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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3276 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 26, 2026

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Absolute nonsense. The amount of minerals in water is very minimal, and most of what is there is sodium, which people generally have too much of.

Calcium and Magnesium are the two you might miss, and see below for how jack shit nothing it'd take to replace that with food. The health crazies conflate that pure water leaches minerals out of things (true) with the amount being relevant (false). You have plenty of minerals to spare in your body.

Below stats are for typical tap water. Double them if you have hard water.

The target is just two numbers: 120 mg calcium and 47 mg magnesium. Everything else the water gives you is nutritionally negligible, so ignore it.

Best single food: chia seeds, 19 g (90 kcal) — 120 mg calcium, 64 mg magnesium. Overshoots magnesium slightly, hits calcium exactly. Sesame seeds do it in even less mass (12 g, 70 kcal) but come with a bioavailability problem, below.

Best two-food pairing: 10 g parmesan + 9 g pumpkin seeds (90 kcal, 19 g total). Splits the job cleanly — the cheese covers calcium at 118 mg, the seeds cover magnesium at ~47 mg.

Calorie-minimal: 100 g skim milk + 6 g wheat bran (46 kcal). Milk delivers the 120 mg calcium in 34 kcal with dairy-grade absorption; bran is the densest magnesium source that exists at 610 mg/100 g, so 6 g covers 37 mg and the milk supplies the remaining 11 mg.

So: roughly a tablespoon of seeds, or a splash of milk and a spoonful of bran. Under 100 kcal any way you slice it, often under 50.

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