Is Salt Good For Us?

 Salt Intake And You

We're often warned against salt. But how much salt is too much? Is salt even necessary?

Long story short, we do need salt in our diet, but not too much salt. Our bodies use osmotic effect to move nutrients in and out of cells to feed and cleanse them, (look up "osmosis" online if you'd like to understand more) and that's why we need a certain amount of it in our diets. 

Like everything else it's a balance we need. Usually the natural whole foods that formed our diet included the right quantity of salt that we needed for optimal functioning, and that wasn't a lucky fluke - we evolved over the course of hundreds and even thousands of generations to make best use of the amounts of salt in our diet. 

Now we're in the perfect state for that but we've changed our diets, and processing foods adds way more salt that natural whole foods contain. Because we tend to concentrate those foods when we process them to produce nutrient-dense foodstuffs, and/or add salt to preserve the foods from bacterial decomposition, we end up with processed foods that contain multiple times as much salt, sugar, and fats than source food.

Too much salt creates problems with fluids crossing cell walls  and the osmotic pressure can rupture cells in extreme cases. Yes you can die from too much salt, and a slightly lower dose can make you very sick. For instance, drinking soya sauce (a highly salted ferment soybean liquid) has landed people in hospital and killed at least one. (Okay left braindead but that's the same thing as far as I'm concerned. Don't follow fad diets or stupid dares!)

But the main point, also made in this article, is that if we eat more made from scratch meals and avoid processed foods, that brings our salt intake down to levels our bodies can manage. Our ancestors evolved to utilise the salt in a more down to Earth diet, and our descendants will evolve to tolerate and use higher salt levels. But this takes space over hundreds of generations and is no good to us.

What Can We Do?

At its simplest, be aware that a can of soup (for example) has been made from a LOT of fresh ingredients, so instead of eating two carrots, two potatoes, a chunk of meat, half a cup of peas, a stick of celery, and assorted other ingredients (which most of us couldn't manage in a single meal) it's all been condensed so that you're getting all the salt, all the sugar, and all the fats, but in a cupful of soup that's easy to manage. 

So in effect you've eaten two meals in that one cup.

This is one reason why the best health advice is to avoid processed foods and cook from scratch, eat more raw fruits and vegetables, and use less salt in your cooking. Note also that the other thing processed foods have is salt, which is added as a preservative to - burst the cell walls of bacteria and kill then in order to preserve the food from their spoiling effects... 

And let's face it - home cooked food made from scratch always tastes better. If you can, grow some kind of herbs and vegetables wherever you are and use them. It adds flavour so you'll need less salt, has better nutrients than processed foods, and will make you healthier in the long run. 

As I always say at the end of these things - get exercised, get angry that our food system's been allowed to get so broken, sign petitions, write to your MPs and company CEOs. Subscribe to my newsletter, donate a cup of coffee or just Paypal me, join a local action group and get involved. And see you next post!