Welcome to the Nutrition Science Podcast, where we help you cut through the noise and make informed science-based decisions about nutrition and your health.

How's it going, everyone?

Welcome back to another episode of the Nutrition Science Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Adrian Chavez.

And today we are going to be discussing the topic of sodium.

So there's a lot of controversy around this topic like there is with every topic in nutrition if you go online

you'll see people saying that you need to be putting salt in your water and taking electrolyte supplements

and increasing your sodium consumption and then on the other and then on the other hand you'll find

lots of information telling you that too much sodium is not a good thing and that you need to be limiting your sodium consumption.

So what we're going to do in this episode is we're going to talk about what sodium is, why it's important in our body, how much of it we need, what can happen if we eat too much of it or too little of it, and how to determine if

you are eating the right amount of sodium for your individual needs, because what you'll hear

a lot of in this episode is there's large variation in the amount of sodium that each of us needs,

and that's one of the reasons why you see conflicting information about sodium

recommendations is because we just need different amounts. So let's go ahead and get into what sodium

is. So sodium is a mineral and it is an electrolyte. So an electrolyte helps to regulate fluid balance in

our body. Sodium helps with water retention. It helps to increase the fluid in particular

tissue. So when you have more sodium in a specific area of your body, so in a cell, in your blood,

that's going to increase the amount of water that's in that particular area. It acts antagonistically,

which means it has an opposite effect as potassium. So potassium has the

opposite effect. It can reduce the amount of water retention. So when we have higher levels of

sodium in our body from higher amounts of dietary consumption or potentially from poor

excretion, so we'll talk about some of these things later,

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