I’m really interested in finding out what can be done to find out the amount of sodium chloride in foods. I get this Thai Soup all the time from my Favorite Thai restaurant and I’m sure it’s loaded with sodium but I just want to find out exactly how much. So what kind of at home chemistry experiment would help me out, or where could I bring it to find out?
211948
Of course you could bring it to a food lab and have them analyze it.  Other than that, I have no idea how you would find how much sodium is in it with chemicals available at home.  If you are worried about your sodium intake, just have half the bowl and share with someone else, or if it's really that good (which it probably is, all Thai food is), just eat it less often.
669391
Not trying to be funny but are you asking a question or just sharing what someone else said & want comments or what? Im gonna assume you want comments so here's one: UGH!!! Like u said, its someone looking for attention. The average persons stomach probably wouldnt HOLD that much food! He'd die just from the salted pork (high sodium) & the seafood (high iodine content). He's full of sh!t....literally!
521881
How would someone even know if they have excessive salt in their pee? It's not like doctors routinely check for this or people self-check the way they check for sugar in their blood or urine.\n\nI have this awful mental image of how someone might know but you now have me curious.I ingest more than the normal salt levels and have been checked but my kidneys are working fine. The doctor would have told me if I was peeing salt. \n\nSo, what was the question?
92818
Radiation can be used to measure minute concentrations of a substance (solute) in solution with a device called a scintillation counter.\n\nFirst, you would incorporate a radioactive isotope into the salt.  For example, combining copper(II) nitrate with sodium carbonate labeled with carbon-14, would produce a precipitate of solid copper(II) carbonate labeled with carbon-14 (of a known concentration).  \n\nYou would then isolate the labeled Cu(CO3) and allow it to reach equilibrium with distilled water.  That solution is filtered to remove the remaining solid Cu(CO3).  The water can then be analyzed using scintillation counting to determine how much radioactivity is present.\n\nThe amount of detected radioactivity is proportional to concentration of the dissolved salt.  Using the (presumably known) quantity of carbon-14 in the Cu(CO3), you can calculate the actual concentration of the dissolved salt.
355760
Balance Your Body Chemistry.\n\nIf you've ever taken chemistry in high school you're familiar with this simple experiment to test the conductivity of salt. Two ends of an electrical wire are attached to a light bulb. The other ends are submerged in a glass of water. Because water alone is not conductive, the bulb does not light up. But when we add a little salt to the water the bulb starts to glow.\n\nIt's the same with our body. When we lack the natural elements in salt we suffer from a chronic energy deficit, or deficit of information. Salt is a core essential nutrient with exceptional abilities and qualities fundamental for keeping us alive.\n\nScience and medicine have tried to define the precise roles of salt in the healthy and diseased human organism. Blood, sweat, and tears all contain salt, and both the skin and the eyes are protected from infectious germs by the anti-bacterial effect of salt. When salt is added to a liquid, particles with opposite charges are formed: a positively charged sodium ion and a negatively charged chloride ion. This is the basis of osmosis which regulates fluid pressure within living cells and protects the body against excessive water loss (as in diarrhoea or on heavy sweating).  Sodium and chloride ions, as well as potassium ions, create a measurable difference in potential across cell membranes. This ensures that the fluid inside living cells remains separate from that outside. Thus, although the human body consists mainly of water, our "inner ocean" does not flow away or evaporate. Sodium ions create a high pressure of liquid in the kidneys and thus regulate their metabolic function. Water is extracted through the renal drainage system. The body thus loses a minimal amount of essential water. Out of 1500 litres of blood which pass daily through the kidneys, only about 1.5 litres of liquid leave the body as urine. \n\nSalt is "fuel" for nerves. Streams of positively and negatively charged ions send impulses to nerve fibres. A muscle cell will only contract if an impulse reaches it. Nerve impulses are partly propelled by co-ordinated changes in charged particles.
