Salty blood, sweat, and tears. But do I need to supplement sodium?

This was meant to be a neutral boring non-tweet:

No one with an actual education in nutrition really cares about salt intake.

— Bill Lagakos (@CaloriesProper) July 12, 2018

But it was met with a hella-backlash. I was being half-serious: in undergrad and grad school, we learned about many different diets, the studies that supported or debunked them, and whether they made sense nutrition-wise. We didn’t spend much time at all on the DASH diet, sodium-supplemented or -restricted diets, etc.

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Sodium chloride vs. potassium bicarbonate? Maybe.

During the mineral portion of one class, yes, we studied the role of sodium in biology. And in a section on nutrition for the elderly, we learned the ability to “taste” declines with age, Tl;dr: old people stop eating meat because it tastes like cardboard and their health is improved by going from zero meat intake to some meat intake, and monosodium glutatamate (MSG) as a seasoning agent helps in this #context.

But as performance aid?

…I’m not anti- or pro-salt. If you like it on your food, have at it! There are no magic tricks. Some of the backlash I received on Twitter was concerns that ultra-endurance athletes use up sodium faster and sweat out more, therefore need to supplement it. Well, not really….

Are there other reasons to take some minerals like magnesium? Maybe.

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