586 | The Science of Hydration, Electrolytes, and Altitude with Dr. Robert

Welcome to the Huntback Country Podcast. This is episode number 586. And before we dive into hearing about what this episode's going to entail, I wanted to just fill you in on a couple of things. One is we actually just launched some podcast t-shirts on the X-O-Mot and Gear website. If you don't know through XO, we sell all of our logo gear at cost. So we have these Huntback Country Podcast shirts that are just 10 bucks. We had these several years ago. You guys have been asking for them in their back. So I just wanted to let you know they're there. They're available. Go check them out. I'll leave a link in the show description. And once again, they're just 10 bucks. So even with shipping, you can get a great shirt, a great price. And yeah, just share your support of the podcast. Also, while you're there, we have some new other X-O logo gear designs and hats and stuff, which you can check out. Next, just to let you know what's coming with the podcast. Through July, we're doing a round table series. We have done this in years past, but the central goal is to get hunters that we know who have a ton of experience and ask them very specific questions or give them scenarios or topics. And then be able to hear from these different experienced successful hunters and get their take. And it's fun because what you'll see is you'll get very different answers. And it's not a right or wrong. It's hunt context, it's preference, it's all these things. But this series in particular is going to be really targeted towards this time of year, this preseason as we're all preparing for our hunts, planning for our hunts and getting ready for that. So it's gonna be a really cool series to check out and stay tuned for that. Into Dave's episode, several things. One, this came from a listener question that you'll hear us talk about. Which again, send us an email. If you got questions, you got guest suggestions, topic suggestions, send an email to [email protected]. We love that stuff. And again, that's the reason we're doing today's episode. And I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. I learned a ton, got to meet somebody new, who is an expert. And it all happened because a listener max sent us an email with an idea. So it's super cool. Also in this episode, I will say I did not realize when we were recording this that my microphone was not actually fully plugged in. And so what happened was a different microphone from my setup was picking up my audio. Totally usable, but just not the same quality and sound is normal. So if it sounds a little bit different, yeah, you're right. Again, sorry for that, totally usable. Just a heads up there that it does sound a little bit different. And finally getting to what we're discussing today. It's all about hydration and electrolytes. And what really we need to know is backcountry hunters. So as we are releasing this episode, it's July. It's high heat. In some places, very high humidity. And a lot of us are doing a lot of training to get ready for our hunts. So it's relevant to today. It's also relevant as we move into hunting season. These multi-day efforts getting to altitude. And yes, even understanding what cold weather hunts demand from us from a hydration perspective. So I'm really excited to share this episode. All about hydration, electrolytes, what matters, how things change in the heat, the cold with altitude, and a whole lot more. So that's where we're getting into today. Once again, appreciate all the support. Check out the shirts, send us some feedback or episode ideas to [email protected]. And just consider leaving a rating or review in your podcast app that truly does help us. Maybe hit pause and do that right now. Come right back. Let's get into this great conversation with Robert. Well, Robert, thank you for joining us. I'm really excited. This really started from an email from a podcast listener, which we'll get to. And he shared his story and that was basically saying, you guys should consider doing a very kind of like scientific in depth approach and looking at hydration. And that pairs well with what I feel like is maybe even more popular in the last two, three, four years than it has been in the last decade with electrolytes. And I feel like there's a lot of buzzer on the electrolytes, even more products. I mean, we've always obviously had support strengths, but I feel like there's a trend where that's even more popular. So and then some of my personal experience. So I'll put all that together. I'm so excited to have you. If you can, and that's probably hard to summarize, but provided an introduction and background. Because I started looking for a guest, looking for an expert, someone who had a science experience, hopefully some practical experience was very fortunate to find you. And then even more fortunate to have wanted to do this with us. But yeah, tell us who you are, bit. Sure. Thanks, Mark. I appreciate the invitation. So I began my career and getting my PhD at the University of Connecticut. And we'll tell you the year, but it's back in the '90s. And I focused then on hydration, really, hydration and environment and fluid balance. After that, I then was a professor at University Hampshire for 10 years, into a lot more work looking at the impact of heat and cold as well on hydration. My background, at least at that time, was doing a lot of rock climbing, ice climbing, mountain year and so I was noticing a lot of things that were going on with hydration. They were interesting to me. So I used those experiences to form something of the studies that I did. After that, I went to work for the US Army at the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, which is a Native Massachusetts. It was there for almost 14 years. There's the Deputy Chief of the Thermal Mountain Medicine Division. I worked in the areas of heat, cold, and high altitude. So there's other aspects that also plays a role in hydration and that's altitude. And that was in one of your-- the questions raised by you when you're listening. So that's another interesting aspect to bring in. So I got to do a lot of work with all of the military forces that we have and got to go all around the world to work with a lot of our allies as well, subject matter expert in the area of hydration. From there, I would have got the opportunity to make a jump into industries. I was a senior VP of research and development for intrinsic bioscience. We worked in hydration. Again, in the area of electrolyte, electrolyte balance. So we could speak to that. And speak to that relative to one of the things I was brought up in the question from your listener relative to losses due to diarrhea and things like that and all of the radiation solutions. So I did a lot of work there. And then after six years, I jumped back to academia, where I am now, some of the-- to permit you to our biomedical nutritional sciences at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. So that's seen in a nutshell, my background. And then you were-- yeah, saying just elaborate there, too. You're telling me before you record, you've done a lot of mountaineering, multi-div, and trail run. So to me, it's amazing. You have the science experience, this practical experience. You've studied others. But then you've probably been a guinea pig of yourself as well, which is very cool. Yeah, my ear was allowed to actually do a lot of the pilot work. Now my age didn't allow me to do that anymore. But whether or not knowing what's happening is actually advantageous, because when these things are happening, you have the knowledge of like, oh, this is what's happening to me now. I don't know how helpful it is. But it certainly is good to be able to have those experiences to be able to relate to them versus just knowing having the knowledge. So you can-- you can understand this. And as you can say, yes, I understand that situation. I've been in it. Well, we will get to Max's email that we've talked about. I want to get to what you mentioned there of heat, cold, and altitude. Now those are effects. Hydration, because all those are relevant to our audience. But let's just start with Laney Foundation. And kind of clarify, I always find it helpful. I mean, we can throw around hydration, dehydration, electrolyte. All these words that we think we know what that is, like we understand it conceptually. I won't speak for the audience. I can speak for myself. I'm not a physiologist. I don't understand all the science of everything. And so I like to just start, but what actually is it? I