Why salt not only bad but also good.
Speaking of death
is too much salt going to kill us all? Ask Adam. Shem: Hey Adam, my name is Shem and I have some questions about salt, taste perception and health. Some members of my family are worried that I, a certified sodium enjoyer, am on my way to demolish my heart before I turn 30. I tend to add a ton of salt to basically everything I eat, to a point that it becomes pretty much inedible for everyone else. My question is, what makes people's salt preference different than others? And do I, as a healthy young woman, need to worry about how much salt I add to my own food? Thank you. Adam: All right, Shem. Short answer, the reason you like salt way more than other people could be due to genetic factors.
It could be due to some kind of acquired sensory malfunction. You could be broken in some way. Or it could be a simple case of chronic desensitization. You've eaten so much salt because you love it. You've eaten it so regularly, so much of it that you've made yourself kind of numb to it. That is a reversible process, by the way. Should you endeavor to reverse it, despite the fact that you are a healthy young woman with good blood pressure? Maybe. There is a clear consensus in the dietary health community that most people eat too much salt, way too much salt, and that common levels of excess salt consumption are probably bad for most people, and they're definitely really bad for certain people who are particularly salt sensitive.
But there isn't really a consensus on what the right amount of salt consumption is. It probably depends on the individual, and there are lots of open scientific questions in this area, including whether excess salt consumption is bad independent of its effect on blood pressure. I, for example, have perfect blood pressure. So I generally don't worry about my salt intake, but there is reason to suspect salt might hurt my health through mechanisms other than increasing my blood pressure. That's not nearly as well established, so I don't worry about it very much. As long as my blood pressure is good, I figure my salt intake is pretty good. Though I imagine I will need to eat less salt as I get older. In general, I try to moderate my salt intake by moderating my food intake.
Eat less food and you'll eat less salt as a consequence. There's lots of reasons for most of us in the developed world to eat less food in general. So I season my food to taste and I don't eat too much of it. And in particular, I avoid heavily salted, prepackaged junk foods, because there's lots of reasons to avoid those, salt being one of them. There's your short answer, Shem. The long answer will be the rest of this podcast episode. Buckle up. I've avoided the salt debate for long enough, got to dive right into it.
Quick disclosures. Of course, I am not a physician or a nutritional scientist of any kind. I am a nerd who eats and reads a lot though.
Though I'm trying to do more reading
Than eating these days.
It's easy to read about this topic because it's one of the most written about topics in the entire field of diet-related health. Indeed, my starting point for my own research on this topic has been this excellent webpage on salt maintained by the Harvard School of Public Health. Pretty much any big topic in dietary health, Harvard School of Public Health has a page on it that you can Google. These pages are written for the general public, either written by or reviewed by experts at the school who are of course among the leading experts in their field in the entire world, and these pages generally make it very easy to dive deeper into the primary sources.
The actual studies. Sometimes they just have a simple bibliography at the bottom, which isn't super helpful for normal people because most of the actual journal articles will be pay-walled and they're generally impossible to read unless you have experience reading scientific literature, which I do. But with the big topics, like the whole salt thing, Harvard generally includes extensive footnotes on these webpages that go into a lot of detail about the primary source study. So you don't even really have to go back and inspect the primary source yourself unless you are a real nerd, which I am, which is why I have gone back and examined many of the primary sources in preparing my notes for this episode. So that's what you're getting now. I'm just a monkey with a microphone who is read up on the topic of salt. So take that for what it's worth. We first need to specify what we mean when we talk about salt.
Salt in the diet, what does that even mean? Generally that means sodium, which technically isn't salt. A salt, according to the definition that you would learn in chemistry class, a salt is any chemical compound consisting of one positively charged atom, or assembly of atoms in the case of a polyatomic or molecular ion. When it's positively charged, they call it a cation. A salt is one of those cations bound ionically to a negatively charged ion, which is called an anion. What does any of that mean? Well, and atom is said to be positively charged when it's missing an electron, and it's negatively charged when it has an extra electron. This has confused me my whole life, ever since school. You would think that something that's deficient in some way would be labeled as negative and something that has an extra something would be labeled as positive. But, an atom has protons in its nucleus and electrons orbiting around the nucleus.
The protons are attracted to the electrons. They represent two opposing sides of the electromagnetic force. By convention, we say that the proton is positive and the electron is negative. As I understand it, that is pure historical convention. It's arbitrary. We could have just as easily labeled the protons as negative and the electrons as positive. All that matters is that they are opposites that attract. It's rather like left and right.
