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Electrolytes 101 · Common Sense Health

• Stephen Thomas BSc. Hons: Hello and welcome to this video explaining exactly why electrolyte management is so critical for people that are transitioning to a low carb or carnivore keto way of eating. about the infamous keto flu stuff. Alongside hopefully enriching your understanding once you have eaten this way for a few months or even for a few years. Now if I had a pound for every time someone said make sure you get your electrolytes, I could probably buy, well, a very large amount of expensive, brightly coloured electrolyte powders. But anyway, we hear the word thrown around endlessly in health circles, but what on earth actually are electrolytes? What are they actually doing? So in the simplest terms, electrolytes are minerals that carry an electric charge. They are the biological electricity, in inverted commas, that allows your brain to think, your heart to beat, and your muscles to move. But... Before we meet the staff that run the complex electrical machinery of your body, we have to address the elephant in the room for anyone eating low carb or ketogenic or carnivore. And that is exactly what we just mentioned. Why do some people switch into this way of eating suddenly feel dreadful? Maybe in the first week, suffering from headaches or fatigue and the dreaded keto flu. Is it almost entirely an electrical crisis? Well, yes. It's simple to understand as well. So when you eat a standard carbohydrate heavy diet, your body produces high levels of insulin. Insulin essentially acts like a hoarder in your kidneys, telling them to hold onto sodium at all costs. But when you drop the card, you drop your insulin levels beautifully and healthily, by the way. So however, without that elevated insulin telling your kidneys to hang on to that sort, they suddenly open the flood gates. you flush out massive amounts of sodium. And because water follows salt, you lose a lot of water weight very quickly. As the water rushes out, it also drags your other precious electrolytes like magnesium and potassium down the drain with it. So the keto flu isn't an illness. It's just a sudden power cut. So to fix it, we need to understand how the power grid actually works. Firstly, we talk about magnesium. or blood labs by the way, levels tend to be around 0.7 to 1.1 millimoles per litre. Magnesium is the master mineral. It acts as a vital co-factor for over 300 different enzymatic reactions. Or you could think of it as like a project manager of a massive construction site. It doesn't actually build the walls itself, but it ensures that the workers have the fuel by helping create ATP. And it coordinates the flow of supplies so the site doesn't descend into complete chaos. also has a great job in relaxing. We know I think that calcium is the on switch that makes muscles squeeze, but magnesium is the off switch. In your brain it acts as a calming guard at a specific gate, the NMDA receptor, N-methyl-D-aspartate. It's a type of glutamate receptor found in the brain and nervous system. So NMDA receptors are involved in the synaptic plasticity, you know, the ability of synapses to strengthen or weaken over time. and are crucial for learning and memory. They're also involved in neural development as well. So in the context of electrolyte workings, magnesium acts as ⁓ a sort of natural blocker at the end MDA receptors. When magnesium levels are adequate, it sits in the channel and it prevents excessive calcium influx, which helps keep neural activity calm and prevents over-excitation. So. This is why magnesium deficiency can lead to anxiety or restlessness, poor sleep and difficulty relaxing because your brain's off switch isn't working properly. So magnesium is blocking unwanted frantic signals to prevent you from getting overstimulated. So if you are struggling to sleep or suffering with muscle cramps on your carnival keto low carb journey, your project manager has probably walked off the job. Now only about 1 % of your magnesium is in your blood. So a normal blood test can often hide a severe deficiency deep in your tissues. So to get a true accurate picture of your magnesium status, you need to step away from the standard serum magnesium test and ask for a red blood cell or RBC magnesium test. Here is where we need to use bit of joined up thinking to understand why standard tests tend to fail us. You see, the body is an incredibly smart survival driven machine. It knows that If the magnesium circulating in your blood drops a little bit too low, your heart could go into a fatal arrhythmia. So the body keeps the blood level tightly and ruthlessly regulated. If you aren't getting enough magnesium in the way you eat, or if you're flushing out rapidly during the transition to low carb keto or carnivore, your body will simply steal magnesium from other areas, from your bones or your muscles and deep tissues, just to keep the blood level looking perfectly normal so the RBC test is the best one. Now by the time the standard serum magnesium test actually shows you as low you're probably already going to be in a severe chronic deficiency so that's why you probably need to look at that. So the serum magnesium test is a bit like a financial advisor checking the loose change in your wallet and declaring you wealthy but it completely ignores the fact that your actual savings account is massively overdrawn. So you can get that quite easily by the way that test. So the RBC magnesium test checks the savings and gives you a full picture of what's actually happening inside the cell because red blood cells have a lifespan of roughly 90 to 120 days. It's measuring the magnesium packed inside them and gives us a really accurate longer term average of your true intracellular tissue levels. It's an excellent test. So if you are dealing with chronic cramps, poor sleep or lingering keto flu, despite your standard blood work looking fine, common sense dictates that you need to look a little bit deeper. the next time you're getting a private blood draw ⁓ or you're speaking to your doctor specifically request for an RBC magnesium test is a far superior tool for seeing what is really going on behind the scenes in your body. Now, next is potassium, which is like a damn. The blood test levels, by the way, tend to be around 3.5 to 5 millibols per litre. Now, if sodium is the king of outside your