think I know what it is, but what actually is it? So what is dehydration? I know that sounds like a very basal of question, but I just want to start there. No, it's not, actually. And defining the terms, especially in this area, can get complicated because scientifically, dehydration is really the act of losing body fluid. So that is actually a verb, right? We talk about the state of hydration. And typically, when we talk about, at least in scientific definitions, we talk about normal hydration status as being you hydrated. So this is a normal status. Your body water fluctuates around plus or minus 2% throughout the day, throughout the week. And you can track that pretty easily. But we're talking about hydration states. We talk about dehydration as the act of losing fluid, right? So we talk about dehydration. We can also talk about hypohydration, right? So that's also being low in hydration or hyperhydration. And we can talk a little bit about that about overhydration. There's also a couple of different types of dehydration. So the type of dehydration that you have when you're out doing exercise, maybe hiking up a mountain with a pack with a lot of equipment, that leads to a lot of sweating, right? Thermal regulatory sweating, which is how we regulate our body temperature. And that leads to the fluid losses. That's one type of dehydration. That's what we call a hypertonic type of dehydration. But there's also another type of dehydration where the fluids are lost due to diarrhea and vomiting. And that can happen. That happens on trips. But all the time, it's been on many trips. I've been on. People get bugs. I get passed around. That type of dehydration, a lot more electrolyte is lost. And so that leads to more of a hypothermemic dehydration, so low volume. And so there's an important distinction there. A lot of people don't think about them. And the clinical world we do. So they'll bring that out. And so how you would actually think or treat these different types of dehydration can be a little bit different. But they both rely on electrolytes as well. So does that give a good basic grounding of hydration? It does. Yeah. Let me ask another question. That will probably make me sound stupid or like a third grader. When we lose bodily fluid through sweat, for example, where is that coming from? Like in my head, I'm going to say, okay, it's coming from cells, probably in tissue, maybe in muscle, but is it also bloodstream? Is it organs? Is it other things? Where actually is this? Like if we're low in fluid, where are we going? Because we're not an engine with an oil pan. Right. Right. No, this is a great question actually. And it is a question that a lot of people never really think about. And when they hear the answer, they're like, oh, okay, that's interesting. So we, you know, most of our body weight is made up by water, 60 to 70% of our body weight is made up of water. Where is all that water? Most of that water is inside of cells, right? And then the rest of the water surrounds the cells and then the remaining part of that fluid is actually within our vascular, within your blood volume, right? So part of that blood volume is water. We call that the plasma. So it isn't just water. It's water with all of the things that are mixed into it, which would include electrolytes, glucose, plasma proteins, things of that nature. So that is the liquid portion of your blood. When you are losing fluid, when you begin to thermoregulate, right? So what happens is when you dissipate heat, there's a shift in body fluids. There's a shift in your circulation where blood flow goes out to the periphery, out to your skin, right? And you can see that. You see it a lot of times with exertion, you see people's faces get red, they're upper body, they're chest, maybe they're back, back of their neck. That is the blood going to the surface and that blood is carrying the heat that your body is producing by doing work, right? So just like you said in engine, our body is not 100% efficient and we have byproducts of creating energy or using that energy for work emotion or other activities. That heat has to be dissipated, the heat is carried by the liquid portion of your blood, pushed out to the periphery, out to your skin, and then sweating occurs. So that sweat that water comes from your plasma, comes from your blood. But there are shifts of fluids. So fluid can shift from the inside of cells to the extra cell of fluid and then shift from the extra cell you fluid into your vascular into your circulation. So there's fluid shifts happening all the time. But when you're sweating that the predominant fluid comes from your plasma volume. So it is important when we talk about these terms of hypolimia, low volume, we're talking about low volume really of your circulation, right? So that has a lot of other downstream effects of vendors cardiovascular impacts as well. So you can see as you begin to lose fluid from your blood volume, from your vascular, it's sure in order to make up for that your heart rate goes up because your volume is down. So there's a lot of fluid shifting going on, but the predominant amount is actually coming out of your blood volume, which is why hydration is so vitally important, especially relative to maintaining circulation and ultimately maintaining blood pressure. So your body is doing lots of different things to compensate for these losses while you're doing activity. Yeah, that is not what I expected and fascinating. It does make me think then you hear people again, in a non scientific self description, you'll hear people say, I'm a heavy sweater or I'm not heavy sweater. Does that then mean like if that is true, that that's tied to their cardiovascular system, to blood pressure, to blood volume. So like, because what you just said on now tying sweat and sweat rate potentially to, yeah, as you said, like those cardiovascular systems and blood volume. Less so due to those factors that you talked about, although when you are dehydrated, we'll just use that term colloquially because that's typically how to choose when you are dehydrated, you do sweat less because you actually have less to sweat with. So there's then many studies that show, even when you're in a dehydrated state, you actually have to get to a higher body temperature in order to start sweating. So core temperature and skin temperature, your body temperature inside, measured lots of different ways and your skin temperature are what the two factors that stimulate sweating. When you're dehydrating, you actually have to get to a higher temperature in order to list that sweating. That's not good because in your your hotter, right? And so you increase your your risk for becoming hyper thermic, right? And we can talk about all sorts of different types of heat injuries, heat exhaustion, heat stroke. But so when we talk about sweating sweat rates, who sweats a lot, who may not sweat a lot, sweating is dependent on many, many different factors, some of which are going to the environmental. So what environment in you in that's a that's a factor. The other factor can be your fitness. People who are more robically fits start to sweat earlier and more effectively. The environment that allows evaporation also allows for better thermoregulation. So in order for you to thermoregulate the sweat actually has to evaporate off your skin. Sweat that's dripping. If you ever go into a gym, you're lip didn't hear doing any car cardio and you just have a giant puddle around you. That's ineffective thermoregatory sweat hasn't done anything for you. Just lost it. So you don't actually lose any heat by by having that sweat not evaporate. The other thing that plays a big role too is a climatization or acclimatization. So this has to do with seasonal changes that we all go through a lot depending on how exposed the environment you are. So it's here in North America actually we're in the summer. So as we transition from spring depending where you are, your body begins to acclimatize to the environment. So you actually are beginning to have adaptations where you actually would start sweating a little earlier. You might have you would have an increase in your plasma volume due to this environmental exposure. So you can enlist those types of adaptations without it being summertime. You can actually we've done it in the army many times. You can acclimatize or when you do it, our fish is called acclimation. You can do that through exercise and just getting your core temperature up through a number of days or just happens when you go outside and your exercise. Typically it might take