Never add sodium to your pasta water

From an HBR, this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I am Nate Hedgie here with producer Felix Boone. Hello, Nate. Hello, hello. I am here with you because I want to talk to you about sodium. What do you know about sodium? I know that I probably eat too much of it. I love soy sauce. I love salty things. Do you like sodium? Are you a salty guy? So sometimes I wonder if I get enough sodium. Really? When I get snacks like pistachios, for example, like any nuts, I always look for the unsalted. Really? I mean, that's good. But you know, the other controversial thing I do, when I cook pasta, people put salt in the pasta water. I don't. Really? Yeah. But let's take a step back because we've kind of been conflating salt and sodium. Obviously, people put salt on all sorts of things. But do you know what would happen if you put pure sodium into your pasta water instead? No, what would happen? Well, I've got a video to give you an idea. A 3,500-pound container of sodium hurdles into the lake and crashes through a foot of ice. As the water seeps in, smoke rises through a series of muffled explosives. Whoa. Yeah, this is no cooking video. If you put pure sodium in your pasta water, it would explode. Your kitchen would be screwed. This was a 1947 recording of the US government disposing surplus sodium into a lake after World War II. The containers go up with spectacular results as water and sodium meet. Sounds like cannons, doesn't it? Yeah, exactly. It sounds like a battlefield. So I mean, that was like thousands of pounds of sodium. But even just a small grape-sized piece of it will explode like a firecracker when it hits the water. Can you imagine if this happened every time I put salt in my soup? That's an ultimate kitchen renovation. Just drop some sodium into a pot. Boom. For this episode of Outside In, it's another edition of the Elements of Surprise. That's right, in case you're not familiar, this is our occasional series about the hidden stories behind the periodic tables, most unassuming atoms, isotopes, and molecules. So in today's episode, we are talking about the saltiest element. You need it to survive. But why is too much of it bad for you? And plus it explodes? That's right, we're getting jiggy with sodium. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, getting jiggy with it. Do you get it, Nate? Do you get it? I bet you feel so clever. N-A, right? That's the periodic table? Yes, exactly. On the periodic table, sodium is abbreviated N-A. All that and more. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, next after a break. BUSY ROUTINES BUSY ROUTINES BUSY ROUTINES BUSY ROUTINES BUSY ROUTINES can make it hard to focus on your health goals. But MedExpress offers a simple way to explore weight management treatment online. Complete our short eligibility consultation with no need for face-to-face appointments or travel. 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Come learn about the ghosts that supposedly walk the museum halls after dark, how a train robbery gave rise to criminal forensics, why leeches are actually the coolest thing ever, and how to get away with murder in the Arctic. Maybe. You'll discover stories of history, science, art, and culture you won't find in a display case. You can listen to Side Door wherever you get your podcasts, or find us online at si.edu slash side door. From NHPR, this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I am Nate Hedgie here with Felix Poon. Yes, and I'm here to talk about sodium. Sodium is the sixth most abundant element on planet Earth. But did you know that it even exists in space? You know what Felix? I did because we're in space. Earth is in space. It exists Okay, but like more impressively, the planet Mercury, for example, has a tail that's made up of sodium atoms, and it stretches 15 million miles into space. Wow. If you took a look at long exposure photos of Mercury using a special filter, it almost looks like a shooting star or a comet or something. That's wild. It's like a giant comet. And of course, I'm going to be talking a lot in this episode about one of our most famous sodium-based compounds, which is salt. But I thought maybe let's start with sodium by itself first. So on its own, sodium, if you purify it, it's a metal, a pretty soft one, actually, you can cut into it with a butter knife or even squish it in your hand. It almost looks like a cheese because it's like silvery when you cut into it, but then it starts to tarnish in just a few seconds. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And this is maybe the most important thing about sodium is that it's super reactive. That's why purified sodium, it has to be kept in oil. As soon as it touches water, a few things start to happen. First, the sodium basically peels the hydrogen off from the water, forming hydrogen gas. And then there's an energy release that ignites maybe the hydrogen gas and then it gets hot and there's some steam and it's very dramatic. This is Dr. Raichel Burks. She's an analytical chemist. And Raichel says that you can't find chunks of pure sodium naturally on the planet because all of the sodium atoms on earth have long since reacted to and bonded with other elements. It's that person who can't be single. I'm a serial monogamous, whatever that is, like I got to be booed up. And as the kids say, booed up