Structure & Salt
Originally published 06/01/2025
When I try to offer the bioenergetic perspective to someone new to it, I always start with two common-sense questions.
If one person drives their car every day, and another drives his car just once a week, which car would you expect to last longer?
If one person takes a walk every day, and another walks just once a week, who would you expect to remain healthy for longer?
Though people generally dodge the “what is Peating?” question, the basic premise of bioenergetics is simple. Machines wear down, life is ‘use it or lose it.’ This is common sense, but it is applied inconsistently. For example, many people have a cartoonish view of eating carbohydrates where their blood sugar spikes and crashes and spikes and crashes until their pancreas just gives up. Downstream is the general sentiment that young people “get away” with eating sugar and that “they’ll see” when they are older. These thoughts invite Death in! It is precisely the participation in juvenile delights that keep us young.
Of course, youth do have a sort of metabolic invulnerability, and they sometimes indulge in destructive lifestyles without feeling consequences. But we should not sclerotically dismiss everything they enjoy as destructive! Sugar is still largely viewed as a vice for children and adults alike, and only recently through the spreading of Peat’s work has that view been challenged. Likewise, Mature Adults have believed for decades that video games are, at best, an immature waste of time, and at worst, they are demonic and encourage violence. But in 2017, Japanese researchers demonstrated that the video game Mario 64 protects against brain aging in adults.
Do video games have a beneficial effect on the brain in spite of being useless or dangerous? Or do children (and young adults) seek them out because the brain benefits from exploration and engagement? One understands that parakeets or intelligent dogs need stimulation to thrive; is it so surprising that the most intelligent species on the planet can benefit from a level of stimulation only present in hyper-enriched digital worlds? Is it so much worse than the hyper-surveilled, fluoridated, and greiged “real” world?
Where do we draw the line between a beneficial brain stimulation and getting excessively invested in the artificial, digital world, losing sight of reality? A most curious question. I think in the right circumstances, social media is an extremely useful tool of socialization. There is, after all, little in the world more interesting than the right conversation partner(s). But social media has serious drawbacks. When children play, they set up their own rules. When you talk online, it is usually on a centralized platform which has its own opinions, controlling the narrative either explicitly with moderation or subtly via the mechanics of the site and how content gets promoted or suppressed. The ideal platform “matchmakes” people with similar levels of intelligence—a person too much smarter or stupider than another is mostly just noise to him—but remains laissez faire with respect to what they discuss.
I digress. Salt. The second lesson of bioenergetics, in my opinion, should be about how minerals fit into cellular life, and how that relates back to the diet.
The common view of cells is that they are lipid membrane-bound sacs of water with organelles and proteins floating around freely. It is known that cells concentrate potassium and magnesium at rest and exclude calcium and sodium, and that cells absorb calcium and sodium during times of signal conduction or other work. It is believed that huge amounts of energy, generated by breaking apart ATP, go into continuously “pumping” these ions in and our of cells to maintain the potassium- and magnesium- including, sodium- and calcium-excluding state.
Gilbert Ling demonstrated that ATP has not the chemical energy required to run the “sodium-potassium pump” in the canonical way. I will summarize his alternative view as succinctly as I can. The water inside of a cell is not free-floating; rather, it is a viscous, gel-like substance that clings to the surface of proteins. There are certain sites on proteins with a negative charge that monovalent anions Na⁺ and K⁺ are attracted to. Na⁺ and K⁺ have the same charge, but because K⁺ has a smaller radius than Na⁺ in solution, its positively-charged nucleus can get closer to the negative charge it is attracted to. So, K⁺ naturally displaces Na⁺ at these binding sites. But this is only true in the “resting” conformation of a protein with ATP present. ATP is an electron-withdrawing agent that itself has a binding site on proteins. When ATP is hydrolyzed to ADP, which is instead an electron-donating agent, the protein “unwinds” and inverts, the sites previously attracting K⁺ either create other linkages or change to prefer Na⁺, and some of the gel-like water becomes bulk fluid water. With those latter two phenomena, intracellular K⁺ is freed up to exchange entropically with extracellular Na⁺. To reiterate: ATP is broken down to ADP repeatedly, but instead of providing “chemical energy” to do cellular work, it’s serving as a breakpoint where a single hydrolysis can switch the conformations of proteins, the unfurling of which is used to do work. The retention of K⁺ is therefore done passively rather than actively, like placing a weight on a spring. About 98% of cellular K⁺ is adsorbed to proteins. A healthy, functioning cell will rapidly re-create ATP after it is used, effectively reclaiming K⁺ that diffuses out. In other words, potassium is highly preferentially retained, and consequently, sodium is strongly excluded. Similarly, Mg²⁺ complexes with ATP while Ca²⁺ complexes with ADP, so we observe that cells retain magnesium and exclude calcium, again, as a simple consequence of how our metabolisms work. (It is commonly accepted that a rapid rise of intracellular calcium causes signal transduction, but perhaps the Ca²⁺ accumulation is simply a downstream effect of ATP supplies being exhausted from performing the transduction in a yet-understood way.)
