When American economist, author, and social commentator Thomas Sowell wrote that there are no solutions, only trade-offs, it was in reference to politics and ethics, not health and fitness.

Even so, I quoted Sowell about a dozen years ago in a verbal jousting match with someone out to make The Fitness Master look like The Fitness Moron.

The encounter occurred in school on a day I had covered another teacher’s class during my lunch period, so I ate with a different group of teachers. They all knew of my healthy and austere eating habits and were in the midst of some serious superintendent bashing, so when I joined them with an egg-white omelet on my plate and a mix of steamed cabbage and canned tomatoes in my bowl, no one said a word.

Until I grabbed the shaker of the sodium-free salt alternative I had left on the table for anyone to use and sprinkled a bit on both.

Then the science teacher who had once called my diet “over the top and off the wall,” grabbed the shaker, read the ingredients, and boomed out, “Potassium chloride.” All superintendent bashing immediately stopped.

So did bodily movement. Or breathing, it seemed. Like a hanging judge, he announced, “You know that stuff’s lethal.”

Everyone looked my way. I chewed and chewed until I gathered my thoughts and finally said, “So’s water.”

A couple teachers chuckled, somebody said, “Ouch,” and soon the superintendent bashing picked up where it had left off.

Now I’m sure you know why I brought a sodium-free salt alternative to school. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 90% of all Americans get too much sodium, and about 40% of what’s in a salt shaker is just that. In fact, the CDC estimates the average American adult consumes 2.3 times the amount of sodium per day that the American Heart Association deems ideal, 1,500 milligrams.

Research shows a strong relationship between the amount of sodium consumed and an adverse increase in blood pressure. Left unchecked, high blood pressure becomes what the CDC calls a “major risk factor” for stroke and heart attack, as well as a cause of kidney disease.

But do you know why the science teacher said what he did? It’s because what I used and still use to enhance certain foods also happens to be the main ingredient in a solution used to euthanize anesthetized animals.

Yes, you got that right. Veterinarians use potassium chloride in a supersaturated solution to make pets go permanently night-night. But the key word here is supersaturated. To put my life in danger, the best medical guess is at my weight of 150 pounds I’d need to consume about 70 grams of the stuff at once.

That’s roughly 60 times the suggested serving size - and 25% of the entire 11-ounce container I’m presently looking at. Ingesting the same amount of the sodium in one sitting, by the way, would be just as perilous.

So what’s all this leading too? To what I said to the science teacher after my two-word coup de grâce: “You need to read Thomas Sowell.”

That’s because in Discrimination and Disparities he states something still quoted 27 years later. “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

He’s right, you know, and so was I when I said, “So’s water.” It’s a truth made tragically apparent last July.

While on a boat, Ashley Summers began feeling lightheaded and dehydrated, so she drank some water. Well, not really some.

The 35-year-old mother of two guzzled four, 16-ounce bottles - about two-thirds of what the average female needs every 24 hours - in approximately 20 minutes.

This quick overhydration created the cerebral edema that killed her. It’s an awful but obvious example of an acknowledged aphorism fully in step with Sowell’s aforementioned observation: that the dose does indeed make the poison.

Both are true for just about everything related to your health and fitness. Another point Dr. Layne Norton makes evident in a segment of a Dr. Andrew Huberman podcast is that that first “dose” of exercise doesn’t seem to be very healthy if you only focus on the immediate, short-term effects.

Short term, exercise causes your heart rate and blood pressure to skyrocket, increases inflammation and the creation of free radicals that can lead to aging and muscle damage. Norton believes if you’d know only that about exercise, you’d say: “I’m not doing that. That sounds horrible.”

But you know all of that changes over the long term. That as a result of consistent and correct exercise, your resting heart rate and blood pressure lower; your body better battles inflammation and free radicals.

In the past, I’ve stressed that if you want the most out of life, you need to optimize your health and fitness. And that to do so you need to experiment, experimenting, experiment.

That’s still true.

But to help guide your experimentation, it’s imperative to keep Sowell’s observation in mind.