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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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Rotisserie chicken eaters: Science says that diets high in sodium are bad for you. What do you do about this? Or do you disagree with The Science?
It is funny to me that teammates in high school baseball would insist on drinking Gatorade and getting others to drink Gatorade on the basis that you NEED those electrolytes on hot days or you'd DIE. That's more of a problem for elite athletes, not my dumbass sitting on a bench. Extra electrolytes seem to be something that you should try to get rid of.
Alpha gal gang: Did you know about this site? Apparently in the year of 2026 you can directly order (expensive) alpha-gal-less pork created by The Science now. We're living in the future, bros. https://amaroohills.com/
My impression of The Science around sodium was that (for people with healthy kidneys) the thing to watch out for is your sodium-potassium ratio.
IIRC, an important mechanism your body has for maintaining appropriate sodium concentrations requires having potassium ions lying around, so in the absence of that potassium your blood volume goes up (if you can't lose some solute, decreasing concentration requires more solvent).
This seems to be backed up clinically - it takes a lot of sodium reduction to get pretty modest reductions in blood pressure / stroke risk / mortality, whereas increasing potassium intake shows strong signal for all three (again, as long as your kidneys are healthy - hyperkalemia is pretty bad)
Then again, trying to correct an extremely-high-sodium diet by throwing potassium at it seems like a dangerous prospect too - I'm guessing there's a good reason the best results found in the linked meta-analysis were for substituting some dietary sodium for potassium
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Consistent high sodium intake over time will overwork your kidneys. At the same time your body needs salt to regulate fluid, among other things. It's an issue of degree. What you're referring to as Science here isn't a great mystery. The typical diet in the US is high in sodium, and sodium in most pre-prepared or restaurant foods is particularly high, which anyone who doesn't cook (and therefore doesn't realize how much salt is required to get the intense tastes in such foods) doesn't realize. Thus you have all sorts of warnings and caveats. But rotisserie chicken is good, go ahead and have it, just not every meal every day for years.
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The sodium thing has come up before.
It's slightly more precise to say that Science™ says that diets high in sodium are correlated with higher blood pressure, and chronic hypertension is bad for you. There are some sodium low or non-responders and some sodium super responders with respect to blood pressure. it's not fully conclusive that sodium independent of high blood pressure is bad for you.
There's also a difference in what is bad for you in the sports performance and bad for you in the longevity sense.
The transient effect of higher sodium intake is higher volumes of plasma. This is beneficial for endurance, power production, and heat adaptation. In fact, increased plasma volumes are the main immediate adaptation from endurance or heat adaptation training. Arguably cardio training is not "bad for you" but the first order transient effect is the same as increased sodium intake.
In the steady state, provided you are drinking enough water your body (partially) compensates for increased sodium consumption by increasing sodium excretion. There is still a chronic elevation of blood pressure with higher sodium intakes, but it's much smaller than the transient effects reported in most of the literature. Worth noting is a bit of a methodological puzzle. Food logs are notoriously inaccurate for tracing micronutrients like sodium. Excluding the Mars500 study, you mostly can't lock people up in a room and give them calibrated meals for long enough to see the steady state effect on blood pressure. Because of this most long term sodium studies are looking at urinary sodium, assuming higher urinary sodium corresponds to higher intake. This is probably true, but the real question is: if the human body has the ability to compensate for increased sodium consumption with higher excretion, what is the mechanism by which it increases blood pressure in homeostasis? Like, why doesn't your serum sodium just return to normal levels once your body starts excreting more?
Anyway, if you feel flat all the time and it's affecting your sports performance, consider you might be a salty sweater, and either measure or try modest intakes of electrolytes (don't forget about calcium, magnesium, and potassium as well just loading up on sodium will throw your electrolytes out of whack). If you have chronic hypertension, maybe talk to your physician about blood pressure medication. Modern generation medications are very effective and in practice far easier to control than ultra-low sodium diets, especially if you are eating prepared foods like rotisserie chicken.
The Science™ is probably correct that if it's driving up your blood pressure high sodium is bad for you. But medication and body-weight/metabolic disease management are probably significantly larger factors in the steady state.
This is the sort of high-quality motte post about random topics I've never thought about that I love to see. Thank you.
I have a meta-comment, however, about themotte: I wonder how dangerous high quality posts like this are that are outside my area of expertise?
What I mean by that is that I don't have enough background knowledge to fully judge the accuracy of this post. I will probably make future decisions based on this information though. And I suspect that there are enough well written posts like this that contain enough not-quite-perfectly-accurate statements that I will make suboptimal decisions in the future based on motte comments that I thought were correct but turned out not to be. And I wonder what the cumulative negative effects of this will be on my life.
you would love the new Asterisk Mag post on painkillers, basic information but still pretty good.
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The common version of that is called Gell-Mann Amnesia. Unfortunately, there aren't great ways to avoid it.
Dell-Mann Amnesia is related. But the effect I'm thinking about / worried about is different.
I had Dell-Mann Amnesia once. Once I upgraded my laptop the symptoms stopped though.
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My first thought when I read "alpha gal" is that it's a cringey synonym for "girlboss" and I am always slightly confused by things like "wasteful spending bill without girlbosses".