I care not to get into the exact history of how the low-salt recommendations came about. Suffice it to say, the advice to lower sodium intake (and increase potassium intake) is based on what we see in aging people with heart or kidney disease. Well, we already know that these patients are metabolically unwell, and we can postulate from Ling’s work that metabolically unwell people will leak potassium and magnesium and incorrectly retain calcium and sodium. It makes sense that people in these situations might benefit from a lower ratio of sodium to potassium. But for healthy people...?
Since the general tendency of life is to retain potassium and magnesium in the living tissue, one would expect the requirement of these nutrients to be relatively low. Furthermore, since most food is living tissue with the same tendency to concentrate potassium and magnesium, almost anything you eat will come with these nutrients. Getting sufficient potassium and magnesium in the diet happens without any special effort, assuming enough food is eaten. (Of course, dead tissue will no longer retain potassium, so some will be lost when water is lost during cooking, e.g. in grilling or boiling.)
On the other hand, for the minerals sodium and calcium, whose natural place is in the extracellular fluids, most foods will have very little. Once they are in the blood, any imbibing of liquid will dilute them, and any excretion of fluid through urine will mean some of these minerals will be lost. It follows that special attention should be paid to keeping up the intake of sodium and calcium. A healthy animal can eat, and excrete, a lot of sodium and calcium. The healthier you are, the better your cells will be at excluding sodium and calcium, and the “worse” you will be at retaining them. (This is true to a lesser extent for calcium because it can be stored in the bones, though retrieving it with parathyroid hormone is itself toxic.)
People familiar with Peat know well enough that you need to chase dairy to get your calcium, else relying on eggshells as a crutch. But I think salt is underappreciated. When people speak fondly of tall, lactivorous steppe people, I wonder if man’s use of salt was a prerequisite for the benefits of milk, or at least synergistic with them. Mastery over both sodium and calcium, I believe, is a necessity for both personal and special evolution. But of the people I see that are aware enough to reject the low-salt myth, most nonetheless fall back to the “safe” alternative viewpoint that you should “salt your food to taste.” Let me first contradict this by saying most people have no idea how to season their food. Even many fast food restaurants, which supposedly serve terrible sodium bombs, salt inadequately. But regardless of how you season your food, eating is just a part of the day. There is much room for improvement in micro-managing your salinity status. Drinking a few ounces of water, eating an apple, or sweating a bit as you work are all situations that call for adjustments to your fluids and salt.
There is an easy way to begin understanding the tonicity of your blood. Sit with a glass of water and a bowl of salt. Slowly drink the water until you are slightly queasy and feel the urge to urinate. Pay attention to how you feel—this is what it means to be hypotonic. If you continue drinking or remain in this state, you may begin to feel slightly anxious and your hands may get clammy. Now, slowly eat pinches of salt. Notice the previous sensations fading and you eventually start feeling nice and relaxed. That’s the happy medium. Continue taking salt to push into hypertonic territory. You’ll perk up a bit and feel slightly wired and thirsty. Recognizing these signs in your everyday life will help you understand your body and fine-tune your sodium status accordingly. I have bowls of salt permanently residing on my desk and bedside table, and I carry a small container of salt every time I leave the house. (Salt flakes are the ideal form factor for pinching between the fingers, and they dissolve in a way that is delicious yet delicate on the sensitive membranes in the mouth.)
Something bizarre about salt is we don’t seem to crave it. When temporarily hypotonic, salt doesn’t taste better, it tastes... saltier. My current theory for this is that, since most animals don’t have free access to salt, they must be prepared to survive very low salt diets. Craving salt is not particularly useful when you don’t have the knowledge to find it. This further implies that our salt-retaining system must be very effective when needed—perhaps it should be able to run on high gear indefinitely. But that does not mean it is healthful to do so! I think that, in the same way that it is healthful to suppress cortisol by eating enough sugar to keep glycogen levels up, or doing various things to suppress the pituitary hormones, it is probably healthful to suppress the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system by eating a lot of salt. So, contrary to “salting to taste,” I recommend making a conscious effort to eat more salt than you are used to. You may be surprised by how much more salt you benefit from.