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.
No email address required.
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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