I periodically suffer from low blood pressure. It causes light-headedness, headaches, and similar mild inconveniences. My doctor said, paraphrased, ‘yeah, that happens sometimes.’ It’s not bad, just sort-of annoying.
But it is sort-of annoying, so I searched the web, made the mistake of going to WebMD (discovering I had cancer, lupus, and am possibly pregnant), and found a little hippy website of nonsense. They had crystals to save my chakrahs. Exotic salts to open my pores. Grass-fed chicken.
But among the inane babble, they said that I might need to eat more salt. Typically I consume very low sodium sort-of by accident, sort-of by design, but several, admittedly garbage, references said that in dry, thin air, slightly increased salt intake can help with low blood pressure and light-headedness.
I tried it. It seems to be working. Anecdotal? Absolutely. Observational bias? Quite likely. But low cost, low risk? Yes.
The important thing here is to keep perspective. Don’t skip a vaccine or medical procedure because the web told you so. That’s unreasonable. But adding a little soy-sauce to a post workout meal is reasonable.
Deeper, critical thinking and cost-benefit analysis don’t lend themselves to absolutist interpretations. A little soy-sauce is just that, a little. The commentariat often interprets ‘a little’ as half a liter a day, because that way the commentariat can get upset, and the odd way internet algorithms work is by boosting extreme reactions.
I suppose this also ties into the information dearth. I’m not going into detail on my diet and water intake, so readers are welcome to extrapolate whatever they want. I may impel them to assume I eat nothing but junk food and sugar, or vegan cheese and kale. From there one can take whatever issuance one desires.
BTW, vegan cheese exists. It’s a term for non-cow-based cheese substitute. I didn’t know that, but it’s in the grocery store.
In Yeats’s Second Coming, he says, ‘The best lack all conviction,…’ Archilochus mentions, ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ I feel like I’m touching on the edges of some deep buried truth, poorly understood, and my fingers, working where I can’t see, only roughly get its boundaries. But I think there’s something in there.
The thread of this poorly knitted thought is: If a hippy tells me to try the soy sauce, I’ll try the soy sauce. If they tell me to abandon the things I love, I won’t. I don’t believe in crystal healing, but I do like cool rocks.