The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I didn't know the Mars500 project had been so rigorous. Is there anything interesting that came out of it?
Mostly that they didn't have to rely on urine samples or food log proxies, and they observed for long enough to avoid the transient effects on body water. I assume the transient change in plasma volume has very little benifial impact on long term health. Since it was pretty long term, they made enough samples on each individual to clearly see the effects on the longitudinal axis, which is much more what you care about at an individual intervention level.
If you look at the plots in the supplemental materials, you can very clearly see the step change in blood pressure with sodium in each individual. You can also see seasonality in urine sodium excretion that is independent of sodium intake.
The part I don't like about just using urine samples is, why isn't you null that the body reestablishes homeostasis when it increases/decreases excretion? Like obviously since your body excreats less sodium if you consume less sodium the net is smaller than the raw magnitude of adjustment you make. Why isn't the net zero over the long term? What is the proposed mechanism by which reducing sodium is improving health? A naive model of less sodium leads to less plasma leads to lower blood pressure leads to better health doesn't work, because plasma volumes return to close to normal once you body has a chance to decrease excreation and restore osmotic balance.
Helpfully they observe in highly controlled conditions over a long enough period you can see that there are indeed appreciable hormonal contributions beyond pure osmotic arguments. It is assumed that the mechical effect of lower pressure and the hormonal effects are beneficial. You can lower the mechical pressure with medication though, so the residual question is what the health effects of sodium are beyond blood pressure. That I don't know. The mainstream consensus seems to be more sodium is bad independent of blood pressure. Hard to say for sure though, since high sodium food is correlated with other things that are bad for us when they try to disentangle it in population level studies.
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