy patient who's uh who had really bad

degenerative disc disease in the spine um what I would physically see just with my own eyes is that their skin would be instead of this thick it'd be like that thick like it'd be really thick and it' Be really really tough like a hard leather that it would be hard to cut through almost like crunchy but not really crunchy but it lost his pliability stretch stretchiness uh and then underneath that thickened skin was fat that was very interesting it wasn't just like globules of yellow fat it was like white fat with this kind of watery

Briny solution in in in in that area between the skin and the muscle sometimes it was so much water That I'd be like what the heck what where's all this water coming from now I didn't have a way to test its sodium content but I suspect that that that water probably was had a lot of salt in it um and then when I would get down down to the muscle layer right above the bones I would see actually a lot of fat intermixed in between the muscle the red muscle fibers so there's red muscle fibers

and then there'll be yellow or white fat that's That's in between the muscle fibers and it shouldn't be there that is the body's storage of excess sodium both in the skin in the subcutaneous fat and in the fat that's intermixed in between the muscle fibers which it shouldn't be there all right I would see that with my own eyes and feel it while I'm doing spine surgery uh and those were in the patients that had the worst joint disease and so you know I will talk I'll Have an episode dedicated to spine problems uh but

the salt issue is integral now oh and the other thing is um there is a condition called anking spondilitis or uh dish uh um d i which is an acronym uh but what that means is that the the body has all sorts of joints on the spine there's many different bones there's like seven neck bones 12 thoracic Bones from here to here and then five lumbar bones in your low back and they all have three joints In between each bone most of them except for at the very top and there's a condition where the body

gets inflamed and then it starts locking down each joint one by one one by one they start locking down and then eventually some patients end up with their whole spine doesn't move anymore it's fused instead of being able to bend like this and twist like that they're stuck they can't move and then they're Very prone to getting a bad fracture because if you fall down even just the falling from your chair if your if your spine can't absorb the shock like bending then it can just snap like that and and and uh you know I

would see that occasionally but the interesting thing is I only saw well I I only saw that very infrequently in uh where I trained uh in neurosurgery which was in a very hot climate uh uh it's in the US but it it's in an Area of the US that uh is very very hot and humid so you're sweating a lot I didn't see that problem uh where the spine locked up uh very often there it would be very rare but then I moved uh I've had a couple jobs in my career uh one of them

is up here in the Pacific Northwest and another one was in uh a state that's very cold very very very very very very very cold uh in the United States and what I saw was that there was way more prevalence of this Locking up of the spine uh and I said well why why is it that I'm seeing that way more in these cold climates and I think it's because in these cold climates most people were eating the same way that the people in the warm climates are eating they're getting way too much salt and

they're not sweating enough and that just causes inflammation in the body and the body keeps storing extra salt that it doesn't need and that causes these joints to get INF flamed Injured and the body's way of of healing that is locking them down fusing them all right so so I I've seen this u in patients and that that once they lock down you you can't unlock it is permanent okay so um yeah so there there are some permanent damages that can happen from getting too much salt and not sweating enough uh we don't live in

that Niche that Niche anymore of outrunning deer or other animal Prey so in today's environment where most people don't have to move around very much we just have to be mindful that don't eat too much sodium and have a good balance between how much sodium you're eating and how much you're sweating that is how you help your body heal well I hope that you find this information helpful and uh yeah I'm looking forward to see what People say in the comments uh hope you have a wonderful wonderful day