Hello! I have been a doctor for 21 years. My name is Georgy Olegovich Sapego. In this article I will tell you about how much and why we need to eat chlorine.
Chlorine is a halogen. Chlorine enters our body in the form of negatively charged chloride. Most of all we get it with sodium chloride, that is, with table salt. Each gram of salt contains about 0.4 g of sodium and 0.6 g of chlorine.
Chloride is the most common negative ion in our body. There are special channels for it in the cell membranes. Through them, he enters the cage and crawls back out. This is necessary to maintain the balance of charges.
Without chlorine, our muscles and nerves will not be able to trigger and conduct electrical impulses. Chlorine is involved in maintaining the balance of acids and alkalis. Chlorine also helps the various glands to secrete liquid mucus. Without chlorine, there would be little water in it, and it would become thick and viscous.
Chlorine is needed in the stomach to produce acid. In the blood, it helps carry oxygen and carbon dioxide.
In immune cells, chlorine is in the form of hypochlorous acid. With this acid, leukocytes burn everyone they don't like.
Chloride deficiency
It rarely happens that we do not receive enough chloride with food. We eat it with table salt and other salts in various products. An adult needs about 2 - 2.5 g of chloride per day.
It rarely happens that young children do not have enough chloride due to some kind of wrong formula for artificial feeding. Children get sleepy, irritable, stomach problems, and grow worse.
Excessive chloride
This also rarely happens. Chloride is very well regulated in our body.
Most often, the level of chloride in the blood rises in patients with severe diarrhea. They lose bicarbonate, and bicarbonate and chloride replace each other in a difficult situation, because each of them has a negative charge. So it turns out that with a lack of bicarbonate in the blood, there will be an excess of chloride.
Sometimes all this is disturbed under the influence of drugs and turns out the other way around. Some drugs increase chloride in the blood.
When there is a lot of chloride in the blood, there are many negative charges. Therefore, the kidneys excrete in the urine those negative ions that they can. And these will be bicarbonate ions.
But bicarbonate is soda, which is alkali. Without alkali, the balance is disturbed and acid builds up. The body does not like this, and it begins to get rid of acid.
The easiest way to get rid of acid is to breathe out carbon dioxide. When carbon dioxide is dissolved in the blood, it floats there in the form of carbonic acid. If you breathe out carbon dioxide, then the acid in the blood will decrease. We breathe deeply and so remove excess acid. Shortness of breath turns out. But all this disgrace began with an increase in the level of chloride in the blood. So much for the chloride ...
Although many of us eat an excess of table salt, no upper limit for the chloride eaten has yet been established. As strange as it sounds, it is difficult to get poisoned with chloride.
It is believed that chloride, like sodium, provokes an increase in blood pressure. But this has not yet been finally figured out.
What happens to him
In a healthy person, chloride is perfectly absorbed in the intestines. Then he floats freely in the blood. Each of us has about 100 g of chloride inside.
As in the case of sodium, chloride is found mainly in the extracellular fluid. This is understandable - chlorine comes with sodium and never runs far from sodium. They are always together.
Our kidneys are constantly juggling with chloride. They continuously excrete it into the urine, and then immediately suck 99% of this chloride back. Thanks to this carousel, the body manages to maintain the concentration of chloride in the blood in a very narrow range, and the whole thing is remarkably regulated.
Where do we get the chloride
Everything is clear with salt. But raw uncooked foods are low in salt and therefore low in chloride. Interestingly, vegetables and fruits contain more chloride than sodium. It turns out that plant foods are a natural source of chloride.
Interestingly, tap water is not considered a source of chloride. There is too little of it.
We also eat chloride with vitamins. Remember the names of vitamins? Thiamine hydrochloride, pyridoxine hydrochloride and all that. "Chloride" sounds there all the time.
If you liked the article, then like it and subscribe to my channel. Check out my articles on related topics:
The harm of salt, the benefits of salt and lies about salt
How to alkalize the body correctly. Part one.
