 Hey everybody, Dr. O here, welcome to chapter 12, excuse me, on water and the major minerals. So this is like a few of the other chapters where I will cover it in really good detail, but if you want to go one step further, I already have a whole video series on fluid and electrolyte balance, and your electrolytes are going to be some of the major minerals we talk about today, like sodium, potassium, magnesium, et cetera. So I've gone into great detail on why we need water and how we maintain fluid balance and then how we maintain electrolyte balance in other places. So I'll cover a lot of ground here, but I will be sharing in the course, I'll be sharing extra resources with you, and if you're not in the course, then just look for the fluid electrolyte and acid-base balance playlist. Okay, so let's dive in. So we're talking about water and the minerals, you know, the first thing I think about is their relationship, right? So we know we need water, right? We're basically a bag of water. The 50 to 70% of our body is water depending on lean mass, so the number one ingredient to make a human being is water. But so we'll talk about fluid balance, which is balancing your water gains with your water losses. We'll talk about ways to know if you're doing that, but the electrolyte balance is critically important as well because, yeah, how much you drink versus how much you pee and how much you sweat, that will determine how much water is in your body, but the electrolytes you consume will determine where the water is. So we'll talk about how much water you should have, where it should be, and then how we can influence that by, for example, eating less sodium and more potassium, those types of things. Okay, so water, I mean, water is just critically, critically important, so we'll go through all those details there. I also want to give you some hints to know maybe how much water you should be consuming in a day and should you be using electrolyte drinks or should you just be drinking water? Well, we'll talk about those things. It'll also tie in to chapter 14 on sports performance as well. Okay, so what is your beverage of choice? What does that beverage do to maintain your body's fluid balance? So obviously there's lots of things we can drink, you know, water is generally your best beverage. There are other beverages that are good, right? The only real downside with most other beverages is they are calorie containing. So if you're trying to limit your calorie intake because you're trying to lose weight or you're struggling to maintain weight, one of the first things I would tell you to do is to stop drinking your calories because, you know, if you drink a couple of hundred calories, you get a couple of hundred calories, but not much satiety at all comes from that, not the feeling of fullness, right? So that's generally one thing to keep in mind, but there are tons of beverages that are really good for you. So here we see milk, you know, milk can be a, is a really good source of calcium, it's a good source of protein, you know, you can turn milk into other things like you see there. So coffee, coffee is my kind of life support in the morning. You know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it's as good as water, but one, so of course, the majority of what I drink is water and I'll kind of talk about when I drink it as well. I'm actually a really big fan of drinking most of my liquids, most of my water between meals, so we'll talk about that. So, you know, using the first thing in the morning, I will consume a couple of big glasses of water and then I like to consume quite a bit of water between meals, but I do have some, some coffee and other beverages. One thing about coffee is it kind of has a bad reputation as being a diuretic and it is, but it still leads to a net gain and fluid balance. So let's say, you know, and so water, let's say you drink eight ounces of coffee, well, even if coffee still has a relatively powerful diuretic effect on you, you're still going to be getting a net gain of maybe four ounces of water. But you can go to, I've looked at WebMD, I've looked at the Mayo Clinic's website, they talk about these things. Coffee is a diuretic when you first get, when you first start consuming it, but your body adapts and your body gets used to things to the point where, you know, once you're adapted to consuming coffee, it's, it's really not much of a diuretic and there still is a net gain of water. So maybe I'm just defending my coffee habits and I can do a whole separate video on coffee at some point because it has powerful antioxidants, it increases autophagy, most observational studies actually show that heavy coffee drinkers are healthier than people that don't consume coffee. Mainly because people that don't consume coffee are probably more likely to be consuming soda and things like that. All right, so coffee is my beverage of choice, but, but truly water is still the majority of what I drink and what the majority of what anyone should drink. That's why if somebody asks me, you know, should I, you know, I want to stop drinking or I, should I be drinking diet soda or should I be drinking juice or should I be drinking this or that? The question is really instead of what, right? If someone says, should I switch from drinking coke to diet coke? Well, the best thing to do is to switch from drinking coke to water, but switching from coke to diet coke might be the, might be a really great stepping point for you. So long, long discussion, lots of nuance like everything else in nutrition. All right, but you think about that for yourself. So in this chapter, explain how the body regulates fluid balance, list some of the ways minerals differ from vitamins and other nutrients. We've talked about that some in our vitamin chapters and in chapter one, but we'll do it again here. Identify the main roles, deficiency symptoms, and food sources for each of the major minerals, which are sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, and sulfate. So major minerals you see, it has to do with how much you need in a day and how much is in your body. So we have major minerals and trace minerals, just like we had, we had water soluble vitamins and fat soluble vitamins, the two categories of vitamins. We have two categories of minerals, but the, the main difference here is that major minerals, you need, you need at least 100 milligrams a day of them and some quite more and there's a large pool of them in your body, or at least there's quite a bit more than compared to the trace minerals. Trace minerals you need less than 100 milligrams a day and there's less in your body. So for, or really we're just talking about, yeah, so you look at like iron, for example, super, super important, but you only need, you know, 14, 16, 18 milligrams of it a day, whereas calcium, you should be looking at getting 1,000 milligrams, give or take a day. So that's going to be the major difference. It's amounts not importance when it comes to major versus trace minerals. We'll cover the trace minerals in the next chapter. All right, water and your body fluids. Let's dive in. So water constitutes about 60% of an adult's body weight. I mentioned earlier 50 to 70%, depending on lean mass. So if you, if you have less muscle mass and more body fat, you'll be closer to the 50% range. If you have more muscle and less body fat, you'll be closer to the 70%, but 60% is a fine number. So that means you're close to two thirds water. So you see it's higher in children because of their, their, their size distribution and less, it's usually lower in females and lower in the elderly because of less mass. So again, a female with more, less lean mass, sorry, a female with more lean mass would have more water. So it's not just a typical female compared to a typical male. All right, Kerry's nutrients and ways. There's just a long list of functions, right? I like to call, I like to call these the life giving properties of water. It's something we cover when we look at the basic biochemistry of water, but water has these special bonds, you know, called hydrogen bonds that make it behave really oddly, right? If you look at, if you look at the formula for water, its structure and its weight, it should boil at a much lower temperature and it should be different than it is, but these hydrogen bonds give water what I like to call the life giving properties. And that's because if water didn't behave like water, then life wouldn't be here, right? We just, just a few examples. Hydrogen bonds are what allow water to be carried against gravity in plants. So if we, you know, if we didn't have moisture evaporating or transpiring out of leaves, then we wouldn't have water being pulled up tree trunks or being pulled up plants and we wouldn't have plants that were off of the ground. When, one of the biggest ones, we'll call, we'll talk about water as the universal solvent. One of my favorite ones is the fact that ice floats, like how weird is that? That a solid is less dense than a liquid. So what happens is if you watch water freeze, it starts to shrink and then these hydrogen bonds cause it to swell. So, so solid water or ice is less dense than liquid water, water. So why does that matter? So who cares if your, your ice cubes float in the top of your, your drink or not? Well, the key there is since water floats, it freezes from the top down. So during the winter, our bodies of water freeze from the top down and that actually insulates the water underneath it. And protects all the things that are living there. If water didn't do that, if water froze from the bottom up, then we would not have aquatic, aquatic ecosystems and food webs and, and life really wouldn't exist. So that's, you know, think about like, if our oceans were to freeze, right? It is a, you know, just, that's one of the big, big no-no. Water also just, it can transport heat in ways that you wouldn't expect. And look at how hard it is to get that water to boil when you want to make some mac and cheese or something. You have to pour a ton of energy into water to break all those hydrogen bonds in order to turn it into steam, to start to, to start to get water to boil. So that means that, you know, think about our, our planet is what two thirds water give or take and 70% really. And this water absorbs a bunch of heat during the summer. So it doesn't get too hot. And then it releases heat during