longer to do it that way just because you need a number of days for it to happen. So all of those factors, the environment, your fitness level, acclimation, state, the intensity of activity, the more intense the activity, the more heat you generate, the more you have to thermoregulate, the more you sweat, all of those factors play a role in how much you sweat. All right, let's tackle before we keep moving on again another foundational, like let's talk about what something actually is. What are electrolytes? So electrolytes, there's a lot of misconceptions on what they actually are and what they're what they consist of. We talk about the electrolytes, we really talk about sodium predominantly. So there's a lot of sodium, we talk about potassium, we talk about calcium, we talk about magnesium. There are other trace electrolytes as well. But those are the big ones and typically you would look on the back of any sport beverage, you will see electrolytes in that beverage. Why do we need them? So electrolytes play a huge role in a number of different cellular functions in our body from nervous conduction to muscle contraction, to, I mean, and the list goes on and on, you know, to your cardiac function, the beating of your heart. All of these things require electrolytes and so they are vital to have. Some of them are very tightly controlled in our bodies. So like potassium is very tightly controlled. Other ones we lose more easily like sodium if there's a fair amount of loss of sodium. But the other thing too that people don't consider, especially in the American diet, there's a lot of sodium intake. There are a lot of foods that people eat have a large amount of sodium in it. as well as other electrolytes. - Yeah, we'll get more into that. 'Cause it directly affects a certain scenario for us to spec under someone to ask you about. All right, so let's talk a little bit about, I mean, this just gives in to hydration strategy, a little bit, we can touch on electrolytes and all the things, but the first one just being what, how should someone think about during activity? And again, we can talk about variables of environment, intensity, et cetera, but in general, maybe just to start here, people talk about this idea of like drinking into thirst or hey, maybe it's, I can't drink the thirst 'cause if I got thirsty, it's like too late. So, I know that's really broad, but how do you begin to look at a hydration strategy, especially based upon activity? - Yeah, so this has been a huge area of controversy in this field. I've been involved in that controversy a little bit, written a few papers on it. So there's a few different camps on this and what works for people. And what I would say, first of all, just give the caveat, what people find for themselves, I was always taught your about, your body's your laboratory. So, you know, people find things that work for them. If things work for you and these are tried and true for you, then that's great. You know, we are all individuals, you know, physiologically we're similar, but there's a great deal of variability among human beings. So I'll just start that as a caveat. What I usually say relative to a drinking strategy is a lot depends, and I know people always hate this so I get interviewed on things. People are like, how much water should I drink? And I'm like, well, it depends. - Yeah. - So it really does depend on like, what are your activities? What activity are you doing? How long are you gonna be out there? What is the environment? What's the intensity, the duration of activity? Because all those things play a role, well, what we talked about, like, how much are you gonna sweat is gonna depend on all the factors we talked about before, right? So you need to think about like, well, how much do I think I'm gonna sweat? And what is strategy of drinking the thirst work in this scenario? Or is it gonna be something I wanna stay ahead of being thirsty and start to do something called plan drinking, right? So that's something that's done in an ulterior as well. You're right when you say that the idea that once you feel thirsty, you are already dehydrated, that is true. So you do have to reach a certain level of dehydration usually around 2% body mass loss in order for that thirst mechanism to trigger. Thirst, even though it's a perception, we perceive it, that our physiological anchors are stimuli to driving thirst. The thirst is really the drive to acquire water or fluid. So one of the ideas is to try to stay ahead of that. Drinking to thirst or just, when you feel thirsty can be effective just when you're out, if you're doing something of lower exercise intensity, right, so you maybe you're not sweating very hard. Maybe the environment is not very hot, maybe exercise intensity is not very high, right? So those kinds of scenarios, you can drink the thirst and you'll be fine because you're not gonna be sweating that much, especially if it's longer, maybe an hour or two of a hike, and if you're taking a lot of rest breaks too, right? So that gives you time to cool off and you don't have to sweat as much. If it's going to be a scenario where you're out, particularly for multiple days, where it's numerous hours of hiking, and the intensity is such, you might be carrying a big pack with a lot of equipment. People forget how much weight and water actually has to it. So that actually increases the amount of work that you're doing to be carrying fluid. It also could involve going up and incline, right? So you're in the mountains, so you have that increases your exercise intensity, altitude can play a role as well on fluid losses. So when those types of scenarios, when you know what's gonna be, you're gonna be out there for very long periods of time, maybe days, then you might wanna start thinking about, like I might wanna be staying ahead of my thirst and maybe every 15 minutes or so, having some fluid just to make sure that I'm okay, that I'm staying ahead of this. Now there are other caveats because we also need to be careful in those scenarios, not to over drink, height botanic fluids, so over drink water, because now you can be at risk for a situation called hyponotremia. So hyponotremia means low sodium, so that's low sodium in your plasma. And if your plasma level of sodium gets too low, it becomes dangerous. So you can actually go into convulsions, become going conscious of secemity to death. So typically in those types of scenarios, it takes time for you to drink an appreciable amount of water for this to happen. So usually it only typically happens in what you described earlier, like a rim-trim hike. When you're out there for like 8, 10, 12 hours, maybe 24 hours, you have the opportunity to drink a lot of water. And why am I saying water? Because water will dilute your plasma. It will dilute the sodium in your blood. So if you think about your blood volume and the plasma volume, like a fish tank that has seawater in it, if I just pour more water into that fish tank, the sodium becomes diluted. But if I pour fluid in that has electrolyte, that has sodium in it, then my plasma becomes less diluted, right? So in those scenarios, having on the electrolyte beverage can be important. Typically those electrolytes lost need to be a little bit greater than what you would see in a sport beverage. The thing that I always recommend, though, that people forget is that food is vitally important in helping retain fluids. So one of the things that electrolytes are important in any beverage is helping retain fluid. So if you were to, let's say you go for a hike for an hour and you lose a liter of fluid, right? And you come back in and we can do that just by weighing you. So you lose a liter of fluid. If I gave you a liter of water, you would hang on to half of that liter and you would pee out the other half. If I want to get you rehydrated, you need to retain that fluid. So having some what we call salient or electrolyte in that fluid helps fluid retention. So that's another thing that's important about electrolyte. We talk about glucose. Glucose is also important because glucose helps transport sodium from your intestine into your bloodstream. 