511985
Salt, sodium chloride [NaCl]... all you need to know is on that page so I won't bother repeating it all here>>>\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_chloride
173047
Biologically, sodium chloride is used by the bodys cells to regulate osmotic pressure inside themselves.\n Culinarily, the stuff enhances flavors of foods, provides a "drying" effect when cooking (reduces the amount of liquid in a dish rapidly when sauteeing, for example)
341871
How about having fruit for  'starters' before every meal, or puree some vegetables into a drink and of course you could have soup. I have heard recently that people who have soup before a meal consume 30% less calories for each meal
307502
It will be the pH of the sodium hypochlorite formed.  Determine that amount, look up the Ka of the acid and solve.
123232
First of all, you're a nut.  Or at least a guy who likes to buy new microwaves.\n\nI'm not sure there is an actual reaction between sodium hydroxide and sugar.  For the sake of chemistry, we can treat all sugar as C6H12O6.  If anything the reaction will produce carbon dioxide and water, but this happens anyway when you burn any sugar so it might be hard to separate the two processes. \n\nWill check and get back to you  :)\n\nUpdate:  See the link below.  The only thing I can find is that NaOH will oxidize glucose, though this doesn't work as well for sucrose.  I don't think heating will have any effect other than to make the reaction go faster (and it already goes pretty fast, apparently.\n\nHave you thought about a career in chemistry?  You have the right kind of mind for it -- i.e., let's throw these chemicals together and see what happens!  By the way, I would NOT try this with NaOH and any kind of acid solution.  It might be dangerous under the wrong conditions.
438759
The kitchen salt has nothing to do with the natural salt.\nOur kitchen salt, mostly sodium chloride, has not many contact points with the element at the original state, in other words what it is necessary to live. \nThrough the industrial process the salt is chemically wiped put and reduced to sodium chlorite; the minerals and the oligo elements are simply considered impurities and as such they get discarded. Sodium chloride, so treated and unnatural, has nothing to do with its nature, with being in its totality or with genuine salt that, on the other hand hols all the natural elements (84 minerals), the same ones that make our body.\n\nThe kitchen salt affects our body\nThe kitchen salt is a poison for the cells. It gets eliminated or made non harmful by our body sacrificing precious resources. \nThe body has an intelligent protection devise which identifies the kitchen salt as an aggressive poison for the cells and detects in itan harmful an unnatural substance which has to be discarded as soon as possible. This is the reason why our excretory organs are constantly over burdened. The body tries to make the excess kitchen salt non harmful isolating it. Sodium chlorite is surrounded by water molecules which neutralise it, ionising it in sodium and chlorine. This means that the body has no choice but to sacrifice the highly structured water of its own cells in order to make sodium chlorite non harmful. The cells, so dehydrated and deprived by its own vital force, die.
317296
I really advise that you dont try it.\n\nToo much table salt will create a sodium imbalance in your body. \nSodium ions in your body are responsible for transferring chemical signals between nerve cells, so as you can imagine it's kind of important.
659833
I tried to write you, but it said your email was unconfirmed?  So I changed the answer.  If you need help in chemistry feel free to write me and I'll try to help.  If I can write you back.  Otherwise keep asking questions.\nI think you'll do fine in Chem.  You've already got half the battle done, you're doing homework.\nDid you convert everything?  That's where people usually go wrong.\n\nThe formula-you'll just be plugging things into this:\nosmotic pressure=cRT\n\nThese are the terms in the formula: \nc=the concentration of ions in mol/L=\n(73 g/L of NaCl/58.43 g/mol of NaCl)--->1.25 mol/1l*2(there are 2 ions in the salt, and it dissociates in water, so 1.25 mol of Na and 1.25 mol of Cl. Which makes 2.5 mol of ion in solution\n\nR=the constant that makes all of the units work out=0.082 Latm/Kmol\n\nT=temperature in K=298K\n\nPlug all your numbers in:\nosmotic pressure=1.25mol/L*2*.082Latm/Kmol*298K=61atm\n\n\nIf you want, you can then convert atm to some other unit, if the answer is in torr or something.  I like to make sure that all of the units in the question cancel to give me the one I want in the end,it's a good, quick answer check.  I didn't use significant digits, you'll have to change that.