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One of the longest living populations in the world subsists on cigarettes, wine, prossecco, prosciutto, salami and aged cheese ...
As long as your kidneys are ok and you drink a lot of water - salt is not really an issue.
The Blue Zones might simply be bad record keeping and pension fraud.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3
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Maybe not die but it will wreck your performance.
I posted a few weeks ago about how I just do not have a thirst reflex (anymore?) and I've been giving myself headaches from distance runs pretty reliably by not hydrating enough.
I finally started taking a vest with built in flasks with me (that I fill with salt water) and it's been a night and day change. Better performance, better feeling afterwards.
Even on cool days.
Exercise-induced hyponatremia is a thing, and deaths from it aren't unheard of. If you're sweating a lot and drinking straight water, I'd strongly consider some sort of electrolyte supplement.
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The difference is that you're actually doing stuff. I was not exaggerating about warming a bench. And the day that he said that was not particularly hot.
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If I am preparing a meal and one of the ingredients is salty then I add less salt. If all of my ingredients are salty then I go to the grocery store to restock on fresh produce. Easy enough.
I sweat so much on hot summer days, even just standing outside, that I will get dizzy without some source of electrolytes, whether gatorade, jerky, or something else. Other people don't seem to have this problem and I envy them.
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Drink more water and a high-sodium diet (within reason) is not a problem.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I drank water. I’m a huge milk, apple juice and soda drinker. I can’t drink beverages like Gatorade. I’m a fiend in general for taste and high sugar and salt items.
Whenever I eat at work, I always try to have my hamburger or pizza or whatever it is, drenched in butter all over, or I’ll grab like 29 packets of salt and 5 of ketchup. Just how I’ve always been.
Is the soda diet? I probably drink 4-6 glasses of water a day. Maybe more. You would be running 1k+ calories per day on mostly sugar water if it’s not diet pop. Unless you are 6 years old I can’t see someone have the metabolism to handle that amount of calories from beverages. Sugar water of course tastes phenomenol but that is primarily because it’s dense in calories and humans evolved in often starving conditions. In a world of plentiful food and sedentary lifestyle we just aren’t designed for abundant sugary drinks.
No, it’s regular. I can’t drink diet anything. I desire intense flavor in food and drinks. I kill on average between 4-10 bottles of regular soda a day at work, and then continue drinking cans of it outside of work, and then milk usually during dinner time and dessert.
My weight hovers between 160lbs and 170lb. I’ve eaten so much I’ve gone over 170 very slightly and then the next morning I go right back down to 165 or so; and I’m a tall man. It just felt like my metabolism would instantly crush it. But the weight doesn’t stay no matter how hard I try to gain it. I can’t stay feeling full longer than 15-30 minutes at a time usually before I feel hungry again.
Some things I just can’t eat because like I’ve said, I’ll feel anemic and fatigued the whole day. Salads are one of them. I hate salads. If I’d already eaten the meat and potatoes and everything else out of the fridge, I remember I’d go into the cupboards, dig out an unopened container of chocolate frosting, scoop all of it into a bowl, put it in the microwave and eat all of it with a spoon. Yeah, empty calories but gave me a momentary energy boost.
When my mother would go grocery shopping for our family as kids, she’d do regular grocery shopping for all of us, and then she’d do grocery shopping just for me, so we always spent more than the average family. My friends always said I had the diet of a 10 year old kid. A lot of times though I skip out on meals here and there just to stay more in line with everyone else but I’m starving inside when I do that.
My father made this point to me once. He argued back in hunter-gatherer times nature would select ‘against’ people like me from existing because I’d be the guy who ends up killing the whole tribe by starving them of all their food to satisfy my own hunger and would wind up being exiled to die in isolation. And if I survived that I’d probably end up getting killed from raiding all the neighboring tribes for their food. Thats why there isn’t many people like us. But every now and then I suppose nature as a hiccup from its evolutionary past.
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Ok this post combined with this post and now I'm sure you should undergo some sort of study. Below you mention a "metabolic" issue. What is the issue, if you don't mind writing it out? If you do mind, no problem.
MCAD deficiency. Essentially it’s a rare disorder that impacts the body’s ability to break down fats but also store them. It also greatly impacts low blood glucose/sugar levels and is a known cause of sudden infant death syndrome when it’s not detected. Mine wasn’t detected until very early adulthood.
Explains the metabolic part. No idea how that ties in with the sleeping part.
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Is it easier to hop over you than walk around? This diet of yours doesn't sound too healthy.
My diet isn’t healthy but when my family tried putting me on such a diet as a child, I’d feel anemic and fatigued all the time. When I went back to my normal (and unfortunately unhealthy) eating habits I instantly regained my energy.
And no. I’m not fat at all. I’m taller than average and very slender. I can’t gain weight very well due to a metabolic disorder I have.
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Club soda or sugary crap?
Sugary crap.
Considering typical American diet, you probably have optimal genetics. Obesity epidemic is over if people have your genes.
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I disagree with the Science. I am active and sweat profusely and do not fear sodium. I avoid most premade foods (for all the other crap in them), so I'm not worried that I'll somehow get too much sodium in the few I do eat.
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