'Cause that's where fluid absorption occurs from your intestine over through your bloodstream. So as a carrier, sodium can be carried on its own, but as it does need help, so there are other carriers for glucose. And when you grab onto glucose, these carriers grab glucose and in turn, that glucose also carries sodium in. So when we talk about oral rehydration solutions, they always have glucose in them. That always buffer the most part they do. And that's important because when you can move glucose from the intestine into your bloodstream, you're also moving sodium. When you move sodium, you move water. Right, so now you're increasing water absorption and then you also increasing water retention. So this is why electrolyte can be important in beverage, but then you can get into how much electrolyte is really vital. So I just kind of live in a long way around. Let me leave it there and see what questions you have. - I do have a lot of questions. - That law, what did the-- - No, it was very good. What you said about glucose helping sodium transport effectively, there are plenty of electrolyte drinks, supplements, what have you. And I feel like some of the more true new ones, more recently, that don't have any glucose and they're very specifically, they're marketing their pitch, their formulation is like, "Hey, this is actually really high in electrolyte." So it's not just a small amount, like this is potent if you will, to use an on-site antibiotic term, but there is no glucose. So is there potential there that some of those levels or call it wasted, right, or not fully utilized because they're on glucose with them? - So the electrolytes are gonna get in. It would be more effective or efficient to have a carrier, yeah, it would be. There are other carriers outside of glucose, amino acids, some, not all amino acids, some amino acids have been shown to carry sodium as well. And you do see beverages that have particular amino acids in them that just for that reason, right? So there are reasons not to have glucose in certain beverages. There are situations where high amounts of glucose can actually cause diarrhea. That can happen in support quite a bit with very, very high glucose concentrations that go into your intestine and because that concentration of glucose is so high in the intestine, that causes fluid to come out of your bloodstream, go into the intestine to dilute it, and then people have diarrhea. So that's never a good situation because now you're trying to ink your you need fuel, you need water, you need electrolyte, now you have diarrhea and so you're getting none of those things. So you will still transport our electrolyte without a carrier. It's just much more efficient and more effective to have a carrier like glucose. But then again, how much glucose do you need? Again, depends on the scenario. The other thing too is you need glucose for activity. So that's why sport beverages were developed. Sport beverages originally, some of the earliest marketed ones were actually developed to be a fuel delivery system. So it was really to get glucose in and you need for particularly for high intensity activity. But it also now is conflated between taking in fluid, taking in fuel, and taking in electrolyte. So a lot of it's like how important are all of these things relative to the scenario? And certain activities, if you're running like a very fast 5K, very fast 10K, or half marathon marathon, glucose is really important. The more intensity you have, the higher the intensity, the more glucose you wind up requiring to maintain that intensity. So you have to supply it. Lower activity, it's less important only because you're relying more so on fat than you are in glucose. So intensity plays a huge role there. The other thing too is that people want to drink things that taste good. So flavor also plays a huge role aside from electrolytes, which also play a huge role in fluid retention as well. Let's touch on the environmental variables. We've mentioned three, again, all three are very relevant. I know they tie into other considerations like we've talked about with duration and intensity of the activity. But if we just talk really like, okay, how does heat play a role on hydration, dehydration, and electrodes, etc. That was probably the easiest, but then cold, I'm very curious about and people symptomatically underestimate, I think, the importance of hydration and cold, and then also altitude. So can we just tackle those three? Because again, to our audience, to what we do, all three are going to be incredibly relevant. Yeah. And in the hydration issue is different in those scenarios. So the first one we kind of touched on already. So that would be exercise in the heat, you know, again, depending on all of the variables that play. So solar radiation is one that people forget about when you're in the heat. So you are getting your absorbing a lot of heat from the Sun's electromagnetic waves. So that's one concern in just being in the heat. Your absorbing heat. So that raises your body temperature and you're also creating heat as you exercise. And then again, that increases the situation where you have to thermoregulate, where you have to sweat, right? So those scenarios, that how much you sweat, how much flu loss is going to happen totally depends on all the factors we talked about. What's the exercise intensity? How long are you going to be out there? The environment itself is a very human that will limit the amount of sweating or the evaporation of sweat. Is there heavy solar load? Because that can increase the heat load. Are you carrying a lot of equipment that increases exercise intensity as well as going up any types of elevations? What are you wearing? There's another big one, particularly concern where we're talking about individuals in the military where they're wearing sometimes full uniforms, sometimes they're encapsulated with body armor, helmets, things like that. I don't know, it's been a lot of tons, it's I've hunted, but I don't know what the fabrics are now. The high-tech fabrics I assume are made their way into the hunting world. Yeah, it's essentially so close to mountaineering at this point. Yeah. So that's a good thing. But still, you do have concerns about, is there are there limitations due to your clothing that can be altering or lessening the amount of evaporation that you need for thermoregulation? So those are all the factors that come to play when you're doing exercise. It's really fluid loss due to thermoregulation. Then your strategies, again, we talked about drinking the thirst, land drinking, and then the amount of electrolytes, which we can come back to. When we talk about coldness at different scenario, and I noticed when I was doing a lot of ice climbing and mountaineering, I would be out sometimes in the same areas where I'd be doing hikes in the summertime. I'd be carrying the same amount of water and water bottles, and I would finish the activities at the end of the day in the wintertime. I would still have nearly a full water bottle. So the the drive to drink, the thirst mechanism was less so. So I did a few studies to look at that. One of the things that people talk about, I was just with my godson, who's a big hunter, we were talking about this last weekend, sitting out in either tree stands or for a long period of time, especially in the cold, how much you have to pee, right? And so a lot of people mentioned that, you know, even when you go outside and watch your time, for a little bit of time, and you're very cold, there's something called cold induced thyrasis. So what does that mean? It just means, and I'm sure everybody's experience is go out into the cold, and after a little bit of time, you feel like I really have to pee. And that is due to being out in the cold. What's happening there, again, it's another aspect of thermoregulation, when your skin temperature gets low, and it can still happen, you know, maybe less so depending on what you're wearing in the insulin of the factors of your clothing, but your skin can still feel cold even when you have some clothing on. Your skin does something called vasoconstriction. So the vessels clamp down, right? So when you look at the skin, in which time it looks very white versus when you're out in the summertime and you're doing activity, it's very red, right? So all that blood flow that would be out there is all being pushed centrally. So it's going to the core of your body, right? There is a lot of belief that people say, "Oh, you know, we're pushing blood flow there to protect your organs." That's less so the situation. What you're really trying to do is decrease the amount of heat lost to the environment. So if I can lower my skin temperature to very close to what the environment is, I decrease the gradient of heat going from my skin to the environment, right? So, you know, the larger the gradient, the more the heat will go to the colder environment. So what your body is doing is literally decreasing the blood flow to the skin. So you decrease the amount of heat lost to