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:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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/
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link