Salt! A deep dive into another maligned mineral;
Sodium Chloride, aka salt, aka an essential mineral, aka an electrolyte mineral. Your blood is salty for a reason!
Salt is a severely underutilized nutrient in the modern diet. Many of us have been brainwashed into fearing salt in the last 100 years. This is a tragedy of the highest order.
Despite bogus recommendations from daddy gov there is no solid evidence that salt is bad for you or should be limited. In fact, the main claim daddy gov makes is that salt causes hypertension and contributes to heart disease, although as we will see, this claim is completely unfounded, and couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Furthermore, these recommendations have failed to take into account the effects of reducing salt in the diet causing a higher heart rate, or how it may affect triglycerides, insulin levels, cortisol production, digestion or cholesterol. Perhaps that’s because low salt is terrible advice for each of those markers of health.
Being salty is a good thing!
The truth is that as salt intake decreased in the Western world, hypertension and chronic diseases were already on the rise. The timeline that Dr. DiNicolantonio puts together in his book The Salt Fix shows us that this has been the progression of hypertension in the US population despite efforts to lower salt intake:
early 1900’s; 5-10%
1939 Chicago; 11-13%
2004; 31%
2014; 1 out of every 3 adults
Finally, recent statistics from 2017 show us that hypertension affects 1 out of every 2 adults in the US. Is it just me, or is that number steadily rising since the release of daddy gov’s low-salt dogma? Something’s fishy.
Could it have anything to do with the fact that extended trials on sodium restriction indicate that the public is only capable of reducing sodium by 1000 mg, at most? Meanwhile the “benefits” of lowering blood pressure only occur at 2-3x that amount.
On top of that, 5 meta-analysis with randomized trials showed that in people with normal blood pressure salt restriction did not even reduce systolic blood pressure by 2 mmHg. Only 1 out of those 5 meta-analysis showed a diastolic reduction in blood pressure greater than 1 mmHg while the rest showed a reduction of only 0.1-0.97 mmHg. Those are negligible results after a lot of hard work and hoopla about lowering blood pressure.
Additionally, low salt diets have been found to cause insulin resistant blood vessels leading to vasoconstriction, a condition often found in patients with hypertension. These studies consistently show insulin resistance coming before hypertension; it is well known that people with diabetes tend to have high blood pressure. Furthermore, insulin resistance [no bueno] and diabetes are shown to consistently coincide with salt sensitivity and high natriuretic hormone levels. But we never hear about any of that in the mainstream dialogue around salt…
What sodium does in your body
So before we go any farther, it’s important to understand the role of sodium in your body, as well as the even more impressive role of salt, which is so much more than just bonded sodium and chloride.
I know that many people are afraid of consuming too much salt because of the perceived threats to our health, and fear is not something one can argue with. So rather than attempting to convince anyone otherwise I’m going to compile some information on why we need more salt in our modern diets, not less.
Salt: chemical name NaCl, is a halide composed of sodium and chloride. Na+ is a positively charged sodium ion known as a cation, and Cl- is a negatively charged chloride ion known as an anion. Na+ makes up the fluid that bathes our cells, and sodium chloride is the highest concentrated electrolyte found in our blood.
There’s no denying we are salty beings, I mean heck, our blood is as salty as the ocean! We sweat salt, we cry salt, every cell in our body requires salt for it’s hydration, and therefore it’s function.
We literally cannot exist without salt.
In fact when the body is in a severely salt restricted state for too long the body activates rescue systems. Those include the renin-angiotensin aldosterone system which has been shown to increase blood pressure; the sympathetic nervous system which you may know for it’s connection to stress signaling, and in this case, it’s ability to increase heart rate; finally our arteries become more constricted, a state known as total peripheral resistance, due to loss of blood volume that places stress on the heart and arteries leaving you vulnerable to chronically elevated blood pressure. This last one is because severely restricting sodium intake can cause blood volume to decrease by 10-15%! This reduction of blood volume can eventually lead to the shut down of your brain and kidneys, due to dehydration and overuse. That’s right, not consuming enough salt actually overworks our kidneys.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Minerals | Mayhem | Magic to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.