Left and right are objectively two different directions, but we could have just as easily called the right side left and the left side right. Though, in researching the paragraph that I just wrote, I went down a whole rabbit hole, reading, quantum mechanical retcon theories on the positive negative convention. People arguing that on the quantum level, which we didn't understand back then, but we kind of understand now. People arguing that on the quantum level, you could retroactively develop a logical justification for calling one side positive or the other side negative, but that wouldn't be the real reason we call electrons negative and protons positive. The real reason is probably Ben Franklin, who believed that the electrical force he observed was due to some kind of microscopic fluid pressure, and fluid pressure actually is positive or negative relative to another volume of pressure.
Ben Franklin figured that electricity was caused
By some kind of microscopic pressure imbalance like that.
He was wrong, but the positive and
Negative labels stuck.
Anyway, because protons and electrons are attracted to each other and because we call protons positive and because Ben Franklin had fluids on his mind, an atom or an assembly of atoms, i.e, a molecule, that is said to have a net positive charge when it's missing an electron.
When one of the protons in its nucleus is not balanced by an electron floating around in its orbit. And because we say electrons are negatively charged, an atom or molecule that has an extra electron, i.e, it has more electrons than it has protons, that atom or molecule is said to be negatively charged. It has a net negative charge. The negatively charged subatomic particles involved in the whole situation outnumber the positively charged subatomic particles. So it has a net negative charge. And in either of those situations, of net positive or net negative charge, some people argue that you technically don't even have an atom or a molecule anymore. You have an ion, a cation in the case of positively charged ions, and an anion in the case of a negatively charged ion. I say "some people argue" because these naming conventions are ultimately arbitrary.
It is objectively true that a charged atom is different from a neutral atom, but deciding to call the charged atom and ion, that's just a choice that people make. And in my experience, there are some scientists who would look at a charged atom or charged molecule and they would call that a kind of atom or molecule. A molecular ion or an atomic ion, as the case may be. Yeah, those scientists and many have other scientists who would look at a charged atom or charged molecule. And they would say, "That is not an atom or a molecule. It is an ion, which is a different thing.". Because I'll have a line in my script where I say, "The molecules in the food do X, Y, Z.".
But then I'll stop and I'll think is some pedant in the comments going to be like, "Well, actually those are ions, not molecules.". Anyway, salt. Because atoms or molecules with opposite net charges attract each other, they will often slam into each other and form an ionic bond. Their respective lack of electrons or overabundance of electrons are complimentary and the two ions complete each other. The resulting electrically neutral molecule is called a salt. And yes, some people would argue that neutral molecule is redundant. They would say that if it's not neutral, then it's not a molecule. It's an ion.
And yes, that is a constant thorn in my side when I write my scripts. Anyway. There are all kinds of salts other than the most familiar one, which is table salts. There are salts that have no sodium involved at all. Cyanide salts, very useful for metallurgy and in murder, cyanide ions form ionic bonds with lots of cations like potassium or hydrogen cations. And you get salts that have a pleasant almond-like aroma, which will be the last thing you experience before you drop dead. Potassium cyanide, that's a salt. There's all kinds of salts, and one of them is the one that normal people like you and me call salt, and that is sodium chloride, NaCl, a positively charged sodium ion bonded with a negatively charged chlorine atom.
Yes, that's chlorine, as in the stuff that they use to kill microorganisms in swimming pools and in drinking water.
They call it chloride when it's negatively charged.
In it's negatively charged ionic form, they call it chloride. But it's a charged version of the chlorine atom, which is the stuff from the swimming pools. I've been doing some work on growing salt crystals at home again, particularly kinds of crystals that I think are culinary desirable. And when you work with water as salty is that, brine that's about 75% water, 25% salt by weight, that's the point at which salt crystals start to hop out of the solution, at room temperature at least. And when you work with water, that's salty, the kitchen starts to smell a little like a swimming pool. Technically it's not chlorine.
Pure chlorine gas is incredibly toxic, which is why it's been weaponized historically. And it's incredibly reactive, which is why you almost never find free chlorine in the world. You generally find chlorine ions dissolved in water or bonded to other things in the form of salts. But there are reactions that occur between the dissolved chloride, which is the anion of chlorine, the negatively charged ion of chlorine. There are reactions that occur between the chloride and other stuff around that result in compounds that smell like swimming pools to us. I believe the big one is chloramine, which is chloride bound to ammonia or part of ammonia. It's complicated. But anyway, that smell is created when chloride interacts with organic molecules in the water or in the environments or whatever.