the environment. But all that blood flow, all that volume that we talked about, that plaza vine's got to go somewhere. So it goes centrally. And then that loads up your kidneys and your kidneys are like, "Wow, there's a whole bunch of fluid here. We did just just drink a bunch of fluid. But you doesn't know. Your kidneys don't know. All they see is a large amount of fluid coming through because it's all being pushed because there's less out peripherally." And so your kidneys are like, "Hey, one of the things your kidneys play a role and is regulating blood pressure. So you can regulate blood pressure by regulating volume." So your kidneys are like, "Hey, I need to dump some volume here. You don't need all this fluid." So I'm going to dump that. And you wind up peeing out a lot of fluid. There's less electrolyte in that situation. So you can become dehydrated that way in the cold, just because of cold induced irises. The other thing that can happen to a degree, especially during an exertion, is you're breathing heavily, right? And the environment's are usually very dry when it's cold out. So you can use, lose some fluid. It depends how long you're out. But you can actually lose fluid from your water of it, bring your breath for longer periods of time. So there's two ways that fluid can be lost in the cold. The last one was altitude, right? So what's really interesting when you go to altitude, particularly acutely. So now we're talking about 12 to 48 hours. Some of the acute adaptations that happen. And we're really talking when we get over that 8,000 foot, 10,000 foot area, when you're acutely exposed to altitude, there's an increase in your respiratory rate. You start breathing more. And you're breathing more to compensate for the oxygen, less oxygen and being your bloodstream. We can get all the physiology of why that happens. When you increase your ventilation, you start breathing more. Your kidneys have to do some work because you need to balance the pH of your blood. And when it does that, it also causes dioresis, similar to what's in the cold. So in that 12 to maybe 48 hour range, you pee more because of that. But you just your body trying to acutely adapt to the to increasing your ventilation, just breathing more. And so you lose a lot of fluid that way. And so there's another way that dehydration occurs. But again, this dehydration is more like what you see with vomiting and diarrhea. So you're losing electrolytes, whereas with sweating, you lose less electrolyte. Does that make sense? It does. Yeah, that's all helpful for sure. What you talked earlier, you mentioned. humidity and then tying that to much earlier on, you also mentioned effective sweating really occurs from a cooling perspective when it can evaporate. And so when you have that excess level of fluid or sweat, the puddle on the floor, it's actually not effective. It didn't cool you because it didn't evaporate, etc. So I guess my question is, people get into high-achumated environment, you sweat more, period theoretically. There's more moisture, right? My question becomes, and maybe this doesn't matter, but I'm just curious, could you, maybe you're not sweating more, it's just evaporating less? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That's exactly what's happening. You just perceive it, you perceive it better because your clothes are wet, right? Because it didn't evaporate. Like, I've been in many of those hikes, you're like, oh my god, everything's wet because nothing has operated. When you're out in dry environments, like I was out in Arizona a while ago, hiking, you're actually still sweating a lot, you just don't know it, right? Because it all evaporates. And you come back and you're like, oh, my clothes are dry. But sometimes you see, especially where it's dark clothes, you see that that light salt on your clothes. So that's from sweating, that's some of the electrolytes, some of the sodium that's in there. So, you know, it's a perceptual thing, because your clothes are wet, you're like, oh, I've been sweating a lot versus when the environment's very dry, desert climate. So can be an altitude too, because altitude, the environment's can be very dry too. You're still sweating a lot, you just don't notice that. I've never tied that together with, I mean, people that I've experienced, yeah, high mountain very dry climates, western dry climates, I also grew up in the Midwest with very humid environments. And so I'm very familiar with kind of all the above. And perceptually, you're just like, oh, yeah, you sweat so much more, but hearing the science and thinking about it, operations like, oh, maybe, maybe not. You're still sweating, let's say you were in either the environment and you're doing like the exact same thing, same load, same everything, right? You would be sweating as much in either environment, the amount of sweat would be relatively the same. It's just the amount that you're losing is very different. How much is evaporating is very different because of the amount of water vapor in the air. We talked about gradients before, like things go from low, low gradient to high gradient, or I'm from a high graded to low gradients, excuse me. So when there's a lot of water vapor in the air, we really talk more about dew points, which is, you know, love to give you an idea of how much water vapor is in the air. You can't get water to evaporate from your skin into the air because there's so much water already in the air. So that limits evaporative sweating. We lose heat other ways. You can conduct heat, like we're sitting in chairs right now, we're conducting heat to our chair, just the same way like your stove conducts heat to a frying pan. You can gain or lose heat from air flow, right? That's why fans are good are when the winds out. That carries heat away. The same thing with water. You lose a lot of heat when you're in the water 25 times faster than air. You lose heat because that flow of fluid or flow of air actually carries heat away. So there's another way that we can thermoregate to a degree and just as soon as you introduce air flow, things feel better, right? Because it's a eating with evaporation, it's carrying that heat away. So yeah, but I mean, a lot of it's perceptual too. But you know, if I were to ask you too, because you're losing, you're still sweating. How thirsty do you feel? And either those scenarios, I bet you still feel thirsty. All right, another comment. I'm just trying to think through common scenarios. Someone is doing, like let's keep it to a multi day hunt. It could be a longer duration event. High trail around what have you. But this idea that at some point, someone is looking at urine color and seeing, oh, like this isn't clear or it's not strong. Like it's starting to, you know, be colored, be darker, etc. Common wisdom would say, I don't know the signs of voice. They would come in with some say, I'm becoming dehydrated or am dehydrated. One, how heavily does urine color actually, how important is it? And then two, at that point, and it surprised beyond urine color, but just talk about dehydration in general. Like how do you catch up from that? Or can you catch up from that? So like how effectively, if you don't stop the effort, can you effectively rehydrate and how? Like at that point, I'm assuming electrodes are becoming more important as part of the fluid intake. So I know it's a lot of you. Yeah. Let me start with the color part first. So can color be indicative of a hydration state? Yes, but it depends on scenarios. Right. So let me talk you talk about like a resting scenario. If you get up in the morning, so let's see, you're hopefully you go to bed and you have six, eight hours of sleep. Your body is making urine all the time or making urine now. As soon as about 300 ml is getting into your bladder, it signals you to go in urinate. So you're making urine overnight. Six, eight hours, that would give you a very good idea of the work your kidneys is doing to say, hey, we need to hang on to fluid or we need to get rid of fluid. So when you look at that color, when you first got up in the morning, that would be pretty indicative. If it was very clear, it'd be like, I'm probably okay. If it was pretty clear and you said, how thirst do I feel? And you said, I'm not very thirsty. You're probably okay. If you got up in the morning and you looked at that color and it was yellow to darker yellow, and you feel thirsty, you are probably 90%. You're probably dehydrated and you need to pay attention to it. Right. So the scenarios get a little different when you do multi-day events and I explain