with chloride usually booed up with chloride or again, if it's soda, carbonate, it loves a carbonate moment. Sodium chloride is of course salt. Sodium carbonate or soda ash is used in glass production and in detergents. And it loves a bicarbonate moment. Sodium bicarbonate, you know what that is Nate? Oh, that's baking soda, isn't it? Exactly. I'm sure you have some in your kitchen. I do. It's used for leavening bread. It releases gas when it contacts acid like lemon juice. And that gas is what makes fluffy cakes and little pockets in bread. Or as Paul Hollywood from the Great British Bake Off would say, a good crumb structure. That was an attempt at a British accent there. That was a terrible British accent. I'm sorry. I'm going to do it in a Scottish accent. A good crumb structure. That's kind of almost a Liverpoolian. Sorry, everybody in England that listens to this. Anyways, okay, one more compound of note, sodium fluoride. Nate, I'm sure you know what sodium fluoride is, right? Yes, that is what is in our water, right? Yes. It's one of a few fluoride compounds that's in our water, but it's the main one that's used in toothpaste for preventing cavities. Okay, so like Sodium, as she said, it's this element that gets booed up. It's the one that you're always seeing quibbling with bicarbonate or with fluoride, but you know what? They love each other. So I want to play a salt quiz game with you, Nate. Okay. Are you ready? Oh, yeah. And salt is again, that's sodium chloride, right? Sodium chloride, NaCl. NaCl, the ultimate long-term relationship. So in 2025, about 40 million tons of salt was sold in the United States. What industry do you think was the number one purchaser of all the salt produced in the country? I'm actually going to say state departments of transportation for road salt. That's my guess. You're pretty close. That's number two. Okay, so number one, it's got to be something industrial. I don't think it's food. Yeah, you're actually right. The chemical industry uses 42% of the salt that's produced in the US. They use it to make plastic, chlorine, pharmaceutical drugs. Wow, I didn't know that they all had salt in it. I mean, NaCl, chlorine, they just separate the two. They get chlorine, right? Oh, interesting. Okay. And then road salt for de-icing highways and cold climates, they're 37% of salt usage. But of course, I wouldn't blame people for thinking that salt that we eat is a pretty big deal. Yeah. And it is health-wise. It's a huge deal. Probably the number one reason we equate salt with sodium. Yeah. We're constantly told that we should be eating a low sodium diet and that eating too much salty foods is bad for your health. Yep. Do you have any idea why too much sodium causes problems like high blood pressure? I'm guessing that it collects plaque in our arteries, which makes our arteries smaller, which increases our blood pressure. Not quite. It does have to do with sodium in our bloodstream, but I talked to Dr. Trisha Pasricha about this. She's a gastroenterologist and the Ask a Doctor columnist for the Washington Post. And Trisha told me that the thing is, the water in our bodies follows sodium. When you have too much salt floating around in your bloodstream, water is going to be attracted to that and come in. So the water gets moved out of your cells into your blood, which is why too much salt makes you dehydrated. But more importantly, when it comes to blood pressure, more water in your blood vessels means more pressure, aka high blood pressure, which can increase the risk of heart attack, stroke, and other scary stuff. So if you start a few days of not eating sodium or eating very little sodium, will your blood pressure drop pretty immediately? Yeah. Like within a week, according to studies. But you have to maintain a low sodium diet to keep the benefits. You can't just do it for a day and expect all your health problems to go away. Yeah. Okay. So like I said, too much sodium leads to high blood pressure. But here's the weird thing. Not enough sodium can also be pretty darn dangerous. You can sometimes see this like in marathon runners, for example, who are like drinking lots and lots of water and maybe not balancing that with electrolytes. Okay. So if you drink Gatorade or Liquid IV, it always tastes salty. And I've looked at the sodium levels and they're like pretty high because that's your electrolytes. Yes, exactly. What are electrolytes? I feel like this is some gimmicky like, oh yeah, have you ever seen the movie? Idiocracy? Brando's got what? That's great. Yeah, it's got electrolytes. What are electrolytes? Do you even know it's what they used to make Brando? Yeah, but why did they use them to make Brando? Because Brando's got electrolytes. So any substance that has a positive or negative electrical charge when it's dissolved in water is an electrolyte. Okay. So some of the main ones beside sodium are chloride, potassium, magnesium, calcium. Yeah. And we need electrolytes, especially sodium, for basic bodily function. The reason your muscles can contract, the reason your heart muscle is contracting, the reason your stomach muscle is contracting is because of this exchange of sodium. It's kind of like sodium is an electric battery that powers our muscles and organs. When your heart needs to contract in this coordinated fashion, it's because suddenly the channels open. These channels are kind of like