Imagine a situation where you are stranded on a beach shore and don’t access to clean water. Your body is slowly dehydrating and trillions of litres of water is in front of you. If the dehydration goes worse, its catastrophic. What do you do? Will you try to drink the sea water or wait for help?
Luckily you and me are not in that situation. If anyone is in that situation and they drink sea water, they may die soon. Yes. Drinking sea water, for the matter even salted water, when we are dehydrated is very dangerous. GlobeTrooper has scientific explanation of behind the scenes of how our body cells react to salt water. In a nutshell
When we drink salt water, water leaves our cells (dehydrating us further) in order to regulate (dilute) the concentration of the salt water we just drank (again, futile).
So, you should absolutely not drink sea or salt water when dehydrated. It’s not just an issue of not absorbing the water, but an issue of osmosis accelerating the release of water and dehydration.
I said in the introduction, “You’ll die if you don’t drink something soon, so what’s the worst that can happen?” Well, what’s worse than dying? Dying much sooner, potentially before help arrives.
If you are interested to read more details of how our body cells react when we drink pure water and salt water continue reading GlobeTrooper post.
image credit: flickr/nattu