[CKD] Sodium/Potassium question

[Big Dog]

I am not a physiologist, biologist or any other type of -ologist so i am at a severe disadvantage in these areas.

I have been feeling very bloated the last couple days. I have been trying to figure out the interaction between sodium and potassium.

Will too much sodium make me bloated or will too little sodium?

I checked fitday and i am averageing about 4700 mg of sodium a day. Is that high? Also i am averaging 2.3 grams of potassium and taking another 99mg tablet. Should i increase my potassium intake?


About the only other thing i have changed this week is that i increased my glutamine intake now that i have powder and i am drinking one extra protein shake per day.

thanks for any info.

[west_on_46]

Your sodium sounds awfully high to me. The RDA is 2400 mg of sodium and 3500 mg of potassium. From what I understand, potassium is the one where you have to make the effort to hit that minimum. Sodium, on the other hand, actually requires an effort to keep down (with today's salted foods anyway). A ketogenic diet is likely to require extra potassium as well, because more of it is lost in the urine as insulin drops (it's related to aldosterone, an antidiuretic hormone).

This depends on how much you sweat though - sweating is a major route of sodium loss.

[Big Dog]

i sweat ALOT when i work out, but still it looks as if i am doubling the RDA for sodium. Will excess sodium prevent ketosis?

[west_on_46]

No, sodium and ketosis are entirely different.

The story with sodium is kind of convoluted. I've read compelling arguments that it's not the exact amount but what the particular person is used to eating day in - day out. In other words, if I eat 1500 mg and you eat 4500 mg, our bodies will be excreting respectively different amounts of sodium but the amount retained would be about the same. So in a way I was kind of hesitant to tell you that you're eating too much; still though, 4700 mg sounds too high to me.

On water retention in general I have a couple of crack personal theories, so here goes some thinking out loud...

Sodium is only one of the moving parts in the lovely phenomenon known as water retention. There are many more. Some of them are not at all related to electrolytes but to circulation instead. Can't point a finger to a specific page in a book but it sounds familiar that if a circulation through tissue is poor, the fluid will tend to accumulate in that area because slow blood flow allows for more leakage from the vessels. Conversely, fast blood flow removes excess fluid as the pressure reverses following Bernoulli's law.

I'm also interested to hear if other people have found what I've found: that high-volume weight training is very effective at minimising subcutaneous water. This kind of makes sense considering that high-volume training places a high oxygen demand on the working muscle (more so than high-resistance training, which is nearly completely anaerobic) and the capillary bed in that muscle dilates, thus creating more room in the circulation and "sucking in" more water from the interstitial tissues. I guess this occurred to me whenever I'd be getting mad thirsty from doing squats and not so from, let's say, shoulders - since squats work more muscle mass, this creates a larger water shift, and one of the triggers for thirst sensation is drop in blood pressure, which is related to volume.

Cardio is capable of doing this too but one typically does not load the muscle as much for duration's sake. However, cardio is known to release neurotransmitters to modify blood pressure and flow - to expand the major arteries to deliver more blood, the other - expand vessels near the skin to radiate more heat; all this improves circulation and can contribute to getting excess water from under your skin.

Am I being a danger to myself and others with all this babbling? ;)

[Big Dog]

Well i think i will try to get my sodium intake down to around 3000mg per day. Also i am going to try and raise my potassium intake.

[Big Dog]

I found a minor flaw in my calculations. It seems that the hardboiled egg i was using from fitday had sodium added to it. about 150 mgs. Since i dont salt my eggs while cooking or eating them I created a custom egg with only 70 mg of sodium (best number i could find to use) so that should lower my dialy intake.

There are days when i eat 6 eggs so i should now be a little below 4000 mg per day on average.

[Big Dog]

geez found another problem, the steak that i selected on Fitday had over 1 gram of table salt added for a 4 oz serving.

I never add any salt to my steak when cooking or eating so i got rid of that too.

In reality it looks like i have been averaging closer to 3500 mg per day which is much more acceptable to me.