the winter. So it doesn't get too cold. I'd imagine if the temperature range on the planet was from 200 degrees to minus 200 degrees, clearly not compatible with life. Which again is why I call them the life-giving properties of water. If water wasn't so special, then life wouldn't exist. And that's why you look at, you know, when we're looking at other planets, we're looking for signs of life. What are we really looking for? Like on Mars, we talk about, oh, it looks like there used to be water there, which is why we think that life could have existed there. These, these types of things. All right, so what are some other things water does? So it carries nutrients and waste products. Anything in your body that is water soluble can be dissolved in water. That's why there, that's why it's called water soluble. So water is the main way that we transport nutrients and waste products. And that's why most of your blood, you know, about 92% of your blood is going to be water. That's gonna be the plasma in your blood. And that's what carries things to and fro. Helps maintain the structure of large molecules, participates in metabolic reactions. We've talked a ton about condensation reactions, how you remove water when you build substances and hydrolysis reactions, how you use water to split larger things apart. It serves as a solvent. Water's called the universal solvent. So in, in living things like us, water is the solvent. So what is a solvent? A solvent is a dissolving substance. It allows other things to be dissolved in it. So that's how we carry nutrients and waste products. So you look at a solution. A solution is one solvent, which in this case is water, plus one or more solutes. So I always use Kool-Aid as the example, right? So if Kool-Aid is a solution, then the solvent is water because it's in the highest amount, right? You don't chew your Kool-Aid. So the solvent is water. The solutes would be the Kool-Aid powder from the packet and the sugar. Those would be the solutes. Well, your body is just one big solution and water is the universal solvent. Things that can't be carried directly in water because they're made of oil or lipids, remember oil and water don't mix, they're going to be carried on transporters. So like the cholesterol we talked about a couple of chapters ago is carried on LDL, the low density lipoprotein and or HDL, high density. Those are a couple of examples. Okay, acts as a lubricant and a cushion. So think about water lubricating your joints and cushioning parts of your body. Aids in the regulation of body temperature. So we think of your skin and your blood is basically like a radiator system. It can store heat when it gets cold around you and it can release heat when it gets hot around you. So it's a major, major player there and maintains blood volume. So if you're losing water, then that will affect your blood volume, which is why if you get severely dehydrated, it can cause your blood pressure to go down, your blood volume to go down, your heart rate to go up, all these scary things. All right. So the distribution and movement of body fluids. So we talked about how you are made of 60% water give or take, but where is it? So we have the fluid inside our cells. You see there it's called intracellular fluid. Is the fluid inside your cells? See it labeled there in the yellow cell. We are about 2 thirds of our body water should be inside our cells and we'll talk about how it stays there. Then we have interstitial fluid is the fluid that's between your cells. So if we have, so that's gonna be, so all the fluid that's between our individual cells is called interstitial fluid. That's the fluid that becomes like lymphatic fluid and those kinds of things in the human body. Then we have extracellular fluid which is all the fluid outside of your cells. That's gonna be about 1 third of your body water. And then a category of extracellular fluid is going to be intravascular fluid, the fluid inside your or within your blood vessels. So you see here blood plasma or intravascular fluid is an example of an extracellular fluid and so is interstitial fluid, the fluid between your cells. So just a quick reminder of how important this stuff is clinically. If you have too little blood plasma, then your blood volume and blood pressure will go down. If you have too much blood plasma, your blood volume and blood pressure will go up. Where your body water is can determine blood pressure and that's why you'll see that diets that are designed to lower blood pressure actually move where our body water is. We'll cover that later. And then if you have too much interstitial fluid, that's edema. So maybe you eat a salty meal, you eat pretzels or something, maybe your face pops up, maybe your ring doesn't fit right, maybe your ankles swell. That's edema. That's your collecting too much interstitial fluid and that can be caused by lots of clinical conditions. Okay. Some basic terminology there. So now we're talking about electrolyte balance, which electrolyte balance is, you'll see that we have electrolytes that are supposed to be inside our cells and outside of our cells and that's very important because we really can't control where water goes in our body. We can just control how much there is. The electrolytes you consume will either drive water into your cells or drive water outside of your cells and that's why the amount of these electrolytes that you consume is super important. And that's because that first point there, electrolytes attract water. So if we want to move water, we change the number of electrolytes in a solution, in this case us, and that will shift water, hopefully the direction we want it to go. But most of us consume diets that shift water the wrong direction. Just a real quick example and we'll cover it in more detail. Most people consume too much sodium, which you see here outside the cells, too little magnesium and too little potassium. So what's the problem with that? Well, if two thirds of our body water is supposed to be inside of our cells, but we're not consuming the electrolytes that would suck water into the cells, while we're consuming too much electrolyte that sucks water out of the cells, then we will have less intracellular fluid and more extracellular fluid, which is why that diet, a diet low in potassium and magnesium and high in sodium, would lead to increased blood volume and high blood pressure, which almost the majority of American adults have. And then it would also lead to more interstitial fluids and more edema. So basically hypertension, one of the most important things to deal with as far as keeping yourself healthy. And the amount of these electrolytes you consume is a major player. So we'll come back to that. All right, the electrolytes that are predominantly outside the cell are sodium, chloride and calcium. The electrolytes, excuse me, that are predominantly inside the cell are potassium, magnesium, phosphate and sulfate. And like with the vitamins and the other minerals, we won't talk about all these equally because some of them like phosphates, it's super, super important. But if you're eating protein, then you don't have to worry about it. Same thing with really the sulfur based compounds. So we'll mainly focus on the ones that are harder to get. And I would make an argument that magnesium is one of the hardest nutrients to find for someone eating a typical diet. All right, cell membranes are selectively permeable, which that's the definition of osmosis is the movement of water across a selectively permeable membrane. So it allows the passage of some molecules. That's where you see like the potassium, calcium, these kinds of things. They should stay where they are, inside or outside the cells. So since they're not moving much, water's gonna move instead. And that's why you control where your body water is by which electrolytes you're consuming. Oh, a term here we didn't talk about yet. Notice that the green ones are called cations. And the orange ones are called anions. So cations are positive ions and they'd be on the left-hand side of the periodic table. And anions are negative ions and they'd be on the right-hand side of the periodic table. All right, we talked about this. Water dissolves salts and follows electrolytes. We covered those two things. Remember, water is a dissolving substance. That's what makes it an electrolyte. All right, sorry, that's what makes it the solvent. And then we talked about how the electrolytes you consume will draw water towards them. So negatively charged electrons are near the oxygen atom. You see that here. And that's the whole thing about these dipole-dipole interactions. So there's gonna be more electrons on the oxygen side of a water molecule than on the hydrogen side. And that's why that you have a partial negative charge. So you see more of these negative electrons on one side, less on the other. So the negatively charged electrons that bond the hydrogens to the oxygen spend most of their time near the oxygen atom. We just said that as a result, the oxygen is slightly negative and the hydrogens are slightly positive. So these dipole-dipole interactions there. Water molecules are attracted to both anions and cations. So whether they're positive or negative ions, you see there that the sodium and the chloride that's in that picture, which would come from table salt, they both attract water. And then protein attracts water too. That's really important when you look at maintaining your blood plasma. So basically water is filtered out of your capillaries, out of your blood by hydrostatic pressure, kind of like a soaker hose. And then protein and electrolytes suck the water back in. So we should filter out, somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 liters of fluid a day, we should reabsorb 20.4 of those liters. If you have enough protein electrolytes, the other 3.6 liters becomes lymphatic fluid or lymph, and then it's carried back to your heart. So at the end of the day, you should be collecting all the water that you filtered out of your blood. If you don't, then you're gonna have more filtration and less reabsorption and you will have edema. You'll have fluid accumulating. An example of that would be someone with liver failure or someone that's very protein malnourished, so they don't have the amino acids they need to make these proteins. They would develop acides. They'd accumulate fluid around their