Previous Philosophical Transactions:

• JP Callaghan on Lithium Pharmacokinetics
• Lithium in Scottish Drinking Water with Al Hatfield
• M’s Experience with Potatoes-by-Default
• Jon on One Year Post-Potato-Diet
• Neoncube on The Meat and Veggies Diet
• Adam Mastroianni says “please squirt lemon juice on my brain”
• Leo on Swamp Taters

JV is a reader and intrepid high-dimensional pioneer who wrote us with some thoughts and comments on the exploration of brinespace. His email is reproduced below, lightly edited for clarity and to help preserve anonymity, but otherwise the same as we received it.

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Hello Slimes

I’m a long time reader of your blog and greatly enjoyed your recent post wrt. explorations of brine space. I’ve engaged in somewhat similar experiments due to some health problems (IBS-D is a likely diagnosis but I’m still hoping for something a bit more actionable). Particularly, I had some temporary success about a year ago experimenting with potassium chloride which greatly improved my wellbeing for about two weeks but then, unfortunately, it stopped working. My experiment was similar to Krinn’s in terms of dosage but with the crucial difference that I did not add sugar to the solution. I now understand, thanks to several of your recent blogs and references therein, why this may have caused my experiment to fail.

I’ve decided to give potassium chloride another go, using Krinn’s experiment as a point of departure. In considering the optimal experimental strategy for searching brine space, I conducted a brief mathematical exercise that I think may interest you as well. My brief experiment can be replicated in the attached python script. 

I should probably mention somewhere, that I’m a complete ignoramus wrt. chemistry, so this is a purely mathematical exercise with all the attendant risks of making stupid chemistry 101-level conceptual mistakes.

Anyway, I jumped right in and tried to replicate Krinn’s solution. I don’t have Gatorade easily available, so I used normal lemonade and added roughly two teaspoons of potassium chloride to 1 liter of water along with the normal amount of lemonade (1:4 mixing ratio) and a teaspoon of salt. In short order, I discovered two things: ingesting the solution 1) made me feel better and greatly reduced my appetite (yay!) and 2) made several subsequent visits to the bathroom urgently necessary (boo!). Reading a bit more about the formulation of ORS explained the latter phenomenon: I had inadvertently made a hypertonic solution, meaning that solution drew water into the intestines due to the osmotic gradient. Apparently, this amount of water was such that it could not be reabsorbed. Thus, I arrived at the conclusion that I should make future solutions isotonic (i.e. eliminate the osmotic gradient) or, like the more recent formulation of ORS, slightly hypotonic to facilitate absorption of the mineral salts. 

You may have encountered the formulation of the reduced osmolarity ORS with an slightly hypotonic osmolarity of 245 mOsm/l relative to the previous formation with isotonic osmolarity of 311 mOsm/l (https://www.rehydrate.org/ors/low-osmolarity-ors.htm). It makes sense, to me personally, that the optimal tonicity of any ingested solution should be somewhere in this interval. After all, hypertonic solutions have the major disadvantage that the ingested mineral salts are rapidly excreted, rendering them useless. And so, I assume that any experimental brines should be, at the very least, isotonic but, probably, somewhat hypotonic to facilitate easy absorption. If this assumption is correct, it would have the major advantage, that it significantly reduces the amount of brine space that we need to investigate as the subset of ideally hypotonic brine space (say 245 mOsm/l) is much smaller.

First, I created a script to calculate the osmolarity of Krinn’s solution. In the attached script, the amounts correspond to the ingredients in blue gatorade which result in a calculated osmolarity of 245.6 mOsm/l. I assume it is no coincidence that this closely mirrors the osmolarity of the recent formulation of ORS and, in fact, googling the osmolarity of gatorade, I encountered several criticism of the osmolarity of Gatorade from 10-15 years ago, so I assume the formulation was changed in response.

Of course, this means that adding two heaping teaspoons (slightly less as Krinn was adding them to 20 oz bottles) creates a severely hypertonic solution, which explains my experience with my attempt at Krinn’s solution. This is in no way a criticism of Krinn’s post and, in particular, I note that she writes that she “sips” the solution during the day, which probably explains why she didn’t have any issues. For myself, however, I think it’s better idea to make a hypotonic solution so that I can drink as much as I want.

Second, I created a script to identify the optimally hypotonic subset of brine space in a solution of sugar, salt and potassium chloride. That is, I assume a certain target osmolarity (245 mOsm/l) and amount of sugar (20 g/l) and find the combinations of salt and potassium chloride that results in the optimally hypotonic solution. The result is illustrated below, showing me that I should use quite a bit less of both minerals, close to perhaps 1 teaspoon of potassium chloride and maybe 1/5 teaspoon of salt per liter.

Third, I created a script to do the same for three minerals, using calcium chloride as an example but you could use any mineral salt, really.

Based on these experiments, I conclude that the assumption of the optimally hypotonic solution leads to a subset of brine space that is a linear plane, which should drastically limit the combinations to investigate.

Anyway, I hope you find this interesting and/or useful. At any rate, this is the approach I will take to exploring brine space. If I make any further progress, I’ll let you know.

If you wish, you may freely use or reference this material and the attached script.

Best wishes,

JV