Replenishing salt loss on day rides if you have hypertension

[ultrazenith]

I have hypertension which is controlled, and I'm under doctor's orders to avoid salt like the plague, but my GP was unable to offer any advice on how to cope with the obvious need to replenish some of the sodium you lose through sweat during long, hot day rides. I told the GP I normally carry a bag or salted crisps to eat during the ride and that seems to help ward off leg cramps and slow down the reduction of cardiac output due to reduction in blood volume from dehydration. But the GP insisted that I really shouldn't eat those crisps.

I always assumed if you eat salty food on a long bike ride, where you're losing salt via sweat, then you're body will send the ingested salt to where it needs to be and it won't hang around in your blood stream long enough to harden your arteries. And I assumed the problem with salt comes from having excess salt above the level that your body needs to function efficiently.

I've been unable to find anything about this on the web, so I thought I'd ask here, as I expect the age range and lifestyles (past or present) of many other retrobikers will probably mean they too have hypertension and are under orders to avoid salty food. ANy ideas? Perhaps others have found a healthy work-around for this problem.

 

[Splatter Paint]

Re:

I found this article:

https://www.gssiweb.org/sports-science- ... e-exercise

 

[ultrazenith]

Thanks - that looks very useful, I'll have a read.

 

[RobMac]

Re:

Replenishing salt loss on day rides in the UK, seriously?

 

[RobMac]

Re:

Or modern day diets contain far to much salt.

 

[mattr]

This came up on a QnA i was at three or four years ago.

Long story short, if you are eating a sensible and balanced diet (and enough of it), are properly hydrated, living in a temperate climate (most of europe basically) and not riding at extreme levels (elite/pro/ultra endurance type stuff) you get more than enough salt anyway. I think that would cover 99.9% of the UK readership of the forum (and probably 99.9% of the people in the UK who consider themselves cyclists).

Outliers would be those who overdress (driving dehydration and heat exhaustion), those genetically predisposed to sweating like a stuck pig or those with some other vitamin or mineral deficiency (he mentioned a couple of other things that can knacker salt balance, mostly a non-issue with a sensible diet).

I'm amazed by how many people have no idea what a sensible/balanced diet actually is!

The guy wasn't very complimentary about companies who market these things either (energy drinks, hydration tabs, recovery drinks etc.) as for most people, most of the time, they are either completely unnecessary and/or massively over concentrated.

So even in the OPs home in Porto, unless you're hammering yourself at 10/10ths for a couple of hours at a time at mid day in july/august, you almost certainly don't need anything beyond a decent diet.

 

[ultrazenith]

Thanks everyone for the input. Yes, I do ride in Northern Portugal where it can be pretty hot for 6 months of the year, and I do tend to go for 8-10 h rides in a quite hilly area, and due to genetics (I guess) I tend to sweat a lot and dehydrate easily. One of the drawbacks of moving to a nice warm place that my genetics weren't evolved for.

@RobMac
I've probably been away too long to remember what the normal British summer is like, and I expect in Scotland or up North having a full day of sun and temperatures above 20 C are almost unknown, so losing salt through sweat probably won't be an issue for a lot of people. It's also true that the average modern diet contains more than enough salt, but in my case I am on a quite low salt diet already and (for example) if I lose 1000 mg of salt on a day ride (I typically lose more than a kg from lost water) than that would have eliminated majority of my daily intake of around 1600 mg of salt. So i Understand people's skepticism about whether this could be an important effect, but on the face of it the evidence i have points to it being something I should be looking at.

Something that is only a minor problem over a short ride of a few hours could become a limiting factor on longer rides, such as multi day bike packing trips or the ultramarathon next spring I'm training for.

 

[legrandefromage]

beer and unsalted nuts.

 

[pigman]

beer and unsalted nuts

**** the nuts, beer is the answer to all problems
Good call

 

[The History Man]

Lick an aged pirate?