abdomen. Okay, in an electrolyte solution, water molecules are attracted to both anions and cations. Notice that the negative oxygen atoms of the water molecules are drawn to the sodium cation, the positive one, whereas the positive hydrogen atoms of the water molecules are drawn to the chloride. So you see there the, look at the difference there. Sodium's got oxygen attracted to it, the oxygen end of water anyways attracted to it, and chloride's got the hydrogen end of water attracted to it, just like magnets. Opposites attract. The positive ions attract negative electrons. Negative ions attract a positive charge. Okay, regulation of fluid balance. Another topic that I've covered in great detail on the YouTube channel, we have the hormones that are involved in fluid balance. So you'll see here, antidiuretic hormone, and we'll talk also about the renin, angiotensin aldosterone system, so hormones play a major role in regulating how much body water you have. So the first one is called anti-diuretic hormone. It is actually produced by the hypothalamus. It is stored in the posterior pituitary gland, and like its name implies, is an anti-diuretic. A diuretic causes you to lose more body water than you're bringing in, and anti-diuretic would do the opposite. So anti-diuretic hormone's job is to decrease urine production so that you're reabsorbing more water, and you're keeping it inside your body. Good example of when this doesn't work well, alcohol shuts off the secretion and the function anyways of ADH, which is why alcohol is a powerful, powerful diuretic. You know, if you drink four beers, you're gonna pee out a six pack, and that's how powerful of a diuretic alcohol is. It's because of its impact on the anti-diuretic hormone. If you didn't have this hormone, you would have a condition called diabetes and sypidus, and worst case scenario, you'd be producing 27 liters of urine a day without the help of this hormone. So we absolutely rely on it. You do not wanna have to produce 27 liters of urine a day. All right, the next one is called renin, and renin comes from the kidneys, and it leads to the renin angiotensin, aldosterone system that I just mentioned. So renin is an enzyme released by kidney cells when blood pressure is low. Your kidneys do not tolerate low blood pressure. Your kidneys are a filter, and if the blood pressure to the kidneys drops by around 20%, your kidneys will stop filtering, which is not a good thing. So if your kidneys sense a drop in blood pressure, one of the main things they will do is release this enzyme called renin. So that causes your kidneys to reabsorb sodium, which will draw water with it. And so you see they're accompanied by water retention. So remember where your electrolytes go, that's where water will follow. That's how osmosis works. So renin causes a direct reabsorption of sodium, which leads to the retention of water, decreasing urine production, and then hopefully keeping your blood volume up and keeping your blood pressure up. I know it's weird to try to think that our body has all these systems to keep our blood pressure up when so many people have hypertension, high blood pressure. Well, for most of human history, that wasn't the major problem, right? Low blood pressure would have been a bigger concern, but now because of our diet changes and our increases in body fat and our activity changes, high blood pressure has become so common. I'm not saying that hypertension never existed, but it would have been much more rare. Some studies of our hunter-gatherer ancestors show, estimate that what would have been considered normal blood pressure in the past may have been something more like 100 over 60. So not saying you should shoot for that target now, I'm just saying that's something that's been discussed. Okay, so what's the next thing Renan does? Renan hydrolyzes angiotensinogen, which is a precursor to angiotensin I, which is inactive until it's converted to angiotensin II, and that's gonna happen in the lungs. So remember that term, angiotensin, because you need an enzyme called angiotensin converting enzyme to do that. And that's an ACE enzyme, and almost anyone that's on a blood pressure medication would be taking an ACE inhibitor. So our primary blood pressure medications slow this conversion of angiotensin I to angiotensin II, so they're called ACE inhibitors. Actually, I'd say the majority of people that have high blood pressure are given a combination of an ACE inhibitor and a mild diuretic, so to get rid of some of the excess fluid. All right, so that switch from angiotensin I to II stimulates the adrenal glands to release aldosterone. So aldosterone is the second major fluid balance hormone behind antidiuretic hormone, so it's released by the adrenal glands, the cortex or outside the adrenal glands, and it causes your kidneys to reabsorb sodium, which would then pull water with it. So you see there at the end, signals the kidneys to excrete potassium and retain sodium. This whole process does do more things too. Angiotensin will directly increase blood pressure by being a vasoconstrictor. It'll also lead to increased thirst, so you'll be thirstier. So hopefully you'll drink more water. All those things will be happening in the background. All right, in most cases, how should people replace their fluids in electrolytes? Why are drinks without electrolytes so popular? Do you use them? Why or why not? So you can discuss amongst yourself, I guess, but most people should replace their fluids with just by drinking regular water most of the time, but I often, I will always say that we should not, you know, we should not read whether this sounds like a Gatorade commercial or not. And I'm not a fan of Gatorades or those things that have a lot of sugar unless you're training and need them, but you should not just replace water. You need to replace sweat, right? And sweat is a combination of water and electrolytes. So I actually recommend getting some more electrolytes the more you're sweating. Now, if you're just, if you occasionally are exercising, you're out taking a walk, then water's what you need. But if you're sweating a lot, you can lose up to 3000 milligrams an hour of sodium in your sweat amongst other electrolytes. So I do recommend if you're sweating a lot, you're working outside in a hot human environment, you're exercising, you should consider replacing sweat, not just electrolyte, or not just water. And that's where some of the electrolytes will come into play. Now, personally, I have, you know, I don't drink Gatorade or those kinds of things, but you certainly can. I have, I add a little bit of salt. I actually have what I'm sitting here. I like these, this is not an advertisement, but I like these LMNTs. I will occasionally use one of them. Oftentimes I'll just sprinkle a little bit of salt in a couple of my glasses of water throughout the day. I'll make sure I'm getting my electrolytes like potassium and magnesium from my diet. So you just, you wanna make sure you're getting electrolytes somewhere, they don't have to come from beverages though. If you're getting them in your diet in other places, and you're getting enough to replace your losses from sweating, then you're good. So most of the time, water is the way to go. All right, most people should replace their fluids by consuming plain, cool water and by eating regular fluids. So again, you're getting your electrolytes, but just from your food and not from a beverage. In some cases, a solution of sugar, salt and water is needed. That's basically Gatorade, Pedialyte, those kind of things. Much like what is found in drinks that contain electrolytes. What I like about these, these types of things, nothing, again, nothing magical about that one. We're just adding electrolytes to your drinks. I've also used things called fasting drops. What I like about those is you can get the electrolytes and you can get the water without the sugar. All right, so the nephron, this is the functional unit of the kidney. I won't go through all the details here. I've covered, I have an entire playlist on the urinary system that covers all the stuff into great, great detail. But basically, your kidneys are a massive filter. Your kidneys are gonna filter 50 gallons of fluid every day. And as that 50 gallons of fluid is filtered into your nephrons, your body will reabsorb what you wanna keep, like the glucose and the amino acids and these kind of things, will reabsorb the majority of the water, the rest of it becoming urine, and that also will secrete things into the nephrons you wanna get rid of, like drugs and toxins and metabolic waste products. So the main reason we have kidneys and it is because it filters your blood, right? So urine is basically filtered blood. We have waste products like urea that we have to get rid of because of our body's needs for protein and getting rid of the ammonia or the nitrogen from the protein. We have a waste product called creatinine, which is a waste product of muscle metabolism. We have to get rid of uric acid from the digestion of purines and things like that. So we have these metabolic waste products that would kill us if we didn't filter it out. And that's why if your kidneys don't work, then you have to undergo dialysis, which is basically using an artificial kidney. All right, so you see here, number one, blood flows into the glomerulus, which is just this knot of capillaries with a cup that catches the filtrate. Blood flows into the glomerulus. Some of its fluid with dissolved substances is absorbed in the tubules. That's that 50 gallons I talked about earlier becomes tubular fluid. Let's see here. Number two, the fluid and substances needed by the body are returned to the blood and vessels alongside the tubule. Number three, the tubule passes waste materials to the bladder. So we filter good and bad stuff into the tubules. We reabsorb the good stuff, we leave the bad stuff, and that's how we get rid of it. All right, the cleansing of blood in the nephron is roughly analogous to the way you might clean out your car. First, you remove all your possessions and trash so that the car can be vacuumed. Then you put back in the car what you want to keep, and then you throw away the trash. So we get all both good and bad comes out, good comes back in, bad stays out. Excuse me. All right, got a little coffee on my leg there. All right, so fluids and electrolyte imbalances. So