little gates in the cell wall that can open to let sodium in and out of the cell. The sodium floods in and briefly the charge of that cell flips. It goes from negative to positive. And your cell going from negative to positive creates this electrical voltage, essentially a spark. And when it does that, it can transmit that signal to the next cell. And then that signal, the electrical currency changes, and then it propagates downwards. Which all coordinates the function of not just our muscles, but entire organs. Did that make sense for you, Nate? Yes. Yeah. I think the way you said it earlier, it's like a battery. It's like a battery just like recharging yourselves to fire off like signals to each other. Without the sodium, our hearts wouldn't beat, right? And like we wouldn't be able to move our muscles. I couldn't grab my cell phone up right now and take a call because my arm wouldn't work. And so sodium is critical to everything that we do second to second. And so it's actually like amazing how quickly if our sodium gets too low or too high, you can start to see these very dangerous abnormal electrical rhythms in your heart develop that can be fatal. That is wild. You really don't hear very much about like the dangers of low sodium. I wonder why that is. Is it really hard for us to just like have no sodium? Yeah. I mean, I think in modern society, because salt is everywhere, it's like you're much more likely to hear about people needing to reduce their sodium intake than ramp it up. Yeah. I also wonder if this is why some ungulates, so like deer and elk, are so attracted to salt licks. Like salt licks, they're a big block of salt and potentially some other minerals. And I remember when I had goats, we had to make sure that they had like a salt lick. Yeah. And we're going to get into this later, but herbivores especially need to supplement their diets with salt. So a lot of animals like deer are big fans of salt licks. As for humans, Trisha says our bodies do a pretty good job responding to its own cues. Like we're evolutionarily wired to crave salt when our body needs more of it. And that's really not hard. Like when's the last time you had a salty snack, Nate? I just ate some takis. I got the takis fuego. So those are very good, but they're very salty. Yeah. I mean, it is not hard to just find your closest convenience store or gas station and get some salty snacks. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Absolutely. But you know what, Nate? There was a time in human history when there was not enough salt to go around. Really? And you know what that would mean? It would mean whoever controlled salt, controlled the world. Ooh. I'm going to talk about that after the break. 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Anyway, so there was a time when humans got just the right amount of sodium without really trying. Hunter gatherer people who rely on wild plants and wild animals get salt naturally through the flesh of those animals. This is Ashley Dumas. I am an archaeologist. I study the history and production of salt around the globe. So is it fair to call you a saltologist? Is that a term? No, but I like it. You can just call me salty. She sounds fun. Yeah. So Ashley says that there wasn't actually any demand for salt until the first agricultural revolution happened. When you switch to an agricultural based diet, you're getting most of your calories from grains and they don't provide enough salt to regulate the moisture in your body. So as soon as we started eating more like crops, we weren't getting enough salt. Yes, exactly. So for the first time, after the first agricultural revolution, we needed to add salt to our food. But it was also pretty handy as a tool. Salt was important as a food preservative around the ancient world, particularly for fish. Vikings, for example, could sail long distances because they had salted cod. Right. And salt made animal agriculture possible too. And he guesses how many I'm sure you know. Was it because we could like the Vikings were doing with fish like kill a cow and then salt it for beef jerky? Well, this comes a stage earlier. Like how could we befriend the animals to even like follow us around and hang out on our farm? Oh, I know this. I had goats use salt licks. Salt licks. Exactly. So sheep, they need about two and a half times as much salt as humans do. And horses and cows, they need as much as eight times the amount. Wow. So any rancher stable hand worth their salt knows that they can't keep their animals without salt licks. I wonder where that term came from worth their salt. Ah, well, that gets me to my next big point. There is a story that back in Roman times, soldiers were paid in part with salt. Have you heard of this, Nate? I have not heard of this. There's actually no documented evidence of this, but it's kind of an often repeated story. But the fact that this became a myth goes to show just how crucial salt was. Yeah. Because after the agricultural revolution, salt became a valuable commodity. And the Latin word for salt is sal, s-a-l, and this is the root word for salary. Salary means salt. So you're worth your salt because it was so valuable. Right, exactly. You're worth basically the income you're getting paid to buy things like salt. The point of all this is we needed salt. And there's a few ways that our ancestors learned to produce it. Do you know