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Title: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster

The issue is electrical neutrality. The body is going to be at an state of electrical neutrality. It will get there anyway it can - if it means build up of bicarbonate. Otherwise all electrical activity would shut down since the entire nervous system depends on local manipulation of the electrical neutrality - establishing a local potential difference (voltage) to generate a current to pass information.

If I remember the electronics of the body correctly Na+ (sodium) is the charge that generates the current. Potassiums (K+) is the ion that establishes the threshold voltage required for a muscle to detect the current and respond by firing. Such thing as heart arrhythmia is associated with K+ unbalance - in fact KCL is a component in the drug cocktail used in executions in many states because arrhythmia is a flaw in the resting threshold potential. Good things horses evolved to dump excess K+. Too bad we humans didn't.

Truman

Sisu West Ranch wrote:

Makes sense to me.  It is congruent with admonitions not to use electrolytes that contain bicarbonite.  The problem is it is impossible to supplement chloride ions without also supplimenting cat ions at the same time.  Choices here are rather limited: Na, K, Ca, Mg, or H.  Now we can't feed H because this is HCl (hydrochloric acid) and would be bad for the stomach.  CaCl2 is quite hygroscopic and would make a mess of the powdered electrolytes.  I can't remember about MgCl2, but I'd bet that feeding bunches of that is rather of a problem also.

 

We also learned last week that feeding to much NaCl or KCl is also bad.

 

I guess I don't see anything here that would guide me in proper race day practices.

 

Ed

Ed & Wendy Hauser
2994 Mittower Road
Victor, MT 59875

 

(406) 642-9640

 

ranch(at)sisuwest(dot)us

--

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”  Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

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