Location Taken: Chaplin Lake, Saskatchewan
Time Taken: June 2010
Did you ever think about how amazing salt is?!
It’s tasty, it’s plentiful, and it’s necessary for life!
Did you know if you don’t get enough salt in your diet, things can really get messed up? Especially if you combine it with drinking a lot of water. It’s called water intoxication, and if it goes too far it can be fatal. An imbalance in the various electrolytes in your system can lead to water literally flooding into your cells to try to restore the balance, which works about as well as you’d expect.
It’s pretty rare to actually encounter water intoxication these days. Most people have too much salt in their diet rather than too little, and most of what they drink contains plenty of tasty electrolytes of varying sorts. But if you tend to cook from basic ingredients (like I do) and drink a lot of water (like I do), you have to keep an eye on your salt intake. Especially if, say, you get sick with a cold that includes a cough, and you find drinking extra water quells the cough for a while, so you drink gallons each day. The first signs that something’s out of balance is a general absent-mindedness, a small headache, and a touch of dizziness. Not that I’ve had recent first-hand experience with such things, not at all…
Luckily, if you catch it, low level water intoxication’s pretty easy to fix. Just add more salt and electrolytes to your diet to bring things back in balance. It’s amazing how fast it works…