here we see, we've actually covered this picture on the right, but so we'll look at the, this is where, how much water you take in versus out is fluid balance. Electrolyte imbalances are what will impact where our water is. Okay, let's look at the picture on the right. First could already walk through it, and then I'll say a few things on the left. So if we have low blood volume and low blood pressure, that's gonna trigger that enzyme renin being released from the kidneys, which converts angiotensinogen into angiotensin one, which is then converted using ACE or angiotensin converting enzyme into angiotensin two in the lungs, and that's gonna cause basal constriction. I mentioned that, which would, it makes the pipes smaller so the pressure would go up. It also leads to the release of antidiuretic hormone, which opens water channels in the kidneys so you reabsorb more water. You see there retains water and thereby retains sodium and excreted potassium, and then also you increase aldosterone, which comes from the adrenal cortex, and it causes the reabsorption of sodium, which pulls water with it. The downside there is as you retain sodium, you excrete potassium, and we need potassium and we have a hard time finding it in our diet. And all those things would cause your blood volume and blood pressure to go up. So I mentioned this before about fluid balance. Two thirds of your body water should be inside your cells and one third outside, and that's what these different electrolytes are going to help us deal with. So we'll look at where they should be and the amounts here coming up real soon. Our reflection question is one, you can pause this and try to answer these if you'd like. Regulation of minerals occurs in the GI tract and the kidneys because your kidneys determine which electrolytes to retain and which ones to excrete. Sodium is lost indiscriminately by vomiting and diarrhea. So obviously that you shouldn't normally be dealing with those two things, but you would lose a lot of sodium in those situations. Other causes of fluid and electrolyte imbalances are heavy sweating, that's going to be, typically the main way we lose electrolytes, heavy sweating burns and traumatic wounds, but sweating being a big one. And that's why, again, if you ask me how much water should I drink, we have to look at fluid balance. We gain water by drinking it, by eating it, and we make it. Metabolism produces around one in three quarters cups, ballpark of water a day. So we drink some, we eat some, and we make some. We lose water by sweat, by breathing it out, right? You can tell when you go outside when it's cold, it looks like you're smoking. That's water vapor. So we sweat it out, we, I was gonna say, we smoke it out. We breathe it out, we urinate, and then fecal material has some water too. Even if you don't have diarrhea, it's a small number, but if you do have diarrhea, it'd be more. So if you ask me how much water should I take in, I'm like, I need to know how much you're eating of it. How much, are you eating a lot of watery fluids, or watery foods like soups and stews or not? But I mainly need to know how much are you sweating and how much are you urinating. So those are all things that change day by day. So it's really hard to know how much water you should be taking in, but I'll give you my best advice here for how to maintain it before I move on. The simplest advice I give the typical person, yes, you have, we'll look at the numbers like half your body weight and ounces or eight glasses of water a day, et cetera. But I generally recommend asking your body if you're hydrated. So the simplest thing to do is if you are urinating every two to four hours, so let's say you're urinating every three hours, and your urine is pale yellow, then you are hydrated, right? And there are some exceptions, like certain drugs and things that would change that. But basically just asking your body, right? If you're producing enough urine that you have to urinate every three hours or so, that means your body's willing to give up excess water. If your urine is pale yellow, same thing. If you're urinating every hour and it's crystal clear, then you're over hydrated. If you're urinating every six hours and it's dark yellow, that means you're dehydrated and your body is only getting rid of the water that it needs to get rid of, right? We would pee dust if we could, but we can't. So we have to make urine. So the less urine you're making and the darker or more concentrated it is, the more your body's telling you that you're dehydrated. So the simple answer to me is just to let your body tell you. Acid-based balance, another big thing that goes along with fluid and electrolyte balance is maintaining your body's pH. You see here death on either end of the spectrum. So the pH of your blood is normally 7.35 to 7.45. If your pH drops too low, you're in an acidosis condition. If it climbs too high, you're in an alkalosis condition. Extremes on either end and you're dead, right? So that just like everything else when it comes to homeostasis. Acidosis conditions are way more common. And again, we're just gonna quickly go through this. I have a whole section on this on the channel, but your metabolism generates acid. So every moment you're alive, your body is generating acids, which means that you're teetering on this condition where you're becoming too acidic. Way more common to become too acidic than to become too alkaline or too basic, which I don't mean something new to you young kids. All right, so respiratory acidosis would be caused by breathing too slowly. Metabolic acidosis would be caused by producing too many acids. That can be like ketoacidosis or lactic acidosis. Alkalosis, let's see, respiratory alkalosis can be caused by hyperventilating, which again, hyperventilating is way less common than someone having a lung disease that's impacting their ability to breathe correctly. And then metabolic alkalosis is the least common that's usually caused by a whole bunch of vomiting. So because they think about it, you're stomach is a bowl of acid. If every time you vomit, you pour out that bowl, you have to refill it. So your body will keep using its stores to make stomach acid, which you're gonna be using up acids so the pH would climb up. But again, I know that's real quick, but the point is that we use electrolytes, we use these ions to regulate the pH in our body. We have this narrow range where we're healthy, where our blood pH is 7.35 to 7.45. If you see here, the problem with your pH getting too high or too low is it denatures proteins. Remember that word? When you denature a protein, you unravel it. The problem is if you unravel a protein, you've changed its shape. If you change its shape, you change its function. So the death would come from organ failure, your enzymes would basically unravel and your metabolism would shut off. And your cell membranes, we get all screwed up, lots of things. Just don't let it happen. All right, so you see here, a high concentration of hydrogen ions makes you acidic. A low concentration of hydrogen ions is basic or makes you alkaline. All right, so one of the ways that we regulate this, now the two big systems that regulate your pH are gonna be your respiratory system and your urinary system. So your kidneys and your lungs play a major role in maintaining your pH. But your buffers, what they do is they resist changes to pH. So buffers are needed temporarily to neutralize changes in acids or bases until your kidneys and lungs can solve the problem. So you see here, buffers can neutralize acids or bases. How they actually work is a buffer can function as a weak acid when you expose it to a base or it can function as a weak base when you expose it to an acid. So we have lots of buffers in our body fluid but here's a couple examples. Bicarbonate, very common in your digestive system and then carbonic acid which is what happens when we're, that's how we carry carbon dioxide. So carbon dioxide becomes this weak acid known as carbonic acid and that's how you carry it. That's how you carry it in your blood basically. And then your lungs and kidneys play a major role in dealing with this over the long term. So if someone's having an acid-based disturbance, it's almost always something to do with the lungs or something to do with the kidneys. Our recommended intakes. So let's see here, we have thirst and satiety. You mean just so if you're drinking when you're thirsty is a pretty good idea but you see here that thirst response lags behind the body's need for water. That's why I always recommend that you should just, you should constantly be maybe sipping on something, not constantly but making sure you're getting your water and take whatever your goal. Let's say you're shooting for half a gallon a day or whatever. Just make sure you're constantly having some throughout the day, not just chugging it in the morning and chugging it during meals because by the time you're thirsty, your body is already sensing some mild dehydration. So I always like to say, drink a little bit before you're thirsty and you only know that just kind of by practice. And you notice I drink a lot but because my mouth gets dry and I talk a lot mainly, but yeah, so thirst, if you're getting signals that you're thirsty, you definitely need to be drinking water but I recommend trying to stay ahead of those thirst signals. You see your link between thirst and satiety. So if you're dehydrated, your body will also tell you to eat because we can get food or we can get water from our food as well. All right, on the flip side, drinking too much, right? Making sure we don't overdo water, water intoxication. You see your symptoms are confusion, convulsions and deaths. You don't hear about this very often but people do get over hydrated. Oftentimes athletes. The condition is called hyponatremic encephalopathy. What that means is the brain will swell because there's so much water that you've diluted the sodium, hyponatremia, the sodium being Na on the periodic table. So over consuming water can certainly be a problem. You hear about like, you know, the lady that died chugging a bunch of water to win a wee or there was a case about a girl that was forced to drink like three liters of soda or something by her parents and it killed her. So those things can happen. I had an old roommate who knew a guy that had a psychological condition where he couldn't