Why can't humans safely drink saltwater?

Answer 1

Short Answer: It's too salty.

Long Answer: Your body needs salt to function. Salt, or more specifically sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, chloride, phosphate are electrolytes in your body. Electrolytes help transmit electrical signals through your nerves, muscles, and help facilitate many organs in your body. Your body needs a specific concentration of these electrolytes to function properly. Too much or too little is bad for you. Your body automatically regulates the concentration of electrolytes by either adsorbing or expelling water.
Now sea water is chockablock full of electrolytes. Too much in fact. When you drink it your body must "water down" the electrolytes by adsorbing all the water it can. This sends a signal to making you thirsty. If you attempt to quench your thirst by drinking more salt water then you'll get just more and more thirsty as your body tries to cope with the high amount of electrolytes. Eventually, and ironically, this will lead to you dieing of dehydration.

Answer 2

Hi

As you probably already know water moves by osmosis from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration. Osmosis is a passive process so it cannot be stopped. Saltwater has a low water concentration and is high in Cl, Na, k etc, while the cells of the body have a high water concentration and a low salt concentration. When a human drinks saltwater the cells of the body try to balance out the concentration.

You probably know that osmosis is water diffusion and it always tries to balance out the concentration. Well the body cells start releasing their water to try an balance the surroundings that are so salty. As they do this they start shriveling and die. All the body cells do this as well as the brain cells. Once the brain cells start dying the person appears confused and disorientated, essentially dehydrated and then dies.

A similar problem occurs with drinking pure water. In this case the body cells try and balance the environment by taking water in and then they burst. Once again causing confusing and eventually death.

I hope that helps

Answer 3

if you drink nothing but saltwater then it dehydrates you. If you are stranded in the ocean with no food it is better for you to not drink anything than drink saltwater because you will die faster. Other than that it is safe for humans as long as you do not consume way too much then it is harmful because of the amount of intake.

Answer 4

It dehydrates you because of the salt. If you drink too much of it, the water will make you sick, and you'll throw up. It's very dangerous to drink sea water. If your only option was sea water, you'd have to filter it, or make some sort of contraption that would allow fresh water to evaporate out of the salt. I've seen the survivor man guy do it before. I've seen that episode too.

Answer 5

Can We Drink Salt Water

Answer 6

humans safely drink saltwater

Answer 7

this is because the saltwater becomes hypertonic to our blood cells and therefore our red blood cells will crenate.So drinking saltwater a lot could make a human to die

Answer 8

The kidneys can can process salt water,but only to a certain saturation.
Sea water happens to be beyond that saturation so dehydration and kidney break down ensues which causes death very quickly.

Answer 9

because saltwater has salt in it and salt can make us dehydrated if we drink 2 much of it especialy we drink it in large quantities in water

Answer 10

That much salt can't be filtered out by your kidneys and ends up in your blood stream in toxic levels.