I noticed that smell the other day when I was trying to grow pyramidal salt crystals again in my kitchen. It did not work. Still working on that. Anyway, table salt is half positively charged sodium atoms and half negatively charged chlorine atoms, AKA chloride. Now is when the pedants enter the chat to say that table salt is actually more than half chloride because chloride is heavier than sodium. The atomic number of sodium is 11, meaning it has 11 protons in its nucleus. Chlorine's atomic number is 17, 17 protons. So the chloride part of the salt is just more stuff, more subatomic particles.
It has a higher molar mass, is how it's measured. So yes, pedants, pure table salt is actually about 60% chloride and 40% sodium by weight. The fact remains that sodium and chloride ions are present in a one to one ratio. It's like having a basket with 10 apples and 10 oranges. You would probably say that you've got half oranges and half apples, even if you've probably actually gotten more than half of one of those by weight because the apples are heavier than the oranges or whatever. Anyway, as far as I can tell, scientists do consider chloride to be an essential mineral nutrient, just the way that sodium is. Essential in this context meaning we need it to maintain normal body functions and we must get it from the outside world. We must eat it.
We can't biosynthesis it in our bodies from other raw materials. Chloride puts the chlor in the hydrochloric acid that we use in our stomachs as part of our digestive process. Yes, pedants, gastric acid is more complicated than that.
It's not exactly just hydrochloric acid.
But anyway, chloride also apparently performs a
Lot of the same electrolyte functions in our body fluids as sodium does.
We will describe those in a moment. And too much chloride is also bad for you. It will also raise your blood pressure for reasons we'll get to.
Why do we always hear about the problem with sodium and not the problem with chloride? I'm honestly not sure. There's research indicating that sodium and chloride work together and chloride doesn't do the same stuff if it doesn't have sodium present, but chloride is still a problem if you have too much of it. I'm not really sure why we worry about the sodium and not the chloride. Chloride is less studied, as a matter of dietary significance at least. I quote now from a 2019 paper by the European Food Safety Panel on Nutrition, where they're trying to decide and to justify a daily recommended value or, DRV, for chloride, a recommendation for how much chloride Europeans should eat, the DRV. Quote, "There are no appropriate biomarkers of chloride status. No balance studies and no adequate evidence on the relationship between chloride intake and health outcomes that can be used to set DRVs for chloride. There is a close relationship between sodium and chloride balances in the body.
Sodium chloride is the main source of both electrolytes in European diets and similar urinary excretion levels of sodium and chloride are typically observed in the Western population.". End quote. So the panel just kin of extrapolated their DRV from chloride from their existing DRV for sodium. Indeed, as they say, as a practical matter, there may be little point in even considering sodium and chloride to be different things, because we generally get them as a package deal. In the form of table salt or in the form of foods that have table salt dissolved inside them. Once the table salt dissolves in water, it ceases to be salt because the sodium and the chloride ions come apart for reasons that we will talk about shortly. At that point, it ceases to be salt. It technically becomes a new substance called brine.
But anyway. There are some things that we eat that have sodium without the chloride and a few things that have chloride without the sodium. According to nutritional values given to us by the US Food and Drug Administration, there are some fruits and vegetables that will give you considerably more chloride than sodium. For example, celery, tomatoes, lettuce. Potassium chloride is used as an additive in lots of processed foods, potassium salt, it's commonly called. It's a nice stable form of potassium that you can use to fortify a food with potassium for dietary reasons, as it is done in baby formulas, for example. Potassium salt, potassium chloride is also used as like a stabilizer, a pH balancer. It's used as a preservative, those kinds of things.
And it is used as a salt replacement. Potassium chloride tastes salty, even though it has no sodium. It also tastes bitter, which is why you probably wouldn't sprinkle it directly over your food. But in processed food where they can do things to try to balance out the bitterness, they can use small amounts of potassium chloride to make the food taste salty with less sodium, and that definitely matters from the standpoint of marketing. You can say, "Now with 25% less sodium, because we replaced it with potassium salt.". That matters from a marketing standpoint. Helps you sell more bags of chips.
It is less clear whether that actually
Matters from a standpoint of actual human health.