what they were, Nate? I'd go to the ocean. I'd go and get some water and let that bucket dry out and have some salt. Right, yeah. The method they used actually was in these shallow lagoons. It was called solar evaporation. People have figured out thousands of years ago that if you can control the movement of seawater into these lagoons, that you can sort of regulate the rate at which the salt will evaporate out of the seawater using dams and pipes, for instance. I just want to share this picture of what these lagoons look like because this is still a method that's used today. Okay. The San Francisco Bay salt ponds. Oh, those are beautiful. Like, look at all those colors. It looks like a close-up of stained glass, very, very vivid. Yeah, you've got green water from algae, then there's yellow and brown water that's because of brine shrimp. That's cool. All these impurities basically get filtered out later, but in the process of evaporation, there's all these micro-organisms that colors the lagoons. Yeah. But anyways, another way our ancestors got salt was to mine it from underground salt deposits. These are essentially left over from when ancient seas or salt lakes dried up. Yeah. And it was pretty dangerous work because of dehydration from the constant breathing in of salt dust and the life expectancy of miners was pretty bad. Wait, so they were literally breathing in salt dust and then drying up? That needs to be in a horror movie. Yeah, it's pretty unfortunate. Yeah. These days, a lot of salt mines have been repurposed. Some of them are used for storage. Like in Kansas, there's one that stores government records and old film reels because they keep really well in the dry air. Oh, that is actually good use for salty air. Exactly. And then there are a lot of mines that are actually tourist destinations now. And I want to show you some pictures of these because they are very impressive. Okay. Just take a look at these. So here's the Slunik mine in Romania. Wow, it looks like a cathedral. And then let me just show you this. This is the Viliška mine in Poland. Yeah, this is not. I thought I was expecting shafts dark and cramped. These literally look like underground cathedrals. Like it literally looks like something out of like Lord of the Rings or something. Creepy, but amazing. Gothic. You should really look at if you haven't seen one of these. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. Yeah, click on that link right now and check it out. Another way to get salt was from salt springs. They would very simply collect some of the salt water from the springs, put it in these bowls and place the bowls directly over a fire or hot coals. This is sometimes referred to as a salt works, kind of like an iron works. Yeah. And one of the places they use this method was in the southeastern United States, among indigenous people before European contact. Ashley has mainly focused her research in present day Southwest Alabama to study the role salt played there. This was about a thousand years ago. And at that point, salt was a relatively scarce resource. I can't think of a better parallel than to compare the desire and production and trade of salt and antiquity to the desire and production of trade of oil in the modern day. We've seen what people will do, the extremes that people will go to, to acquire a mineral resource that they want, that they need, that they don't have. Wow. So were they like salt wars? So based on the evidence Ashley has seen from three archaeological sites in Southwest Alabama, she thinks that one group of indigenous folks took control over the land from another group and they took over their salt works. We see a change in technology. Different types of ceramic bowls are being used. They're larger. They're made completely differently. And we don't see this as a local change in technology like these late woodland people just decided to start doing it differently. We see this instead as sort of a colonization event by people from outside their region. So whether or not salt was the reason for the takeover or even whether they fought wars over it as opposed to some kind of peaceful transition isn't exactly clear. But the general point Ashley makes is that in pre-modern times, whoever controlled salt controlled the ability to feed their people, to run their economy, and to maintain their armies. Like I would totally watch a 10 part Netflix series about this. Like a historical recreation game of thrones, except it's called the salt wars. That's a great title, the salt wars. Yeah, it's not star wars, it's the salt wars. There is a pretty dramatic example of what role salt played in a war, the US Civil War. Do you remember what strategies the Union army used against the Confederacy? My civil war knowledge is not very strong Felix, you're going to have to help me out with that one. Okay, so one of their key strategies was actually depriving the south of salt. Wasn't there salt springs throughout the southeastern United States? Were they not using those? They were primarily getting their salt not from the salt springs. They were getting it from, you know, where we get a lot of our salt these days, global trade. The southern states were producing cotton, and they would send the cotton over usually to England, where it would be spun into cloth. And one of the items that was sent back in the ballast of those ships was salt. But