stop consuming water. Like he almost lost his tongue from licking the condensation off of an air conditioner, things like that. So there are, those are kind of some rare examples but so what's more common though is someone that's sweating, losing a bunch of water and sodium and then only replaces the water. And that's why if you're sweating a lot I recommend replacing sweat, not just water. So you see you're caused by drinking 10 to 20 liters within a few hours. That's a pretty big, pretty big number but it does happen occasionally. So that's called water intoxication. So how much do we need? That's the problem, needs vary. Like I mentioned earlier, if you ask me how much water should I take in? My question is how much water are you losing? And that's, that's why there is no RDA. You see here there's an AI or an adequate intake because we cannot say how much water you need. If you're a roofer in Texas that's outside sweating in a hot, humid environment and you exercise, you're gonna need way more water than someone like me sitting here in the basement in a cool room, et cetera, et cetera. So the recommendation here is eight to 12 cups per day. Great place to start. Some people would say half your body weight announces. At least that takes your sizing and consideration but I've already told you what I recommend. Look at your urine, look at how often you're urinating ask your body if you're drinking enough water. Okay, health effects of water intake, physical and mental performance, they both go up if you're hydrated and down if you're dehydrated. Proper functioning of your organs like kidneys, heart, GI tract and other systems they need water. Like just for example, your GI tract needs I don't know six or seven liters of water a day to produce all the fluids and to move all the materials. So very, and then your kidneys if your blood volume and blood pressure drop your kidneys will shut off. Obviously your heart is a pump it needs something to pump. So those are some good examples. How about the mineral intake in your water? So you have things like hard and soft water. So hard water has more minerals, soft water has less. So if you have, you know, the, what else? Like we use culligan so like the minerals have been removed from our water. So that means that, you know and I don't think your water is the way you should be getting most of your nutritional value as far as minerals go but keep that in mind, right? If you're drinking a bunch of reverse osmosis water where the minerals have been removed you are gonna have to consume more in your food. All right. And that's why I like with kids and stuff we use fluoride rinses because since we consume culligan water the fluoride's been removed from our water as well. Fill in the missing words or phrases you can pause and try to answer these and we're moving on. The kidneys are central to regulating blood volume which in turn influences blood pressure. They do this by adjusting urine volume and concentration. So again, ask your kidneys by asking your urine and it sounds kind of weird. If your blood volume is good and if your hydration status is good and your kidneys care so much about this because not only, I mean they are the filters but they need enough blood pressure to function. It's like if you have a bunch of coffee sitting in your coffee maker in your kitchen but you don't run any water through it you won't have coffee. All right. Antidiuretic hormone is released in response to dehydration. Thus it stimulates water to be reabsorbed by the kidneys. It opens what are called water channels. If a person is dehydrated their body releases anti-diuretic hormone to conserve water. These events stimulate thirst. We talked about it earlier and then both of these mechanisms help restore blood volume and homeostasis. Okay, that's water. I told you I'd go kind of quick but there's a lot to say about water. So now let's cover the major minerals and again we'll cover the trace minerals in the next video. So minerals are inorganic elements. That doesn't mean you don't buy them in a farmer's market. It means they're not based on carbon so that your vitamins are carbon based structures that are built in organisms. So they're made inorganic elements. The minerals are not made there or they were at some point in stars but they're elements on the periodic table. So the trace minerals and major minerals are all vital. So calling something a trace mineral doesn't mean it's not important. It just means you don't need very much of it like something like selenium for example. Inorganic minerals are not destroyed by heat, air, acid or mixing. So whether or not they're in your food is determined by whether or not they were in the soil where your food was grown or whether or not they were in the food that the food that, you know, they were in the plant food that the animals that you're gonna eat ate. So minerals are, they travel through food webs but they're not destroyed the way that vitamins are. Bioavailability is a big deal. So you see there are some things that impact mineral bioavailability. Really good examples. Your two best examples really are phytates and oxalates. These would be compounds. They're called anti-nutrients basically because they're compounds in plants that decrease the availability of minerals. Remember that the minerals that are stored in a plant are there for that plant and they're usually for reproduction. So like for example in a seed, the minerals might be locked up by these anti-nutrients and then they're gonna be released during certain times in that plant's life. So this is where things like sprouting grains or soaking nuts and seeds might actually increase the mineral bioavailability by causing these anti-nutrients to let go of them. So there, I mentioned this a few times but these types of anti-nutrients are the reason that for example, spinach has a ton of calcium. Spinach has as much calcium as a glass of milk but you're only gonna absorb 5% of it. So because the bioavailability is very low. So that's okay because calorie per calorie vegetables and fruit have a lot of nutrients anyway. So you're gonna be absorbing less of them but there's still quite a bit there. All right, excess of some minerals can create inadequacy of others. That's another really big thing too. Like if you're consuming a whole bunch of zinc for example, we'll actually will impair the absorption of some other minerals like copper. So you do wanna try to make sure you get, it's the whole diet thing. You wanna make sure you have an adequate yet moderate amount of all minerals. If you get a whole bunch of one, like maybe a whole bunch of calcium would impact the absorption of magnesium and vice versa. So you wanna make sure you have enough of all your minerals but not really high levels of any of them. And supplements are often to blame. Like I said, if you're taking 1,500 milligrams a day of calcium in supplement form, well that is going to impact how your body absorbs magnesium for example. Okay, minerals in a 60 kilogram or 132 pound human body. All right, so there you see here, we have the major minerals dealing with how much you have in your body. So you've got calcium and phosphorus are the only two where you have more than a pound of the minerals in your body. Potassium, sulfur, sodium, chloride and magnesium, you know, having the 30 grams there but still those are all considered major minerals. The key is how much you need in a day. If you need 100 milligrams or more in a day then it's a major mineral. Then the trace minerals, you have iron, zinc, copper, copper, manganese, iodine and selenium. So selenium is there's only a fraction of a gram in your body and you only need micrograms of every day, right? Maybe 50 micrograms, I recommend more than that but let's say you need 50 micrograms of a day. Well, if you don't get it, you are going to die, right? So trace minerals are wickedly important, you just don't need a lot of them. Let's go through the major minerals now. So first we have sodium. Sodium is very important, right? Sodium gets demonized and we do consume too much of it but you absolutely do need sodium. So even as much as people tell you to go on low salt diets and avoid sodium we need 1500 milligrams of it a day. So we still need one and a half grams of it every day. So it's the principle cation of extracellular fluid and that's good and bad because it is the primary regulator of extracellular fluid volume. So if you eat a diet that's high in sodium it's gonna suck water out of your cells and you're gonna have too much extracellular fluid. Well that's gonna lead to edema and it's gonna lead to an increase in blood volume which leads to an increase in blood pressure. So this is where a high sodium diet will lead to hypertension. Now you'll see that if you're trying to treat hypertension you should also be dealing with the other end of it. You need to consume more electrolytes, more minerals that draw water into your cells. So I never recommend someone go on a low sodium diet. I recommend someone goes on a low sodium diet that's also higher in potassium and magnesium. All right, sodium plays a role in acid-base balance, nerve transmission and muscle contraction but the big one, nerve transmission. Sodium is what depolarizes your nerves. Sodium basically turns nerves on, potassium turns them off but sodium is also needed for muscle contraction. So it's demonized but every muscle contraction, every nerve impulse, all these things rely on sodium. We just don't need so much of it, right? Our ancestors would have had a hard time finding sodium, right? If they lived that they needed to eat things from saltwater, you know, live by salt marshes. There's actually a book called Salt to World History. Wars were fought over salt because it was so hard to find, right? And now it's just not the case. So our ancestors craved salt and looked for it and ate it whenever they could because they should because it was so hard to find. Now we consume way too much of it. We still have those kind of cravings built into our brains and our minds but we consume too much of it now. So that used to be a very rare problem. Now it's very common. All right, sodium travels freely in the blood, kidneys filter out and return what is needed. So okay, so sodium is important but we wanna make sure we're not getting too much of it. So let's look at, remember like I did with the vitamins, I got a few