It seems to be an open scientific question, whether excess dietary chloride is any better or worse than excess dietary sodium, as we've discussed. Nonetheless, the FDA, here in the states, they actually explicitly endorse potassium chloride as a substitute for some of your sodium chloride. The justification being that potassium chloride at least gives you potassium, and potassium intake is generally on the low side in Western diets and potassium effectively counterbalances sodium in our bodies. So it's important to get it. And we generally get too much sodium. We generally get not quite enough potassium. We get too much sodium. Too much sodium in the form of table salt with chloride.
Yes. But also there's lots of other sodium salts used in processed foods, notably MSG, monosodium glutamate. That's positively charged sodium ion bound to a negatively charged glutamic acid. Which the latter there, by the way, is an example of a polyatomic or molecular ion. Glutamic acid is not just one atom. It has lots of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen atoms and some nitrogen just like all the other amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Glutamic acid is one of those. As we have discussed on YouTube years ago, the balance of scientific opinion is that.
MSG is probably as safe as any other food that contains a ton of sodium and a ton of glutamate, i.e, cheese, which has a lot of those two things. However, some studies and lots and lots of anecdotal evidence suggest that there are some weird health effects of MSG that might not be unique to MSG, like glutamate in other foods may also function as a migraine trigger in some people. Some people say that mushrooms are migraine triggers. It's the glutamate. But people are perhaps just more apt to notice these effects when they happen in response to MSG, perhaps because MSG is just a convenient way to get a ton of glutamate into your food and sodium. Certainly there's a lot of research indicating that excess sodium is bad for you, no matter how you get it. So yeah, MSG is as bad for you as table salt is in that regard, in regard of sodium. Lots of other common food additives have sodium, but not the chloride.
Sodium by carbonate, baking soda. Which, fun fact, is not actually sodium bicarbonate, even though we call it that. It's actually sodium hydrogen carbonate. Bicarb is an old name that came from a misunderstanding of what's actually in this particular salt. But the name stuck, especially in British English, where it's commonly called sodium bicarb, or bicarbonate soda by normal people in the kitchen. We will use those very scientific sounding terms. In American English, we're not so fancy. We much more often just say baking soda, which is probably good because it isn't actually sodium bicarbonate.
It is a sodium salt that doesn't have chloride, and we have more of those in processed foods.
Like all of the emulsifying salts used
With cheese, sodium phosphate, sodium citrate.
They have this very special effect on
The proteins in cheese, allowing them to maintain an emulsion with fats and with water even at very high temperatures, thus giving us molten nacho cheese-type products.
We'll talk another day about how exactly emulsifying salts do that. Has to do with the calcium in the cheese. Calcium, there's another electrolyte. What the heck is an electrolyte? Glad you asked. Important question for understanding the role of sodium in the body and ultimately whether or not it's killing you.
An electrolyte is an ion, a charged sodium atom or a calcium atom or whatever. There's lots of atoms that can be electrolytes as long as they're ions. An electrolyte is an ion that can float around in a medium, such as water, and convey electrical charges across that medium. The water can conduct electricity via the movement of those ions through the water or other fluid medium. Those ions are the electrolytes. Or some definitions say that the whole medium plus the ions inside it, that's all collectively the electrolyte. The water or other liquid with the dissolved ions floating around inside, some people say that's the electrolyte. Regardless, all of the common food salts dissolve in water.
Water molecules have a net neutral electrical charge, but they are said to be highly polar because they have this weird bent shape where most of the negative charge from the oxygen is on one side of the molecule and most of the positive charge from the hydrogen is on the far other side of this weird long bent molecule.
So those sides can act independently on other stuff around them. Those sides attract their opposites, which is why water molecules hold together so well. The positive side of one molecule sticks to the negative side of a neighboring molecule. This is, as I understand it, the reason behind water's surface tension. When you spill a little water on the counter, it doesn't spread out into a very, very thin layer of water that's like one molecule thick, which is what gravity wants to do to it. Rather, you get clumps of water molecules standing up in little piles we call droplets because their surface tension is holding them together. And in a small volume of water, that surface tension is stronger than the force of gravity pulling the water into the flattest thinnest film possible.
That surface tension is caused by the polarity that we just discussed. You put sodium chloride or another common food salt into water and the polarity of the water is stronger than the ionic attraction that's holding the sodium and the chloride ions together. That is, I think, a gross oversimplification of what's happening. But if we do a tangent now on covalent bonds versus ionic bonds and all of that, we will absolutely never get to is salt bad for you, which is really all anyone here actually cares about. I suppose that isn't fair to either of us. I know that you're here for more.
