While almost everyone agrees you should consume WATER during fasting, the argument surrounding SALT is dangerously misunderstood.
►The Salt and Electrolyte Mix I Take: https://bit.ly/Fasting-Electrolytes

In this video we explain what electrolytes really are and how they work, how fasting impacts sodium, and how you can use salt to support your fat loss and health during fasting.

Please remember to see a doctor if you plan to fast longer than 24 hours! That initial blood work is critical to your safety :)

While I only ever fast for a few days at most to maintain peak physical performance, the information in this video can apply to both longer prolonged and extended fasting and shorter intermittent fasting as well.

So what’s the verdict? Is consuming salt in your water during a water fast a good idea? Is it ok to consume salt when fasting? Beyond just being ok to consume, could it actually be important to consume? Or on the flip side, could consuming salt during fasting be hurting our weight loss or health.

Salts are minerals which are comprised of positive and negative ions, joined together in solid form the charges cancel eachother out.

When they dissolve in a liquid solvent though, the stable combination of positive and negative breaks apart. These individual electrolytes carry their positive or negative charge as they float around separately.

So in this case with electrolytes which are dissolved in the liquid of your body.

Something key to understand about water is it will always be attracted to areas with a higher concentrations of these dissolved solutes.

At some point very early on, the bodies of early organisms figured out that the world around us is filled with these minerals, so as long as we ingest them, and transport the right minerals to the right places, we can use water’s attraction to them to in turn control our water balance in different compartments.

By adjusting the concentration of these positive and negatively charged solutes, which we call electrolytes, compartments can control their fluid balance through what is called osmotic pressure. A type of cell which needs less water can structure itself so it contains less of these electrolytes, a cell which needs more water, will contain more.

In extracellular spaces, the spaces outside of cells, which includes the blood and fluid around the brain, it is the positively charged sodium and negatively charged Chloride electrolytes which control the water levels.

Within cellular spaces, it is positively charged potassium and negatively charged phosphate.

Electrolytes also maintain an acid-base balance in our body, ensuring we don’t become too acidic or too basic.

Just as important though, they are also directly necessary for the generation of action potentials. Any time a signal is sent through a nerve, whether it be a thought in our brain a beat of our heart or a muscle flex, it is these positive and negatively charged electrolytes which are used to generate and transmit the signal.

In the extracellular fluid sodium accounts for 90-95% of the solute. In other words, it is sodium which is primarily responsible for keeping water in the blood, cerebrospinal fluid, and all the other areas between cells which don’t have direct access to a blood vessel. Now you know why that time you cut your mouth, the blood tasted salty.

So if sodium is keeping fluid in these spaces, that should mean that without sodium, water would have no reason to stay in these spaces. Worse yet, since the inside of the cells contain their own solutes, if there was no solute outside the cell, all the water would force its way into the cells.

Sodium levels are measured by sampling the blood, the healthy range is between 134-145 milliequivalents per liter. The term used by doctors when sodium levels get too low is Hyponatremia, and it occurs when the sodium levels in your blood fall below 135 mEq/L.

If levels drop below healthy levels and into hyponatremia, water begins leaving these extracellular spaces, this reduces the supply of blood and the fluid around the brain, as well as the fluid between cells. This loss of water from these important areas is called hypovolemia.

And remember all this water though needs somewhere to go, so it begins forcing into cells. Pushing them beyond their capacity stressing their membranes.

If levels drop below 124 a patient becomes severely hyponatremic, at which point death will eventually occur as cells begin bursting under the osmotic pressure of water leaving these spaces and pushing inside.

As it turns out, fasting is especially detrimental to sodium levels. During the onset of a water fast, a phenomenon occurs where the body actually goes into a steep negative sodium balance, excreting large amounts of sodium in the urine, far more sodium than you would lose if you simply cut your intake down to 0.

Thank you to Dr. Alan Goldhamer for explaining why he is known to not administer salt during fasts.