extra things I wanna say here. All right, so for sodium, what did I put there? Got this organized. All right, necessary for the maintenance of blood pressure, acid-base balance, muscle contractions and nerve impulses just like the book says. The adequate intake of 1,500 milligrams per day, important for most people to consume less than 2,300 milligrams a day, which you see up here now. People on low carbohydrate diets will need more sodium, that's because if your insulin levels drop, it also causes a drop in aldosterone, so you'll reabsorb less sodium. That's why people that go on low carb diets, they recommend consuming more salt. Let's see, the new Atkins diet and the Duke University Medical Center diet, which are both low carb diets, they both recommend you consume two cups of broth a day, which would lead to almost two more grams of sodium, especially early on as your body is adapting to a lower carb diet. That's probably where the fluid loss and dehydration and loss of sodium is probably where some of the side effects from trying a low carb diet come from, so it's just something to consider. Some people are more sensitive to excess sodium than others, absolutely. I mean, genetically, about 30% of people are really salt sensitive. They'd be the ones where if they ate a high salt meal, their face would get puffy, their ankles would swell, they couldn't get their ring off. Those are people that are more salt sensitive. Most people are not. If you consume more salt, your body will just deal with it. The standard American diet can easily lead to 4,500 milligrams a day of sodium intake. You'll see the average up there is 3,400 milligrams, but it can be higher than that. And that's mainly because of highly processed foods and canned goods. And it draws fluid out of your cells, leading to hypertension and edema. I mentioned that. All right, now I have the FDA page here. We're looking at sodium, right? Okay. So sodium, what does it do? Acid-based balance, blood pressure regulation, fluid balance, muscle contraction, nerve function. Where is it found? So the daily value here they have is 2,400 milligrams a day, but 2,300 is the one you hear most often. Breads and rolls, cheese, cold cuts and cured meats like deli packaged ham, mixed meat dishes like beef stew and chili, mixed pasta dishes like lasagna and spaghetti, pizza, poultry, sandwiches, savory snacks like chips, crackers, popcorn and pretzels, soups and table salt. All right, so sodium deficiency is rare because I said so easy to find. High sodium leads to high blood pressure. Recommended intake of 2,300 milligrams a day. I think that as long as you're getting enough potassium and magnesium, you can consume more than that, but it's definitely kind of a goal to shoot for if you have hypertension. I recommend lowering sodium intake to that level and seeing what happens. The average sodium intake in the U.S. is 3,400 milligrams a day, but again, I'm cautioning you, don't just lower your sodium, get the other, this is why just going on a lower salt diet doesn't make near as big of a difference as going on a diet that also is higher in the other electrolytes, potassium and magnesium. Salt, where do we get it? So table salt is sodium chloride and it does have the greatest effect on blood pressure. So the dash diet, it's a very important diet as designed by like 100 nutrition scientists to deal with hypertension. So dash stands for dietary approaches to stop hypertension. It has been, there's different types of the dash diet now, but it is a diet that's lower in sodium, whole food diet basically, low sodium, high potassium, high magnesium, and it has been shown to drop blood pressure better than really anything else I've seen besides medication. So if you have high blood pressure, I definitely recommend looking into the dash diet, but just that's what it is. It's got grains, fruits, veggies, leaner meats, so it's a lower sodium, higher potassium, higher magnesium diet. Sodium and bone losses, so high salt intake does increase calcium excretion, so something to consider, but if you're also consuming potassium, you should be good. We talked about the dash diet. Food sources of sodium, processed foods have the most sodium, so basically this is the double-edged sword because processed foods also reduce potassium. Really good chart coming up, I'll show you that. Fresh fruits and vegetables have the least sodium. So our ancestors would have ate food, like we need 4,700 milligrams of potassium a day, and then we only need 2,300 milligrams or so of sodium a day, used to be easy to do because most foods that our ancestors ate would have been higher in potassium and lower in sodium. Now it's opposite. Let me see, I have it coming up here. Yeah, look at these charts here. When you process food, see how small those purple bars get? That's the potassium intake. And then when you process foods, you often add salt. So you have canned goods and packaged foods. They almost always add sodium, and preservative helps with flavor. So you see that processing, so before processing, food is high in potassium and low in sodium. After processing, food is high in sodium, low in potassium. This is why we've had this huge switch in our diet. So if you go back to eating less processed foods, more whole foods in their closer to natural state, you'll cause that shift. So if you have high blood pressure, remember this image, eating whole foods that are minimally processed will be one of the best ways that you can lower your sodium intake while increasing your potassium intake. So this is a really cool picture. I like this kind of snap shot here. All right, reflection, so pause if you need to. If sodium levels in the blood drop, you develop hypo-natremia. Using an ultra endurance athlete as an example, sweating causes losses in sodium and water. If too much water is consumed, the above condition develops, I mentioned that earlier, where you're losing water and electrolytes, only replacing water that can cause a dilution of the sodium in your blood and you can develop hypo-natremia. Acute symptoms of excessive sodium on the other side then are edema and high blood pressure. Two things that can be issues, but especially high blood pressure, that's just a straight up killer. All right, next one we're gonna go through real quickly. Some of these are just that, we consume so much table salt that getting chloride is not an issue. So it is essential, but I never think about it in the diet. It's a major anion or negative ion of extracellular fluids, moves passively across membranes, it's associated with sodium and potassium. So it does help maintain your fluid and electrolyte balance and we also need it to make hydrochloric acid in our stomach. But just because the average American consumes too much sodium, getting enough chloride in your diet, which comes from sodium chloride or table salt, plus other places, not a big deal. Usually, usually we're getting too much, but you're good there. Abundant and processed foods, again, we need a lot of it, but we get a lot of it. Nothing to really talk about there. Deficiency in toxicity, diets rarely lack chloride. So you'd have to be losing it somehow, mainly. And then toxicity would be caused by serious dehydration, so don't do that. All right, potassium, another really, really big one. I love potassium. So it's, we need a lot of it and it's hard to get. And this is why it's one that we have to talk about quite a bit in a class like this because we need 4,700 milligrams of it a day and we don't have very much of it in our food. So I usually do a little thought experiment and you can do this. You go and Google, Google list the potassium rich foods or Google high potassium foods. Last time I did this, it took me to a website at the University of Michigan and add up the foods, add up the numbers. And then how many of these foods would you have to consume to get to 4,700 milligrams a day? Now we're talking about a single serving and you can certainly eat more. But usually it's between nine and 13 foods on a list of potassium rich foods. So Matt, you basically have to build your diet around getting enough potassium. And that's why I mentioned a few chapters ago that even people that eat really healthy diets have some nutrients they're gonna struggle to get. And the first three to come to mind are potassium, magnesium and iodine. And potassium is, you know, is definitely one of them. Right, you see I have a potassium powder that I will use. I don't take very much of it, but let's see, I do about 350 milligrams of that every night before I go to bed just to make sure I'm topping off my potassium tank because even if you're eating these foods that are high in potassium, 4,700 milligrams a day is a lot to get. And it's so important because it's your principal intracellular cation. So potassium is the main electrolyte that would suck water into your cells where you want it. So sodium is sucking water out of your cells. Potassium would suck the water back in. So if you decrease your sodium intake while increasing your potassium intake, you'll see a shift in where your body water is and then hopefully you will have less blood plasma and you will have lower blood pressure, if that's your goal, right? So rolls in the body, it helps maintain fluid electrolyte balance, just said why, helps maintain cell integrity, aids in nerve impulse transmission and muscle contraction. So whereas sodium turns nerves and muscles on, potassium turns nerves and muscles off. Deficiencies increase in blood pressure, that's the big one. Not having enough potassium makes you more salt sensitive which makes sense because if you have less potassium holding water in your cells, then it won't take as much sodium to suck it out of your cells. So if you're eating 2,300 milligrams of sodium and 4,700 milligrams of potassium, if they're in a tug of war, potassium will win and will suck more water into your cells which is where it should be, right? Two thirds of your body water should be inside your cells. Comming to kidney stones, increased bone turnover, irregular heartbeats, muscle weakness and glucose intolerance, long list of things. So don't be deficient in potassium. If you're gonna use chronometer or my fitness pal or any of these tools, one of the first things I want you looking at is your potassium intake and finding ways to bump that up which you can see here. All right, let's look at some