Essentials: Using Salt to Optimize Mental & Physical Performance

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are going to discuss salt. also referred to as sodium. Salt has many, many important functions in the brain and body.

For instance, it regulates fluid balance, how much fluid you desire and how much fluid you excrete. Salt also regulates your appetite for other nutrients, things like sugar, things like carbohydrates. We all harbor small sets of neurons. We call these sets of neurons nuclei, meaning little clusters of neurons, that sense the levels of salt in our brain and body. There are a couple brain regions that do this, and these brain regions are very, very special, special because they lack biological fences around them that other brain areas have.

And the those fences, or I should say that fence, goes by a particular name, and that name is the blood brain barrier or BBB. Most substances that are circulating around in your body do not have access to the brain, in particular large molecules, can't just pass into the brain. The brain is a privileged organ in this sense. However, there are a couple of regions in the brain that have a fence around them, but that fence is weaker. And it turns out that the areas of the brain that monitor salt balance and other features of what's happening in the body at the level of what we call osmolarity, at the concentration of salt

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