What are electrolytes?
uniqueid198x @ uniqueid198x @lemmy.dbzer0.com Posts 2Comments 253Joined 2 yr. ago
uniqueid198x @ uniqueid198x @lemmy.dbzer0.com
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Much more effective, yes. Although endurance athletes do benefit from all that sugar, too. But if you are playing sports - Pedialyte is much better
Welcome!
Eh, anything that close to what your blood is at normal levels works out pretty well. Liquid IV and LMNT and so forth do pretty well... But depending on your activity, acclimation, and the temp, you might need several packets to make up. I run, so I am very acclimated, and that makes your sweat more. So in summer when I do multi day hikes, I take electrolyte tablets with me. It can really sneak up, so just swallowing a salt tablet makes it a lot easier to balance.
Here's a thorough (long) video by Gear Skeptic where he breaks down a lot of this within the frame of through hiking (usually 100+ miles) https://youtu.be/pcowqiG-E2A
Welcome!
I actually take electrolyte tablets with me when I hike. Hyponatremia (having dangerously low salt levels) can really sneak up on you when you are hiking in the heat for four or five days straight. You keep hydrated, but there just isn't enough salt in your food to replace what you lose. Dropping a straight tablet of salt can really help balance that
Effectively, yes. "Electrolytes" is a collective term for the ions that help move stuff into and out of your cells. These are primarily sodium and potassium, although calcium also plays a role. Sodium is the most important of these for sports drinks, because it is the one you most lose through sweat.
Unfortunately, most sports drinks don't really contain enough to balance out heavy sweating, because sodium salt (aka normal salt) tastes, unsurprisingly, salty. If a drink had the right balance of sodium, it would be noticeably salty. Gatorade has one line of drinks that do that, and Pedialyte is specially made for the correct balance. Sports drinks really jack up the sugar to help hide the salt taste.
Most sports drinks, rather than having the sodium you need to replace sweat, instead jack up the potassium (think Prime and it's advertised 843mg of electrolytes, 700mg of which is potassium). This doesn't really replace the electrolytes you need, but it also doesn't make the drink nearly as salty.
When you see "electrolytes", you should flip around to the nutrition label, which must list the actual amounts of sodium and potassium. This will tell you if it will actually help you recover from activity, or if it's just more sugar water and advertising.
Edited to add:
why is sodium so important? Because your cells use a mechanism called "osmosis" to move water back and forth. Water molecules naturally move from areas of high concentration to areas of lower concentration. In the cell, this means that water will go in to the cell if the inside of the cell has more sodium than the outside, and leave the cell when the outside has more than the inside.
When you sweat, two things happen: you lose water and you lose sodium you lose more water than sodium, so your blood becomes saltier. Water moves from inside your cells to your blood; this is what it means to be "dehydrated". To counter it, you need to dilute your blood and increase the amount of sodium in your cells. Hence, drinking water with sodium can help replenish both and speed recovery from dehydration.
In new homes, they can be fitted with heat pump water heaters, or electric resistance. Heat pumps are fairly efficient, but need the house to be designed with that in mind. Electric is less so, but can use very small spaces and be retrofited as well.
You're not wrong about that at all. I thought about making a Wayland WM TM around that idea, but programming is work and not fun now so ¯(ツ)_/¯
I've been reading that the k-Pg is found in the Deccan traps, suggesting that the eruptions had already been going on at the time of the chicxulub impact. So, no consensus on a relationship there. But the geoid low being related is an interesting suggestion!
That meta study is actually quite interesting as a source for specific data. For instance, this paper found that the swedish helmet law had low effect on head injuries because it causes low risk cyclists to stop cycling.
This paper demonstrates that a safety-in-numbers effect exists for cycling, suggesting that we have policy which encourages more cycling.
What most of the sources cited demonstrate, and which I haven't contested because its pretty self evident, is that out of people admitted to the emergency department of a hospital, those who where wearing helmets had less head injury.
That meta study, and most of the cited studies, does not account for the injury rate for time spent by cyclists, or the total number of cyclists on the road. As seen in studies linked elsewhere in this thread, helmet laws do have an impact on those metrics also, and can be detrimental to the safety in numbers effect.
I've been using paperwm on gnome for a couple years now, it's my preferred paradigm for tiling. This looks like it has a lot of the same influences, so I'm interested in seeing where it goes
Yes, it's calculated across the population, it's an epidemiological study. That is, for every million hours the population as a whole spent driving, there where 0.46 head injuries (as an average). For every million hours the population as a whole spent cycling, there were 0.41 head injuries. This was before the helmet law went in to place. This means that, on a time sent basis, you where slightly more likely to receive a head injury in an automobile than on a bike. Your math would be correct, but the probabilities you listed are not those the study found.
Meanwhile, this study found that whole helmet use in Victoria and NSW increased from roughly 30% to roughly 75%, the proportion of head injuries only dropped by 13%. On the other hand, ridership declined after the helmet laws.
Raising more questions, during the same time period, the proportion of head injuries amongst pedestrians also declined by about the same amount, indicating that helmets may have partial or no responsibility for the decline.
Again, the available data suggests that without helmets, the rate of head injury stays in line with cars and walking, and with helmets, the rate stays in line with cars and walking.
I think I see what you are getting at... We need to look at the rate of injury per use. In traveling, we may want to look at travel times. From the article I mentioned:
Risk of head injury per million hours travelled
Cyclist - 0.41
Pedestrian - 0.80
Motor vehicle occupant - 0.46
Motorcyclist - 7.66
Which would you say is more dangerous? Those are probably the ones that should have mandatory helmets laws, no?
It's not really an either/or. In order to get investment in infrastructure, there needs to be interest in cycling. This means removing barriers where present. A great example of this is in bike shares. New York City introduced a bike share in the early 2000s, and that helped to increase ridership. Increased ridership lead to the construction of miles of inner city separated bike lane.
The Melbourne bike share had consistently low ridership, and was abandoned entirely in 2019. They explicitly cited the helmet law as the reason.. In Brisbane, 85% of people said the helmet law was why they didn't use the bike share.
If we want to increase actual cyclist safety, we desperately need the infrastructure, but for the infrastructure we need cyclists. One of the best methods for getting more cyclists doesn't work in Australia. Maybe that should change.
The article linked at the beginning of this thread lays out a good overview of the available research. This includes causes of head injury hospital visits, over half of which were from driving.
Well, it shows that either all places in the data set have universal helmet use (they don't) or that helmet use is not the dominating factor. Further, informing policy, is suggests that it would be better to mandate helmet use for the more dangerous modes such as walking and driving, and focus enforcement there
It's true, to get the best data, we need a common denominator, which is just not available. The initial post of this thread was pointing out that the studies all around are weak, including the study that lead to mandatory helmets use policy. What information we do have is suggesting that more ridership results in better infrastructure which results in less injuries over all
Since what you really need to replace is sodium, you could just make salt water. But there are a lot of products that make it easier My preferred are Salt Stick caps... It's a tablet so you don't need to taste it at all