why. So I said before, like, if you went out and you did an activity for an hour and you lost a liter of fluid, you would need to drink back a liter. If it was just water, right, and we said you need electrolyte to hang onto fluids for fluid retention, this is just water you would hang onto about half of it. So you'd still be down half a liter. Right. So if I were to look at your urine color after you did that activity and you drank back the liter of water and you peed out half a liter. If I looked at your urine color then it'd probably be still pretty clear, but you're down half a liter still. So in that scenario, it's not really good because now it's being conflated there, influenced by the fact that you just took a bunch of water. So electrolytes, again, are helpful for that fluid retention. When you're talking about multiple hours of activity, a day after day, I think you can rely on it a little bit more only because you have a longer period of time where you're making urine and you can be more aware of it. The other thing to pay attention to the people don't think about and this is another thing of awareness is how often are you peeing, right? So there's a great way, especially in your amount, in your hearing scenario or you're in a scenario for your out multiple hours. If you are, you feel thirsty, people forget about the thirst factors, you feel thirsty, your urine color is dark and you have not peed much in the last hour or two hours, you are probably dehydrated. So thinking about the frequency of urination can also play a role. If you're peeing a lot, then your kidneys are doing its job. If you're not peeing a lot, then your kidneys are also doing their job and trying to retain fluid, trying to hang on to water. If someone's in that situation, so it's like urine's dark, you know, I have been a while since I did pee, I am third, like they have these signals that being dehydrated. What is the best course of action? Like, yes, drinking, I know. But again, assuming it's like, okay, that is a situation where you do not only want water. Like you said, if it's pure water, you're going to retain half of that. So you do one electrolyte. I guess this is kind of leading to at Walt Point and again, hard question answer, but I'm trying to tie this to practical. People can go on Amazon a million places and look at electrolyte drinks or supplements. And if you start looking at labels, they can have different compositions, meaning like higher and sodium with magnesium with potassium, maybe some all the above. And something could be labeled an electrolyte drink and you start looking at it and it's like 5% of sodium per se compared to the next electrolyte drink that has 20x more. So I know it depends. I agree with that answer. It's the only best answer. But help us think through what actually is an effective electrolyte drink. I'm using quotes when I say that. Right. Right. Yeah, it gets back to the other part of the question and gets to is like, how do I get myself back to a state of normal hydration and new hydration? Let me do the caveat first. One of the things that's happened, and I was in this business when I were working for a biotech and consumer company, you see a lot of marketing has graphed onto electrolytes. So I don't want to mention any company names for the obvious reason, but you know, you look at their marketing and they're saying, you know, five times, 10 times. And then there's some bogus science that's involved of overplaying massive amounts of electrolyte in a lot of these beverages. They're unnecessary for the most part. One of the, and we said that email that you had from when your listeners came in and mentions oral re-hedration solutions from the WHO, that's how you've been studied. And the composition, the top of my head, I care to remember it, but the composition of electrolytes and there are very effective for those types of scenarios, right? So that's recommended. There's an amount of glucose that goes in there. You know, when you're getting an amount that's greater than that, it's probably unnecessary for retention. You just don't need it. The thing that I also bring up all the time, especially for these multi-day events is the importance of food and snacks, especially salty snacks. So you do need to eat. You are most of the time not at a high exercise intensity unless you're in a lead trail runner. You're, you're piking, right? You're hiking. It's sold a lot of exertion, but you can, you can drink, you can eat, you can eat while moving. In having foods along with that snack, salty snacks, things like that are very effective in helping maintain hydration. And that would be very effective in helping you get back. You know, so when you after an event and you recover, it's really the time after of eating and drinking that helps bring you back to normal. So I always bring up that because I think you do need the fuels for the activities. By we said, you do need more glucose for high intensity activities. You still need fuel overall because some of these duration of activities can be 6, 8, 10 hours up to, you know, multi-day events 24 or 48 even longer. And so then food is important and then food also plays that huge role in helping you retain fluid. And some foods depends on what you have actually contain food as well. But again, the power salty snacks, we use that a lot in the army, use that a lot in trail races. The other piece too, and you you alluded to it and well, to supplements, you look at the wild, wild west of supplements where claims can be made. They do not have to be substantiated to a large degree. There's a lot of junk science out there. And so again, people take a lot of electrolyte tablets, which may or may not be necessary. Again, I'll go back to, you know, if you have a thing that you do that's effective for you, then that's great. Then your body's your laboratory, you have to figure that out for you. That works for you. Great. I don't want to tell you not to do that if you've already figured out that that works. The thing I detail people though, like when you're doing things in training, that's the time to try things. It's never a good time to like, I'm going out and doing my big multi-day haunt or mag for a couple of days. I think I'm going to try taking these electrolyte tablets. Sometimes I've seen it a lot. Some of those tablets can actually elicit a lot of vomiting in diarrhea because they are so concentrated. That's something to be very careful of because then you wind up instead of trying to retain fluid or actually losing fluid because now you're vomiting or you have diarrhea. It's something to be really careful of during when you're actually doing the event or the activity. That's not a great time to try stuff. You try it when you're just going out training for something. Again, your body's your laboratory, try stuff out. It also gets back to the idea of cramping, that belief that electrolyte deficiency plays a role in cramping. I'll say this one that you may get letters in here, but there's no scientific evidence that supports electrolytes playing a role in cramping. The ideology, the source of what causes cramping, has not been shown to be electrolyte deficiencies. But you talk to people all the time and they say, I had this half cramp and I was hiking. I was wicked bad. I had to stop. So there, and then I always point out, you know, you stopped. Some of it has to do with the fact of it's a neuromuscular issue that when you stop, it allows this neuromuscular situation to reset itself. So just by the act of stopping, stopping, and massaging it out, and you will actually are now giving a type of treatment that addresses it. But then people stop and then they're like, I massage it, I take the break, I drink my electrolyte beverage, I take a salt pill, and I felt better. I always say, well, how do you know it was due to that? And then I did it the fact that you stopped, and you gave your neuromuscular system a little bit of time to reset itself. So, but again, it's difficult to tell people, like, this is my tried and true belief works for me every time. If that works, what's more for you than great, you keep doing that. But from the science side, there was no evidence to support that. Yeah, that's fascinating. Just like you said, essentially removing end-or-changing the stimulus, right? You're stopping the activity, you're doing some massage, what have you, that neuromuscular relief, you know, it's going to help the cramp. I did go through a, I would be one of the people who said, this actually helped me. I went through a period a few years ago where I was struggling