cells, potassium is the absolute king of inside. About 98 % of your potassium is tucked away internally. That's why a juicy steak is actually a fantastic source of potassium. You're eating intact animal cells which are packed with potassium. So think of potassium as the water held tightly behind a massive dam. A biological engine called the sodium potassium pump acts like a relentless bouncer, constantly pulling potassium into the cell and pushing sodium out. And this builds a tension, a potential energy. When the brain sends a signal, the gates open, the water rushes out and it creates a spark of electricity for a heartbeat or for a thought. So potassium is the ultimate reset button. Without it, your muscles would squeeze, but never let go. Then we come onto sodium. So that's like a water park manager. The normal blood levels are 135 to 145 millimiles per litre. So we've been terrified into thinking salt is the enemy, but sodium is the ultimate fluid magnet. Think of sodium as the manager of a water park. It decides exactly how much water stays in the pools, like your blood vessels. It maintains healthy blood pressure and how much gets drained away into the urine. It manages this delicate balancing act via three departments. So the first one is your first signal, ADH hormone, is the thing which tells you it is time to drink. It manages pressure. The pressure team is the RAAS system, which actively holds onto water if the pressure drops. And three, the release valve. So that's where ⁓ natriuretic peptides work, which tell your kidneys to dump sodium and water if the pressure gets bit too high. In more detail, your heart releases. special sort of messenger molecules like I said called natriuretic peptides often abbreviated as BMP or AMP. So these messengers rush to the kidneys and basically shout dump the sodium and water. Now just quickly to get into that in a little bit more detail, AMP is released by the atria, the upper chambers of your heart when they detect high blood pressure or too much fluid volume and BMP which is just the B type natriuretic. Retic peptide is released by the ventricles the lower pumping chambers of your heart and when you're under strain from high pressure or an excessive workload They will be released and both essentially do the same job. They are your body's pressure relief valve You know telling the kid is to dump sodium and water however BMP, but what is often used clinically as a marker of heart stress? So if someone's BMP is chronically elevated, it does suggest that your heart is working harder than it should be, which can indicate conditions like heart failure or hypertension. It's not measured on a standard blood test, the way. This brings me onto what I would call the musical chairs of a heartbeat. To keep your heart beating flawlessly, once every second, roughly, sodium and potassium perform a constant frantic routine across the cell walls. So imagine your heart cell is like a fully loaded mouse trap and it's packed with tension. The sodium rushes in and this trips the trigger and snaps the trap violently shut. So you've got it here but it rushes in, shuts it, causing the heart muscle to squeeze and pump blood out of the body. And then you've got a relaxation, a fraction of a second later, potassium rushes out of the cell and this is like pulling the heavy bar back off. It releases the electrical tension. and it allows the heart muscle to open back up, relax and refill with blood. And then you've got a reset, the final sort of biological reset. The sodium potassium pump steps in and it acts like your hands, carefully resetting the delicate latch, forcing, ⁓ pushing the sodium and potassium back to their original starting side. So the trap is loaded and ready to snap again for the very next beat. So if you lack sodium, the trap has no spark and struggles to snap. If you like potassium, the trap snaps shut, but gets stuck there refusing to release, which is exactly what painful muscle cramp is. So I now want to move on just quickly to calcium and chloride, the master switch and the sidekick. So one lab reading is total calcium, and that is in your blood labs, normally between 2.1 to 2.6 millivolts per litre. Now calcium hardens bones, clots blood and tells muscles to squeeze in your blood. It travels in groups. Roughly 40 % is bound to a protein called albumin, like a VIP passenger sitting comfortably in an Uber, and another 50 % is free ionized calcium, which is the workforce that actually gets things done. If your protein is low, a standard test might show low total calcium. But you aren't deficient, you still have the exact same amount of active working calcium, you just have fewer Uber cars for the inactive ones to sit in. And doctors use a bit of mathematical corrected calcium to account for this. It is something that is known and accounted for. Now chloride in your blood is between 98 to 107 millimiles per litre is the loyal sidekick because opposites attract. This negatively charged mineral follows the positively charged sodium everywhere like a dance partner keeping your body fluids and your acid base, your pH levels perfectly balanced. Now, before you rush out to buy expensive, heavily marketed electrolyte powders, housed in plastic sachets lets you some common sense. Buying highly processed artificially sweetened electrolytes might not be the best move for your health or for your wallet actually. you can often get around this by just generous, you know, a generous sorting of your meals with good quality salt, or eating nutrient dense meats and simply buying a naturally sourced mineral water in a glass bottle and that's vastly superior and cleaner, a more natural way to keep your electrical grid fully powered. to wrap up, just stay salty, stay hydrated, preferably out of a glass bottle. And if you want to join a community that actually understands human physiology, come and find us at the Common Sense Carnival Community online. There is a link in our description to this video. And if you're on my sub stacks as well, you'll see a link there. And if you got to the end of this and you enjoyed it, please consider like sharing and subscribing. And if you've got to the end of this video and you didn't like it, well, thanks very much for staying. maybe give me another look and on the next video you might actually like what I've got to say. So anyway thank you for watching. One and all. Speak to you soon.