one of the first things the Union did at the start of the war was blockade the south. So the supply chain for all sorts of essential goods, including salt, dried up nearly overnight. I mean the governor of Alabama even called it a salt famine. And yeah, salt was used to preserve meat, which was an essential food ration for soldiers, but it was also used to tan leather to make saddles and shoes. So not only were soldiers going hungry, a lot of them wound up barefoot. So you really can't run an army without salt? Yeah, not in those times at least. They didn't have refrigeration yet, or polyester shoes, I guess. But that's why the south tried to ramp up their salt making locally using those salt springs. Okay, so they did use the salt springs? Yes, they did. But then the north would attack those salt works wherever they found them. And enslaved black men and women who were working those salt works, they would sabotage them or sometimes give up the locations to the Union army and navy. So it was sort of like a game of whack-a-mole between the Union navy and the Confederate salt production. In fact, one historian estimated that taking out one salt works was the equivalent of taking out 20,000 Confederate soldiers. Wow. And you know, while we can't say if the south could have won the war if they just had enough salt, historians do say that the lack of salt definitely contributed significantly to their defeat. And as one southern veteran put it after the war, quote, do you know why you northerners whipped us southerners? It's because you had salt. Anyways, these days salt is way more abundant, mostly because of new technology. But not every country makes their own salts, either because they have no coastline or salt deposits, or because they just haven't developed infrastructure for it. So salt is still traded around the world for that reason, but also because of fancy gourmet salts that only exist in certain regions. Yeah, like the Himalayan pink salt. Yes, exactly. Do you know why it's pink? Probably because it's mixed with another mineral. I mean, true, but what do you think those minerals are? What's the key mineral that's turning it red? Iron. Iron oxide. Rust. It's rusty salt. Himalayan salt is just rusty salt. It's mined from the Punjab region of Pakistan, has trace minerals in it that include iron oxide. Yeah. Okay. And then there's French gray salt or cell gris. French gray salt is gray because it's raked from the bottom of solar evaporation pools. And so it picks up some clay. Okay. Some people say French gray salt is healthy because it contains essential minerals like magnesium, potassium, calcium. Which do you remember what these are all examples of, Nate? They're all electrolytes. Yes. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding electrolytes. Next time you're running a marathon, Nate, make sure to pack some French gray salt in your pocket. I hope be the fanciest marathon runner out there. So Felix, do you think that sodium is worth its salt? I mean, it's got so many uses. It helps our bodies function, but also, you know, don't try this at home unless you know what you're doing. But it can show you pretty good fireworks display. What I have learned is don't drop sodium by itself into your cooking pot. I have learned that too much sodium, and we all know, not good for our hearts, but hey, it better make sure you have sodium. It's like water for us. We have to have it to survive. Yeah, I would like to survive. That sounds like a pretty good idea. Yeah. Okay, that is it for today. If you've got a suggestion for our next element of surprise, send us an email at outsidein at NHPR.org, or you can call us on our hotline, 1844-GO-AUTER. Do not suggest iodine because my buddy Chris Schleck wrote in via email and already suggested that one. And now I just don't want to do it to spite him. No, I'm just kidding. We'll probably do iodine. If you want to hear about any of the elements we've already covered, helium, aluminum, lead, silicon, you can listen to those episodes now and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was reported, produced, and mixed by Felix Poon. It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby, very much worth his salt. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of On Demand Audio. I am the host of Outside In. Nate Hedgie, our staff also includes Justine Paradis, Marina Henke, and Jessica Hunt. Special thanks to Mark Kralansky, author of Salt, A World History, and to Theodore Gray, the man behind a series of YouTube videos titled Sodium Party, where he explodes sodium chunks of varying sizes in a lake on his farm. Music in this episode is from Ryan James Carr, Blue Dot Sessions, Lenin Hutton, and Hampus Naesilius. Outside In is a somewhat salty production of New Hampshire Public Radio. You know, Salt Wars, by the way, Felix, that could be like the next Star Wars. It's a long, a long time ago in a land not so far away. This is a classic, Felix goes on too long with the song. Sorry, everybody. Rebel salt makers, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Salt Empire, pursued by their sinister agents. Have you ever wondered why Reese Witherspoon founded Hello Sunshine, or where Kevin O'Leary got his start? Or even how Alex Earl became the most accessible founder to someone who may not even consider this space? 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