foods. Okay. So potassium, nutrient of concern for most Americans. That's what the FDA site says. Blood pressure regulation, carbohydrate metabolism, fluid balance, growth and development, heart function, muscle contraction, nervous system function and protein formation. So we need, again, I recommend shooting for 4,700 milligrams a day. Bananas, beet greens, juices like carrot, pomegranate, prune, orange and tomato juice. But remember, a lot of those will have sodium too. So you wanna go with like a, maybe like a low sodium V8 for example would have way more potassium than sodium. Milk, oranges and orange juice, potatoes and sweet potatoes. We always think about bananas but like a potatoes can have way more potassium than a banana. Prunes and prune juice, spinach, tomatoes and tomato products, white beans and yogurt. Yogurt's another really good source of potassium. All right, potassium here on my document works with sodium to maintain fluid balance, blood pressure, muscle contraction and nerve impulses. Draws water into your cells where two thirds of it is supposed to be, lowering your blood pressure. Recommendation of 4,700 milligrams a day. The standard American diet is usually low in potassium and some studies show that less than 10% of Americans are getting enough of it. Some studies show that one and a half percent of Americans are getting enough potassium every day. Best food sources are fruits and vegetables of all kinds. Well under 5% of Americans eat enough vegetables, also found in beef liver. And then again, you've got your yogurt's, potatoes, bananas, the typical things you see. And look at this list here. So look at these foods. How many of them are you eating and are you getting enough potassium? These AIs, remember these are the floor, right? These are small numbers. This is the absolute minimum you should be getting. That 4,700 milligrams is what I recommend as an optimal number. So you see here the AI for men, 3,400 milligrams a day for women, 2,600 milligrams. All right, pause and see if you can answer these. Potassium is abundant in all cells, processing destroyed cells, therefore fresh foods are the richest sources of potassium. So I showed you that chart earlier. Potassium has an AI of 4,700 milligrams a day and that's a number I trust way better than any of the small numbers. Diet's low in potassium, raised blood pressure. To meet potassium needs, people are recommended to consume more fresh fruits and vegetables, which is why the average American does not get enough potassium. Okay, calcium, keep checking the clock because I got a class here, I apologize. Calcium is the most abundant mineral in the body. We need it primarily for our skeleton, our bones and our teeth. So adequate intake grows a healthy skeleton in early life, which is good because that's, you're gonna build your peak bone density. So as you get older, you lose bone density, but if you start from a higher peak, you'll probably never get to osteoporosis. So helps minimize bone loss in later life. Majority of body's calcium is found in your bones and teeth. It's part of your bone structure and that's where we store minerals, right? Your bones are basically like a mineral storage depot. Calcium and body fluids, so what else does it do? This is a really important point though. You know, you, when you think calcium, you think bones and that's fine, but your body has, the main reason your body stores calcium and bones besides building your skeleton is so that it has access to it when it needs it because calcium does lots of things. So having strong bones in your 80s is the last thing your body cares about when it comes to calcium because look at all these things that it does. Helps to maintain blood pressure. It participates in blood clotting. So calcium is needed for the blood clotting process. Calcium, that's outside of your cells. Inside of your cells, it's needed for every muscle contraction, every nerve impulse. So calcium is what allows your muscle fibers to actually grab onto each other. It removes a shielding protein out of the way. So your actin and myosin, your thin and thick filaments can grab and pull on each other. Transmission of nerve impulses. So calcium is needed to secrete neurotransmitters. So into the synapses so your nerves can actually accomplish something. Calcium is needed to secrete hormones. It's called a second messenger. Activation of some enzyme reaction. So you see, calcium is wickedly important. So your body says, okay, do I wanna keep your bones strong for later or keep your heart beating now? And it always chooses that. So think about it that way. Every day you're not getting enough calcium. Either you're not eating it enough a bit or not absorbing enough a bit. Your bones are going to get weaker because your body will go and steal that calcium from your bones. All right. So calcium balance, very complicated. I've gone through all this in some other videos but you see here we have hormones. We have calcitonin and parathyroid hormone to kind of balance each other out. So calcitonin is the hormone that will cause calcium to be driven, kept, keep it in your blood or cause it to be driven from your blood into your body tissues. Parathyroid hormone will stimulate the calcium to be taken out of your bones. You see down here, let's just start at the top. If you have high blood calcium, that signals the thyroid gland as accrete calcitonin. Calcitonin inhibits the activation of vitamin D so you don't reabsorb more of it. You don't want too much calcium in your blood either. So it also prevents calcium reabsorption in the kidney. So if you have too much calcium in your blood, you basically will try to reabsorb less and excrete more in your urine. It also limits calcium absorption in the kidneys and then inhibits osteoclasts. Osteoclasts are the bone cells that break minerals, break calcium out of your bones. So inhibits osteoclast cells from breaking down bone, preventing the release of calcium. And the end result, this is homeostasis 101, the end result is lower blood calcium and then calcitonin will drop. On the other side, which is more common if the average person isn't eating enough calcium or is vitamin D deficient, low blood calcium will signal the parathyroid gland, those little, those two paired glands, those red glands there behind the thyroid, signal the parathyroid glands to secrete parathyroid hormone into the blood. So what does it do? Parathyroid hormone stimulates the activation of vitamin D, which vitamin D stimulates calcium reabsorption from the kidneys and also enhances calcium absorption in the intestines. Parathyroid hormone also stimulates calcium reabsorption from the kidneys directly as well. So parathyroid hormone and vitamin D are both gonna reabsorb more calcium from the kidneys while, and then vitamin D will also increase calcium absorption in the gut. Okay, then they also both stimulate osteoclasts. So osteoclasts are the bone cells that break down bone. Osteoblasts build new bone. Osteoclasts break down bone to release the calcium into the bloodstream and the end result is blood calcium goes up and then that parathyroid hormone would go back down. So that's how your body maintains calcium balance. But notice where it cares about. It cares about blood calcium. Bone calcium levels are great. They're a luxury, but your body is really only concerned about keeping you alive for the next couple of minutes and then the next couple of minutes and the next couple of minutes. Right, so whether or not you have osteoporosis off in the future is not your body's priority. Maintaining blood calcium levels today is. All right, let me read this point here about calciton at the bottom. Calcitonin plays a major role in defending infants and young children against the dangers of rising blood calcium that can occur when regular feedings of milk deliver large quantities of calcium to a small body. In contrast, calcitonin plays a relatively minor role in adults because their absorption of calcium is less efficient and their bodies are larger, making elevated blood calcium unlikely. So calcitonin is better at helping you build bone when you're younger than when you're older, which is why when we get older, even if we do all the right things, you're generally not gonna be building a bunch of new bone. As someone in your 40s, 50s, 60s beyond, your priority is slowing bone loss, not building new bone, especially like once you have osteoporosis, maintaining your bones and keeping the protein portion of your bones as strong as possible is the priority. You're just, you can't turn back the clock that far when it comes to bone density. And part of that is because calcitonin is just not that effective in adults. All right, calcium in disease prevention. So calcium can help with hypertension. We don't talk about that much, but it can, it plays roles in blood cholesterol levels, diabetes, colon cancer, kind of a neat one. Again, not completely proven yet, but it appears that a diet high in calcium can decrease the conversion of colon polyps to cancerous lesions, et cetera, et cetera. Calcium may play a role in obesity and help prevent or maintain a healthy body weight, but osteoporosis is a big one. So reaching peak bone mass means denser bones protect against inevitable age related bone loss and fractures. Like I mentioned, if you start from a higher peak, two people, they're both gonna lose bone density throughout life, but the one that started with a higher peak is hopefully never going to reach osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is silent because the body shows no symptoms. You don't, you generally don't, unless you get a dexa scan and X-rays and these kinds of things, you don't know you have osteoporosis until something goes wrong, right? Until you have a fracture, for example. And these are life threatening conditions, right? There is, I was involved in a study when I was younger that found that 82% of people that fracture their hip because of osteoporosis never go home again. Fall kills them, dive pneumonia in the hospital, have to live in a long-term care facility forever or have to live with families. These are life-threatening, life-altering problems. So if you're listening to me right now and you're 20 years old, worry about your bone density now because you're gonna worry about it when you're 70 and it's gonna be too late. Not too late to do anything, but you