For what reasons can people not survive drinking salt/sea water?

Answer 1

You need some salt. So salt (NaCl) alone is not a poison, but the quantity you take in when you drink only sea water lets it become poisonous. Too much salt dehydrates your body.

If you cover your need for liquid with nothing else but coffee, then your body can be dehydrated, too, since caffeine has also a dehydrating effect.

Answer 2

Salinity
The ocean is essential for life on Earth, and also helps make the climate fairly moderate. However, although the ocean contains 1,370 million cubic kilometres (334 million cubic miles) of water, humans can’t survive by drinking from it—it is too salty.

To a chemist, ‘salt’ refers to a wide range of chemicals where a metal is combined with a non-metal. Ordinary common salt is a compound formed when the metal sodium combines with the non-metal chlorine—sodium chloride. This contains electrically charged atoms, called ions, that attract each other, resulting in a fairly hard crystal. When salt dissolves, these ions separate. Sodium and chloride ions are the main ions in seawater, but not the only ones. The salty seas benefit man, because the ocean provides many useful minerals for our industries.

Answer 3

You can survive drinking seawater, but you have to do it correctly. It had been common knowledge of seafarers for centuries that drinking saltwater caused madness. However, a french biologist, Alain Bombard, believed that this was the case when the sailors waited until they were already dehydrated before they drank the water. He sailed across the Atlantic in a small boat and survived 63 days even though he brought with him no food and no water. He was not healthy but he survived. The trick was to drink small amounts at regular intervals and supplement that with fresh water obtained from fish or rain (when you could get it).

Answer 4

Too much salt can dehydrate the body, sea water is loaded with salt. Drinking it can cause your body to dehydrate and that shuts your body down that leads to death.

Answer 5

Salt dehydrates the body.

Answer 6

They can survive, they just need to remove the salt!

Answer 7

The salt actually leeches moisture out of the body. You die of dehydration.