Water

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Settler
Jan 2, 2005
611
0
Central Brazil
clearblogs.com
Chris K,

I had heard of the French study as well but didn't have any data from it. As I recall he did that study to try to prove that a well hydrated man at the start would supposedly have enough water in his system that drinking measured amounts of seawater would not be a problem. I had never heard of any independant verification of it so I didn't mention it. The problem is that dehydrated people, driven by thirst to drink seawater die as a result, this much we know for certain.

I would much rather have people counscious of what not to eat, preserve sweat, and collect water at every opportunity using proper techniques. I'm willing to be responsible for telling people to do that. Mac
 

Moine

Forager
Chris,

This study was just the beginning of the story. I've read some newer stuff from a guy named Xavier Maniguet (army doctor + not so clean undercover agent). To put the thing succintly, I'd condense his studies as this :

There are two kinds of thirst. Blood thirt, and cellular thirst. Blood thirst occurs when the blood volume plummets, or when the general concentration of the blood raises. Blood thirst will severely impair your capacities in the short term (especially through hypotension, and blood viscosity). Cellular thirst is the dehydration of the cells themselves. They lose their precious fluids and, at some point, their salt, minerals and general concentration gets too high and it stops working. As long as they can keep going, they do. It's closer to (but not quite) a "on/off" status. The cells either work or not.

When you drink sea water, the high salt concentration literally sucks water out of your cells, and into the blood flow, which gives you back blood volume, and limits blood viscosity. So, you can function better, even though your cells are more dehydrated than before drinking.

By drinking sea water (there are precise dosages to respect, and I'm too lazy to dig them out right now) the end result of this is that you will be almost fully functional for a few days, and then rapidly collapse in the last day or so (as your cells ultimately just stop working).

Without drinking sea water, your workload capacity and general state gets down quicker, because of the "blood thirst", but your total survival expectancy is exactly the same.

Maybe that book from Xavier Maniguet was translated into english. Who knows? It's a big, black book anyways (and he stole most of the section on sharks to a south african author BTW).

Cheers,

David
 

Moonraker

Need to contact Admin...
Aug 20, 2004
1,190
18
61
Dorset & France
Thanks for the info David. It is similar to other stuff i read today. I am finding it tough to find any recent reliable research on this.
 

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