603701
we know that pH is ranged from totally basic to totally acidic, with neutrality (water) being at pH=7; so just display a range from 0 to 14 and color code it (red for acid and blue for basic) and place your findings there (ie before and after situations of NaCl towards the pH of the solution). Also place analogies (ie. the results of the pH due to NaCl concentration of 10% is equivalent to household ammonia)\n\nWhen explaining something to a non-science person, visuals and analogies always helps.
269438
How about making your own sherbert using citric acid (available in chemists) and icing sugar? \n\nOr you can use those mini marshmallows and cocktail sticks/skewers to construct  something that can bear a load (a paper cup of water or a egg work well but make sure you put newspaper down first!)\n\nHow about dropping sultanas in a glass of lemonade? They'll sink at first, then rise, then sink again etc - can they explain why?\n\nOr use jelly beans and have a blind taste testing and see if they can catch their friends out.\n\nOr just a blind taste test with different things to show how we can tell sweet, salty, sour etc. Just make sure you know about any allergies/religious requirements first.\n\nAny help? These experiments all went down well with our Brownies (Girl Scouts)!
371289
According to Sigma-Aldrich the solubility of MgCl2.6H2O is 1M at 20C (or 20.3030 g/100ml solution), so it shouldn't be possible to prepare 4.5 M MgCl2 in just water. If there are more solutes involved which might increase the solubility of MgCl2 try dissolving those first and then the MgCl2.\n\nYet I saw some papers using 4.5 or 2.5 M...\n\nI don't know why there is this discrepancy between sigma-aldrich and the solubility provided in the link in the above answer which would correspond to 8 M if you consider 100ml of solution and not water. In reality you would have a significant change in volume when you add so much salt and the solubility would be much less but I don't know exactly how much. If you consider 167g of MgCl2.6H2O then you are adding 88.8 g of water which means that the total volume is at least 189 ml and thus the maximum concentration is 4.3 M.\n\nWikipedia gives a different number; 54.2g/100ml at 20C, without specifying if it is for the anhydrous or hexahydrate... so it would be 5.6 or 2.6M respectively... \n\nWhat a mess !!!\n\nMaybe you should also post the question in biology, since someone who has been doing such purifications can clarify the issue.\n\nAnother idea would be to prepare a 100ml saturated solution according to the lowest reported solubility (that of sigma-aldrich) using a 250 ml volumetric cylinder, and then from a pre-weighed amount of MgCl2.6H2O keep adding powder slowly until it doesn't dissolve any more. Weigh the powder that is left in order to find how much you dissolved, measure the final volume and calculate the molarity. If you achieve higher than 4.5 M, dilute.\n\nOR\n\nprepare a 4 M if the amount of powder that you couldn't dissolve is very small.\n\nor \n\nprepare 450ml of 1M and evaporate to 100ml of solution while praying that there will be no precipitation...\nThat's very desperate but I am running out of ideas...\n\nI must say the whole story is very fishy (finding very different solubility values)\n\nI'd go mad too...
101388
Hey...if you are talking to a stroke group, addressing salt "toxicity" is not really what you want.  Salt toxicity occurs in people with renal problems or others with very high exposure to salt (usually intravenous).  Another word for such toxicity is called hypernatremia and has nothing to do with stroke.\n\nI believe what you are after is to convince these people about salt's negative impact on their stroke risk.  That's admirable and you should do it by linking salt intake to high blood pressure, which then increases the risk of stroke, rather than toxicity.  I like your idea of visually representing the salt intake and I'd do it this way.  A common recommendation for salt intake in people with high cardiovascular risk factors (like stroke victims) is to consume no more than 2 grams of salt a day.  The less the better really, so just show them, say, what one gram of salt looks like.  We know that an average American consumes about 4-5 grams of salt every day.  So you make a 5 gram pile of salt next to that.  That educates them how much they are overeating, rather than tells what would kill them like you wanted to show with the toxic dose (more practical that way, I think).  Then you can suggest the changes, namely to never use a salt shaker (there is more than enough salt in food already), avoid processed foods, avoid canned foods (including veggies...use frozen instead), avoid junk food etc.  Good take away message for everyone would be...look at the label...if it contains more than 250 mg of sodium / serving -- forget it.  Hope that helps!