Salt - How You've Been Misled and How It Can Change Your Life

If you have high blood pressure, there's a chance you've had a medical physician recommend that you lower your salt intake to help reduce it. Even if you haven't been diagnosed with high blood pressure, you've probably heard that you should restrict your salt intake overall - low sodium soy sauce, moderate salt added to your cooking, etc. 

The low-salt intake theory for reducing blood pressure made sense when it was introduced. When we eat salt, we get thirsty. The excess salt then causes the body to hold onto the water in order to dilute the salt in the bloodstream, resulting in higher blood volume and high blood pressure. It makes sense, right? But there wasn't actually data to back up this theory.

Today we're delving down deep into why the low-salt theory was wrong, where it came from, and the harshly negative effects it can have on your body (including weight gain).

The high-salt hypothesis stemmed from a study conducted in 1904 from the findings of just six patients. The concept became popular in the United States in the 1920's, stating that in addition to the rising blood pressure epidemic, we also needed to be concerned about the health of our kidneys filtering through too much salt, thus potentially decreasing their life expectancy. This continued through the 1970's, when two scientists from the Loisiana State University Medical Center claimed that the combination of high-salt and low-potassium intake leads to hypertension (high blood pressure) only in those who were genetically susceptible. The details of this study were blurred, leading to headlines states that salt leads to hypertension. In 1977, George McGovern's Senate Select Committed on Nutrition and Human Needs published the findings, which recommended that all Americans restrict their salt intake to just 3 grams (1.2 grams of sodium) per day. 

In response, the American Medical Association said, "While epidemiological observations suggest a relationship between salt ingestion and hypertension, they fail to support the hypothesis that salt consumption is a major factor in causing hypertension in person in the United States." To add to this, the Committee of Nutrition of the American Academy of Pediatrics states, "The role of salt intake as an environmental factor in the induction of hypertension has still not been define. For 80% of the population in this country, present salt intake has not been demonstrated to be harmful."

Despite these claims from major medical establishments, salt restrictions became popular recommendations for doctors when facing a rising population with high blood pressure and the desire to solve the problem. 

What patients weren't told, however, were the negative effects of reducing their salt intake, which we are now seeing in astounding numbers. 

Alongside the introduction to mainstream culture as salt being the bad guy, leading to hypertension, in 1977, the sugar industry cited Jean Mayer, a professor at Harvard, who suggested that the rising obesity problem was cause by inactivity. This shifted the focus from "harmful calories" to "total calories." Sugar was then able to fly able to fly under the radar of scrutiny. We focused on saturated fats, which have more calories per gram than sugar. And thus, sugar became a staple in the diet while fats and salt were blamed for our rising diseases and cut out of the American diet. More on sugar to come...

You may remember seeing TIME magazine scrutinizing saturated fats in 1961, but how about this image from TIME in 1982? The fault of salt became center stage. 

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So now it's time for the truth:
Low salt is dangerous.
Our bodies evolved to need salt.
Low-salt guidelines are based on traditional "wisdom" rather than scientific fact.
Sugar has been the real culprit, and salt can actually help mitigate the effects of sugar. 

Our bodies need salt to function, and not having enough can lead to wide range of symptoms that cause health deterioration, such as:

• Low electrolyte balance. Salt (also known as sodium chloride, NaCl) turns into electrolytes once it is dissolved in the blood and other bodily fluids. In fact, they are the highest concentration of electrolytes found in our blood.

• Absorption of twice as much fat for every gram your consume. Consuming too little salt can change a variety of hormone responses, effectively increasing sugar cravings, creating insulin resistance, develop an out-of-control appetite - leading to what's called "internal starvation." One of the body's defense mechanisms for lower salt intake is to increase insulin levels and create an insulin resistance. Similarly, if you are not getting enough iodine (typically consumed through salt) thyroid function can be impaired. If thyroid function decreases, you have the risk of developing hypothyroidism, a condition in which your metabolic rate slows down, more fat is stored, insulin resistance develops further, and weight gain occurs. Even for those who do not seen weight gain, they can be "metabolically overweight," where fat has accumulated around the organs - also known as "thin on the outside and fat on the inside" (TOFI) or "skinny fat."

• Increases release of hormones to compensate for fat loss, such as renin, angiotensin, aldosterone, leptin, etc).

Put this alongside sugar intake, and the consequences have been deadly. The intake of sugar has been steadily increasing since the 1700's, alongside our misguided recommendations to remove salt and other valuable nutrients from our diets. 

The intake of refined sugars in the United States between 1776 and 2002 has increased thirtyfold, with similar increases found occurring in England. The parallels in the rise of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and kidney is disease in this time are hard to ignore. 

It's also important to note that a change in the diet generally takes two to three decades to cause a rise in disease prevalence, meaning that the toxic threshold of sugar in the United States would have been reached sometime between 1905 and 1915 in order to account for the dramatic rise in heart disease seen in the 1935 that sparked the search for a cure. 

So how much salt do we really need to be eating?

We thought we needed to restrict it, but what if we eat too much? The good news is that your body is designed and thrives when it has too much salt. In fact, your kidneys are able to excrete it readily if eaten in excess (which doesn't happen too often anyways). On average, our kidneys may filter between 3.2 and 3.6 pounds of salt per day. This is about 150 times the amount of salt we ingest per day. Our kidneys filter 6 grams of salt every five minutes, and the stress on our kidneys comes mainly from having to conserve salt and reabsorb it. 

Scientific research suggests that the optimal range for sodium intake is 3 to 6 grams per day (or about 1 1/3 to 2 2/3 teaspoons of salt) for healthy adults, rather than the recommended 2,300mg of sodium (for perspective, this is less than 1 teaspoon of salt).

Some people even need more than this (those manages shock or burns to help skin heal, to counter low sodium levels, those who sweat often and excessively, those pregnant to lactating, those with high sugar diets, those with kidney disease, those with inflammatory bowel disease, those on a low-carb diet). If one of these relates to you, please don't hesitate to comment asking how your intake should be altered. 

The simple solution for ensuring that you get enough salt intake daily is to salt your food to taste. Salt tastes good. And when we are low on salt on our body, our natural salt thermostat will tell us. We may even notice that salty food tastes even saltier. This is our way of knowing that we need more. 

There is a silver-lining to the salt and sugar complex. Salt can help us kick the sugar addiction. Next week's blog will go into depth on how this happens and how to finally resolve your cravings naturally with salt.