Good to know! But wait, it can act as a laxative if you take it with enough water, but a constipating agent if you take it with not enough water?
Is the laxative power of it related to the vitamin C in it? This is the perfect segway for my Nepal pooping story, which I have likely already told in the Napal thread.
So on the trail, we had all sorts of supplements, pills, and medications with us to help our bodies with the conditions. Every little bit helps, as they say, and vitamin C came recommended as something you should be consuming daily. It helps reduce symptoms of high altitude sickness, helps your body repair tissue faster, boosts immune function, and a bunch of other benefits.
I had with me 1000mg packets of emergenC vitamin C powder, which I mixed in one of my 1L water bottles every morning, as part of my morning routine. Then I consumed the vitamin C drink throughout the day. But.. It wasn't long before I started complaining about the taste. Fresh water is just so much more refreshing. I thought an orange-like flavour would be nice, but you do get sick of it pretty quickly. Eventually just want that h20 like flavour and that's it.
My friend Jeff suggested that I just mix the entire packet in the morning in a small amount of water and down the whole thing at once. So that's what I did, as it seemed like a great idea. Well.. Maybe 20-45 minutes into the walk, when there was barely anything around, I started feeling my stomach growling. It wasn't long before it was obvious I really had to release some waste from my number two tube.
I ended up running towards a decently large rock I saw nearby, which might have really been the only thing I could have hidden behind. And I don't want to get gross, but I released the motherload right there and then, quite possibly the largest amount of excrement I have ever released at once. And somehow, I managed without even at first noticing to do that on top of somebody else's pile of poop. And somehow, right after that, I released another large motherload on top of that. It was obscene. Too obscene to describe. But I just did. Because this was a rant.