This is a story about how intemperance and vice versa, strict dietary restrictions can be equally harmful.
I'll tell you my example from the dashing nineties.
We have already discussed horror stories about low sodium levels in the blood several times. From this old people fell out of the blueand inadequate beer lovers ended up in intensive care.
Beer is low in salt and therefore people who drink more than 4 liters per day can easily get low blood sodium levels. From this, pure water begins to be absorbed into the brain, and you can die.
In fact, the average healthy person needs to drink 20 to 25 liters of water a day in order for his blood sodium level to noticeably decrease.
In the case of beer drinkers, it's all about low sodium in their food. If they washed down lunch with this beer, they would be alive. But to some extent, they ate exactly beer. So these poor fellows were deprived of life-giving sodium.
I am not kidding. Some drunkards manage up to 50% of their daily calories. get out of alcohol. It is clear that such a diet will contain few nutrients.
Kidney
For some reason, people think that the kidneys work like a water tap and are able to drain off excess water. In fact, everything is very complicated. You can't just press the valve like on a toilet cistern and flush excess water.
The kidneys can excrete only a certain amount of water and always with substances dissolved in it.
If a person eats little, then he will have few dissolved substances in his blood. Therefore, the kidneys will not be able to excrete much water. They just stop at two liters of urine a day. And a person can drink those same cherished 4 liters per day. Excess water will dangle inside the body and dilute all sorts of useful things like sodium or potassium in the blood.
Vegetarians
All those stories about inadequate beer drinkers were fashionable somewhere in the seventies of the last century. But by the end of the century, it turned out that it wasn't just about alcohol.
The inadequacy of the nineties yuppies was different. They weren't intemperate. On the contrary, they were inadequately abstinent. Sports, diet, limiting both. These guys treated their bodies like a machine that must work properly and which must be kept in a certain mode.
And so similar stories began to happen with vegetarians. They refused meat and milk, limited themselves to salty snacks and drank a lot of (in their opinion) useful water.
In 1998, a story was published about a young sports woman who did not eat meat, but ran a lot and drank a lot of water. Everything is as it should be. Only the woman for some reason ended up in the hospital with severe weakness. It turned out that her blood sodium and potassium levels had dropped dramatically.
The doctors thought about this story and decided that it was all about the squirrel.
When you and I eat meat and other protein products, then there will be some urea in the blood.
Urea acts like salt on water. That is, it pulls it towards itself. She does this not very powerfully, but enough for the kidneys to work and begin to remove water. If the protein level is low, the urea will be low in the diet, and the kidneys will stall in much the same way as beer drinkers.
That young woman had about 26 grams of protein a day. And it should have been twice as much. Plus, this woman led a healthy lifestyle and limited salty foods. And as a result, she ended up in the hospital.
My example
Somewhere around 1999 (what a coincidence!) A girl studied with me in residency, who followed some kind of salt-free diet. The ophthalmologist examined her fundus and found optic nerve edema. Type of cerebral edema. I had to quit the diet.
Briefly speaking
It turns out that if we want to run, jump, drink a lot of water and have the strength for this, then we will have to eat. And the protein. You can't argue against nature.
We brothers need meat. Have you ever seen babies drool from the smell of barbecue? How does this small fry know to eat a kebab? Everything is sewn up in their genes. Instincts.
Read my articles on the links in the text. There is a lot of useful information.
