Hello and welcome to the Consistency Project podcast.

My name is Patrick Cummings. As always, I'm here with E.C. Sinkowski. Every week on the show, we aim to simplify the science of nutrition, health, and fitness, cutting through the noise to focus on the principles and practices. Help you perform better, feel better, and live better. Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week. Hello, and how are you, E.C. Great. How are you doing? Wondrous. We're going to talk about sodium today. And your notes that you sent me always before this episode, I'm pretty sure you titled the note, you're drowning in sodium. Yeah. Maybe we'll use this as a title, but it did make me laugh when you sent it over. That's what we're going to talk about.

We're going to talk about why most people consume far more sodium than they need and where it's coming from, how high sodium diets affect your blood pressure and overall health, and who really needs electrolytes to stay hydrated. Cool. So let's do a little bit background. We've certainly talked about sodium in the past. Let's do a little background. Let's get into this though. Yeah.

Yeah.

Definitely we've hit it pretty hard over the years.

Of course, some of these things are older.

But hopefully this one definitely has a little bit more of the highlights,

practical application type stuff in it than all of the really deep dive science.

But I think, you know, we're back in the summer months. And so the

hydration market is alive and well. Heaven forbid we sweat without any full replenishment, you know.

So that's why I want to talk about it again. And I'm going to tell everyone out of the gates that

it's far more likely they need more water than they need more

sodium to quote stay hydrated, but you might not even need as much water as the hydration

marketing would like you to believe. I just checked out the FDA website again to make sure my

stats are up to date. We're consuming in the U.S. on average 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day,

and the recommended upper limit is 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day. So basically we're 50% over what we need. And we have to remember

that most people aren't even exercising enough where we would theoretically sweat out some of

this excess sodium. Now, again, I know our audience is the much more active demographic than the general population.

And so they're probably like, yeah, but EC, we actually do sweat.

I hear you.

So do I.

But it has to be sweating for a long enough duration.

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