with cramping during the day, but also at night. And one of the things I was told the trial was magnesium, biosanic, glycine, particular, and I tried it and I feel like it helped. But maybe I always say, I always say, if the placebo effects works, it still works. Right. Yep. And that's why I always have this kid Abia, because I don't want to get into fights with people because they're like, well, I worship you and I'm like, if it works for you, it works for you, and that's great. But it's hard, you know, it would be hard to do the control experiment on that. Like, okay, Hey, Mark, you're going to go do that same activity again, but don't take the magnesium this time unless see what happens. Like, there's too many variables. It's very difficult to do that. You know, up into the point where you're doing something that's detrimental to your performance, to your health. If you have something that works for you, fantastic. But just be aware, it doesn't work for everybody. And the power of belief I've seen many times, the placebo effect is incredibly powerful. Yep. So in hearing all of our discussion thus far, I mean, I tend to be somewhat of the, I wouldn't say full skeptic, but I am somewhat of the guy like, he's like, man, most of these supplements are marked being, most of these products are marked in the, it's all unregulated. Like you said, people can make whatever claims they want. I will say though, just my base little understanding of hearing you describe the physiology of fluid intake with electrolytes helping you retain fluid and not just pass all of it. It does make me, it's any regards to whatever product you may pick that it is important to consume electrolytes, especially during activity, longer duration activity, multi-day trips, etc. Like I said, that doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be a fluid supplement. It can come through the snacks. A very common thing for our hunt scenarios is, we're pretty much generally snacking throughout the day, but then you have like a dehydrated or freeze-dried meal at night. And often many of those are pretty high sodium. And people look at that and tend to have a negative association with it, but perhaps there's actually a benefit, at least for the, I'm the saying that you should eat that every night all the time, but under these longer duration events, like higher level of sodium in that meal could actually be in that positive. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I was thinking, you know, in those scenarios of having things like jerky when you're out hiking, because it's always, and it tastes good, and you won't eat it. Those things are tried and true, and getting restoration of fluid after the activity is a big part of this. And so things like you said, like a jerky, a lot of those meals tend to be higher in sodium, just to preserve it. And there's nothing wrong with that. We do get into again that issue of like, how much is too much? And then you have these scenarios with these products that are pushing very high amounts that really are unnecessary. And the other thing that gets conflated is the scenarios that you've just been talking about. So they'll be marketing these products that could be beneficial to the scenarios we just talked about, multi-day events, you know, six, eight, ten, twelve hours of activity, even low duration activity, high sweat rate, it's things like that. For people who are just like, I'm going to go run three miles today. Do I need this? Probably not. You're only running three miles. Are you going to become dehydrated? Really dehydrated? You might be a little dehydrated, but you're going to be fine. You know, a lot of athletes finish radishes and they're a little bit dehydrated. Sometimes severely dehydrated. It can affect your [BLANK_AUDIO] athletic performance to a degree when you get to higher levels beyond 2% of body weight loss. But for the most part, like if you're going to go hike three miles, you're probably okay. If you're going to run three miles, if you're going to go out and gardening, all these lower short duration, shorter duration, yeah, you're sweating. But do you need these massive amount of electrolytes or those type of activities? Just, you know, general things that people do? No, you don't. But you really need to be thinking about what is this scenario. So all the scenarios we've been talking about, yes, I think they're important. But again, these massive amounts, I agree with you, marketing employees. You really have to do up to dig into the science. And you do, I like the word that you use because we use that in science all at that. Be skeptical. And even if you're people who are motivated enough to, like, I really want to know what's going on with this product. You go on to their website. Sometimes they'll say, "Our science," and you can look up their science. A lot of times their science is not their science. It's science that other people did. And then if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, you can look at that science. I've done it many times. What you find is the science they're citing doesn't really support what they're saying. So they're kind of, you know, twisting things around just to make it seem like, yes, we have scientific support for what we're saying. They actually don't. So, I like that word again. You be skeptical of what these claims are. Especially when you see a lot of these things being touted by actors and athletes and people like that. I mean, these are people who are telling you this because they're getting paid, not because they have any knowledge of what's going on. Would there be, when you're talking about some of the products being having levels that are higher than necessary, say, of sodium, for example? Would there be a symptom of having too much sodium? Like, how could someone perceive that or could it not be perceived? Well, if you have, either I've seen it again. I've seen it a lot where people take supplements like salt pills or other type of electrolyte pills. It could be a beverage too that has super high concentrations. One of the first things you would notice is nausea. You know, in your stomach, now you're introducing a very high, we call osmotic, a very high concentration of electrolytes into your stomach and now your stomach's trying to deal with that. The other thing that can happen is now that we call it gastric emptying when it leaves your stomach and goes into your testin. Now your testin sees something very, very concentrated and it's trying to deal with it. If it's of a higher concentration, we could have that situation described earlier because osmotic diarrhea. So again, you have a super concentrated fluid or could be with foods as well. And your intestine is trying to deal with this in order to afford to absorb. It has to make it more dilute. It can pull water from your body back into your intestine and then you can have diarrhea. So there are some detriment to this. You know, nausea and vomiting is the other one. And again, I've seen it many times. So some people just can't tolerate it. So that would be a very strong negative for some of these things. So it's just it just is unnecessary for what you're doing. For the types of scenarios we're talking about. All right. We laid so much framework, groundwork, explanations of things that answering maxes, emails probably we've probably already answered it in some ways. And I won't even read the entire thing, but I just wanted to recap with it and see what we do need to potentially add. So essentially, max rodin, as I mentioned, he was saying that he was very interested in having someone with a background sports nutrition or physiology to talk about hydration. Obviously, that's that's what we're doing. To talk about what works and what doesn't to break down science of fluid and cells and electrolytes, we've done that well. I guess the part to touch on his story, which may or may not be related to hydration, but he felt like it wasn't many ways for his experience, which again, we've talked about not arguing with someone's experience, but his scenario is very common. So he says he lives in the Midwest. He drives to the mountains to hunts. Usually in the first couple days of his hunt, he's feeling destroyed, what was his term, by the activity. Basically, piecing together, he thought it was just altitude. He tied in reflection on doing this for several years, taking these trips, looking at the bathroom breaks. He felt like he needed to take every few hours during the drive, still having dry mouth, putting all this stuff together. He's tying elevation in this pursuit