can make a much bigger impact today. Okay, calcium recommendations. So hormones maintain blood concentrations regardless of dietary intake and that's why, like it says there, when intake is low, bones suffer. Any day you don't get enough calcium or eaten, digested and absorbed, your bones will suffer. Every day, if you're not eating enough calcium today, your bones are gonna get a little tiny bit weaker and they're gonna a little tiny bit weaker tomorrow, et cetera, et cetera. So recommendations are set high enough to accommodate a 30% average absorption rate because when you get older, calcium absorption is really rough. Just calcium isn't absorbed very well anyways, but you need a lot of stomach acid to digest it, et cetera, et cetera. So 1,300 milligrams a day for adolescents, 1,000 milligrams a day for adults up to the age of 50 and then 1,200 milligrams a day for women over 50 and everyone over 70. And then of course, this doesn't work, right? You need, I was gonna say vitamin D is gonna be a big thing here. If you're vitamin D deficient, then the calcium you are eating won't be absorbed. So you do need to make sure you have enough of the other nutrients in play. How does calcitonin affect vitamin D in the kidneys? We already went through that. Calcitonin is released when blood calcium is high. If vitamin D is not activated, calcium reabsorption in the kidneys is prevented. Parathyroid hormone stimulates vitamin D activation. This increases calcium absorption in the intestines. Osteoclast cells release calcium into the blood and parathyroid hormone raises blood calcium levels. So we covered that all with that chart. All right, phosphorus is gonna go through it real quickly. Very important, very easy to find. So because it's a structural component of cell membranes, anytime you're eating cells, you're eating phosphorus. So the second most abundant mineral in the body, hydroxyapatite crystals, so it helps form the hydroxyapatite crystals of bone and teeth. So when we think of calcium, we think of bones, right? And teeth, but phosphorus is needed to make what's called hydroxyapatite, which is actually what allows your bones and teeth to mineralize. So we need it, need lots of it. It's part of your major phosphorus buffering system to maintain body pH. It's parts of both DNA and RNA. It assists in energy metabolism, right? We have adenosine triphosphate, so phosphates are needed for that. We can't build ATP without phosphates or phosphorus. Helps transport lipids in the blood and a structure component of cell membranes. So I'm not trying to downplay phosphorus. It's just that, again, getting enough of it is not generally a concern. So deficient serum, unlikely as long as you're getting enough protein. And you know how I feel about protein, right? I think the RDA is absolutely the floor, the bare minimum that someone should be consuming, and most people should be consuming more of it. So the kind of diet I recommend that prioritizes protein means that phosphorus should not be a concern at all. The upper limit is 4,000 milligrams. Toxicity is very rare. And less, of course, look down here. You're consuming a whole lot of liver. So that's why I never recommend someone consume more than a pound of liver a week. That might even be too much. But I love liver, but it's so nutrient dense you want to make sure you're not overdoing it. It's pretty rare that we have foods that are maybe too good for you, but I think that beef liver can be an example of that. All right, magnesium. Another really important one that we often don't get enough of. So I mentioned earlier that even someone on a really healthy diet may be struggling to get that 4,700 milligrams of potassium. Well, same thing with magnesium. Magnesium is found in green leafy vegetables and all these kinds of things. But so even someone eating a healthy diet may not be achieving optimal levels. And that's because magnesium is really important in ATP production. So if you're eating really healthy, but let's say you're an athlete and you're using a lot of energy, your magnesium needs will be higher. So magnesium is also one of them where even on a really healthy diet, make sure you're getting enough of it and possibly supplement with it, which I do. So it's not an advertisement for now foods. I just happen to be sitting by my supplements. So I take 400 milligrams of that once a day besides all the magnesium I get from green leafy vegetables, et cetera. Okay, not medical advice, not sales, just we're friends here and that's what I do. All right, so by locations, more than half the magnesium is found in your bones. When you think about bones, you think of calcium, but bones are just a mineral storage depot. There's manganese and molybdenum and all sorts of stuff in there. It's a reservoir to ensure normal blood concentrations. So again, what's the real function of your bones? If you don't eat enough magnesium the day, your body can go into your bones to get it. It keeps you from dying from not getting enough minerals in your diet. So what is magnesium for? Hundreds of things, right? There are at least 300 processes in your body that are powered by magnesium. Magnesium is the cofactor that powers the enzymes for at least 300 functions. And basically magnesium deficiency is linked to pretty much every chronic disease that the modern human deals with. So roles maintains bone health, necessary for energy metabolism, catalysts in ATP production, that's what I mentioned before, really critical roles in ATP production. Another really big one is it's needed for protecting our DNA. So the enzymes that proofread and protect and deal with mutations in our DNA are magnesium dependent. So magnesium is needed to generate energy and to protect your DNA. That should be all the reason that you need to make sure you're getting enough of it. Inhibits muscle contraction and blood clotting when you don't want those things to occur and supports normal function in the immune system. So super, super important. All right, so what did I put about magnesium here? Because again, it is one of my faves. Magnesium, this is a very, I have it in all caps, a very important nutrient that the huge majority of Americans are deficient in. It plays a role in the functioning of at least 300 enzyme systems. Good food sources include green leafy vegetables, beef liver and nuts. Magnesium glycinate is my favorite supplemental form because it doesn't lead to the GI issues because if you've ever had a bowel prep for colonoscopy, they use magnesium to flush out your colon. Magnesium glycinate is way less likely to do that. Magnesium deficiencies seem to increase your risk of every disease of civilization or modern disease that we've talked about there. Magnesium, the FDA site here, blood pressure regulation, blood sugar regulation, bone formation, energy production, hormone secretion, immune function, muscle contraction, nervous system function, normal heart rhythm, protein formation, you get the point. Where is it found? So we need the 400 milligrams a day. Where is it found? Avocados, bananas, beans and peas, dairy products, green leafy vegetables like spinach, nuts and pumpkin seeds, potatoes, raisins, wheat bran and whole grains. All right, back to magnesium though, it's pretty cool. So we look at iron, right? Iron sits in the center of hemoglobin, which transports oxygen in our body. Magnesium does that with chlorophyll. So magnesium is like the iron of the plant world and that's why when you eat green leafy vegetables, you consume the magnesium, just like when you eat red meat, you consume the iron. So you see here, average dietary intake for US adults is below recommendations. Look at this list of foods and how few of them, other than halibut, even reaches over 100 milligrams a day. So you have to eat a ton of foods that have a little bit of magnesium to reach those RDAs that we're shooting for, right? Around the 400 milligram a day recommendation. Hard water does contribute, but most people use water softeners, so that limits it there as well. Sources, legumes, seeds, nuts and leafy green veggies, and I already explained why. All right, magnesium deficiency and toxicity. Deficiency rarely occurs as far as overt disease, but we already mentioned the average American is not getting enough, which means that it's either harvesting it from your bones or there are deficiencies. So how your body works is, okay, I have to keep making ATP or I'm gonna die. So I'll focus our magnesium on ATP production, which means I don't have as much magnesium for DNA protection, right? So that, and then over time, does that mean you're accumulating more mutations? Possibly. So overt deficiencies would cause tetany and impaired central nervous system activity, can play a role in hypertension, which we already talked about. If you're eating more potassium and more augment magnesium while eating less sodium, then you'll have a fluid shift, and then hopefully you'll have a decreased blood volume and blood pressure. Toxicity can be fatal, but if it happens, we're talking really high dose supplementation. And then sulfate. Sulfate is gonna be found in any of your sulfur-based amino acids, which are methionine and cysteine. So again, if you're eating, if you're consuming protein, like I recommend, you won't have to worry about this. So no recommended intake, just make sure you get enough protein and you'll have sulfate. Not downplaying its importance, but it's just one. I don't like to spend a lot of time talking about nutrients that we just don't have to worry about finding. Okay, we are here. So explain how the body regulates fluid balance, we did that. List some of the ways minerals, different vitamins and other nutrients did that. Remember organic, inorganic, found in the soil, et cetera. Identify the main roles, deficiency symptoms, and food sources for each of the major minerals. Sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sulfate, we hit all those. All right, so we have one more to finish up this unit. We have one more video on the trace minerals and then we will move on to nutrition across the lifespan and we'll start to put it all together. So now we've been through, here's the macronutrients, here's the micronutrients, here's water. These are the things we build a human with. Now let's look at what our needs are at different times in our lives. Okay, I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.