to dehydration and to fluids. So he's just basically asking, like, do you think that was it? Would more hydration help? Should it come from sports strengths? He mentioned, as you mentioned earlier, he had found that World Health Organization of oral rehydration formula that combines both salt and sugars. And that being more effective than just plain water. We can talk about that. So, yeah, I guess you've seen his email. I sent it to you. I've laid some of the big things out there to elaborate on it. Is there something we've missed in our conversation? Is there something else that looking at Max's email again that you want to share or get people to think through? Because again, his struggle with traveling from Midwest, going into the mountains, feeling authorgic, maybe having some upset, maybe some headaches, maybe some stomach issues is very common for a lot of people in our audience. So what role does hydration play and what other factors should someone like that be looking at? I love Max's question. This would be a great final exam question for students just to be like, here's a scenario. Because this is the real world, right? I mean, this is what I try to teach students all the time. These are the questions you get from people in the real world. And people are like, I'll just use AI. And you do need to have a good amount of knowledge to be able to look at scenarios and then say, okay, what's going on here? You know, to critically think what's happening. We touched on a lot of physiology, but I can kind of review it a little bit. Yeah, it would be nice to know, you know, he's going from basically the Midwest, probably sea level up to some altitude. It would be nice to know what altitude, but let's assume that is an altitude in that eight to 10 to 12,000 foot range. He's having a number of factors. One of the things that he points out, we talked about this, he's like, I'm driving up in there. I'm taking bathroom breaks every two to three hours on my mouth feels dry. We just talked about that. So that is the the dioresis that's happening due to the fact that he's going up an altitude. So his kidneys are working harder because he's breathing more and his body's trying to adjust for that. And now he's peeing out more fluid. So the altitude is causing him to be dehydrated. He mentions here too, is it the altitude sickness? So there is something called a cute mountain sickness that happens in that 24 or 48 hour range, typically 10,000 feet in above. It can happen at lower altitudes. That can be more so the range of altitude sickness can be from like a mild headache to full-blown vomiting, diarrhea, massive headaches, cramping. I've seen all this particularly landed work with the army. People go from one minute, they're fine, you're talking to them in the next minute. They're coming, it's coming out of both ends and they're like, you know, call my mom, Mattel, or I love her. And everybody recovers. So the degree or severity of a cute mountain sickness can be different. But having gone to altitude many times, just when you get there, even for that 24 to 40 hour range, you do have that headache. You do feel a bit hungover just from being there. And you do acclimatize to altitude, but it does take that 24 to 40 hour range and longer. So when you're going there acutely, especially in your driving, you're going to altitude pretty fast, right? So I like you're hiking, it takes you time. This is like you're in the car, you're going out. And the army has many scenarios of this and putting soldiers, war fighters in helicopters and bring on the very rapidly that high altitudes and seem cute mountain sickness. So are there some couple factors going on here? Yeah. He is losing fluid due to altitude exposure, most definitely. So dehydration is playing a role. Yep. His altitude exposure playing role here, giving him that hungover feeling. Yep, that's definitely there. So there's multiple factors here. Hydration is definitely one of them. It's flexible, flying as well. And you know, we know the cabins are pressurized. Pressurized to about 6,000 feet. I believe somewhere in there. Usually that effect isn't so much. The environments are very dry as well. So you do lose fluid because of that. So people do feel like they've become dehydrated on planes as well. But then you know, he asks, what's the fix? Right? And what's the fix? He mentions the products. One thing that he does mention is the WHO, well, cloud organization or a rehabilitation solution, which you can make yourself. You can just buy that the solution in little packets makes it with water. You don't need anything fancy. It does have glucose again for that transport reason. It does. does have the amount of electrolytes in there. This is really more so for dehydration due to mainly diarrhea. But in the scenarios we're talking about, this could be an effective electrolyte beverage for the longer dehydration or longer duration multi-day events. The other reason I like this one is because it has been tested and formulated not to cause what we described before that osmotic diarrhea situation. So the concentrations here have been shown not to cause that. So the original solution had more concentration of electrolytes and that diarrhea did happen. So they adjusted it after they had made it. So there's another good reason to use it because it's been tried. But when it's recommended and it is used throughout the world to address dehydration due to diarrhea, especially children, any mentions all this osmotic transport stuff, which is what we talked about before, the imports of glucose there. So I think all the things that we just talked about really touch us to this great question from Max. And now we put-- I try to talk about the solar system army too. And in the research now, we are looking at always multiple stressors when we talk about performance. So it's never just like people are dehydrated. It's like people are dehydrated and they don't have good nutrition or dehydrated. And they don't have enough sleep. Multiple multiple factors or they have an infection. So really tying all these things together and trying to give recommendations is important. And so this is a great multiple stressor question relative to hydration, activity, altitude. And so I think we've touched on all of it, don't you? Yeah, yeah. We've covered it well. Man, I've learned a lot in this one. This has been awesome, I remember. I truly appreciate it. It's been so good. Good. I'm glad. Yeah. It's interesting to understand the World Health Organization, the oral rehydration supplement. Like you said, even they probably started with it a bit too potent and had some issues and reformulated it. One of the interesting takeaways that I was getting ready to do is look at the current formulation and they compare that to some of the products on the market, just to see what actually is similar. Going back to it's like, hey, how much is too much? Or what small dose is effective or isn't? And again, it depends, of course. But I'm going to do some of my own research. I'm like, OK, what are these products I have taken or are interested in taking and tried? And how does that actually compare to this the World Health Organization formula? And then particularly, again, I don't see that for me personally. It's something of, you know, I was at the gym before this call for an hour and sweated. I don't need it for that. But going into here in a few weeks, I'm getting ready to go on a 10-day backpack hunt, pretty early season, pretty warm, high mountain. So that's the one I'm like, OK, that's what I'm going to do it. So yeah, just for me, you know, the connect with physiology, which is fascinating. I'd like a lot there to some of this practical takeaway that's been great. Great. It was a lot of fun. I love talking about this stuff. Well, that is a wrap on this one. Check out the link in the short description. If you want to see more from Robert, there's actually a really cool article I have found featuring him. I'm going to share the link too. And then also we have the Huntback Country podcast t-shirts for just 10 bucks. You'll find that link down there. You'll also get our contact info. Again, if you have questions for the podcast for Q&A episode, if you have a topic or guest suggestion, reach out and let us know. And then be sure to also hit subscribe or follow in your podcast app so that you get future episodes, including this new roundtable series that we're about to kick off. Thanks as always for the support and following a show and engaging with us. We appreciate it. 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