Anyway, electrolytes. You put your table salt or whatever salt into the water, the water in the case of table salt is going to pull the sodium and the chloride ions apart. And in this dissolved form, ions can transmit electrical charges from one place to another via their movement through that watery medium. As such, electrolytes are a crucial part of our neuromuscular system.
How we send electrical signals from our brain to our muscles, telling them to contract and to move our arm one way or another or whatever. But that's not all, electrolytes, through their osmotic power and such, they help to maintain the balance of fluid between the inside of our cells and the outside of our cells. The extracellular fluid versus the intracellular fluid. That has to be balanced. Osmotic pressure caused by electrolytes also facilitates the movement of water and other fluids across membranes in your body. This is how excess water in your blood flows from your blood into your kidneys. Your kidneys are constantly filtering your blood, making sure that it has the right balance of water and other stuff to keep you alive and kicking.
Sodium and the counterbalancing potassium in your
Body are effectively what push water from your bloodstream and into your kidneys, where you can filter the stuff and then pee out the water, if you have too much of it.
When you have too much water in
Your blood, that's called high blood pressure, or it's one cause of high blood pressure, too much water.
And it is bad for many reasons, some quite intuitive. Imagine any over-pressurized hydraulic system, eventually the pressure gets so high that the pipes start to burst. When you have too much sodium relative to your potassium, water from your blood cannot pass into your kidneys. You have to drink more water to dilute the sodium in your blood back down to the right level, and all of that raises your blood pressure. All of that extra water. Too much water flowing through your circulatory system. That's high blood pressure, a pipe going to burst after a while.
These are obscene oversimplifications of what's going on, I know. But the point is electrolytes are absolutely crucial to pretty much every aspect of how a complex multicellular life form functions. And they have to be present in your body in a certain balance, an optimal balance of sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and some other ones. They all have different jobs to do so you need to have the right amount of them in relation to each other, and in relation to your total body water. You have probably experienced what it's like to have your electrolytes out of balance or depleted. Say, in a typical episode of food poisoning, you spend 24 hours straight on the floor of your bathroom exploding out of one end or the other, gastric and intestinal fluids are filled with lots of chloride, sodium, potassium in particular. You lose those electrolytes when you explode, which creates an overall deficiency and an imbalance because you now have too much magnesium, for example, relative to the other electrolytes that you puked out. Your sodium, your chloride, your potassium.
Normally you would replace those electrolytes by eating, with food. But you're probably not excited to eat in this condition, lying on the bathroom floor, riving around with food poisoning. You're probably not excited to eat. And even if you did eat, you probably couldn't keep it down, so it wouldn't do you much good. In this condition, you're losing water like crazy. So you're thirsty. You drink water, but that doesn't replenish very many electrolytes, assuming it's just normal water with not that many minerals in it. And you might even have trouble holding onto the water that you need to be hydrated because you're deficient in sodium.
You puked out a bunch of your sodium and sodium plays this crucial role maintaining fluid balance in your body. sodium and some other ones. If you're deficient in certain electrolytes, you might not be able to retain all of the water that your body needs in order to function. This is a bad situation and it results in you feeling extremely weak and bad after a hellish night on the bathroom floor like that. It's not just that you're tired. You're also dehydrated and you're low on electrolytes, which are interrelated problems. You're weak. You have muscle cramps.
You might have a pounding headache. You're in real rough shape. This is one of the very few circumstances in which normal people have any business at all drinking Gatorade, or some similar sports drink.
That stuff is a godsend the morning
After a night of vomiting or diarrhea, or the morning after a night of drinking.
Alcohol also depletes your electrolytes and your hydration for super complex reasons. All of this is super complex at the molecular level and I'm not going to explain it all, mostly because I don't fully understand it. But the point is, sports drinks are really good for hangovers and for getting over an explosive digestive episode. Sports drinks are just sweet, fake, juicy drinks with sodium and other electrolytes added.
You drink one of those after a night on the bathroom floor and you suddenly feel way better. You won't feel perfect, but you're going to feel a lot better. That's what it feels like to have your electrolyte balance thrown off and then restored. Now you can rehydrate. All your muscles are going to contract when you tell them to, life starts to get back to normal. The same problems can also occur as a consequence of great physical effort, exercise. That's why they call it a sports drink. Gatorade is named after alligators because it was invented in 1965 at the University of Florida, where their school mascot is an alligator and the sports teams are known as the Gators.
How about them Gators? Go Gators. Very hard, extended physical effort, depletes your electrolytes. Chiefly through perspiration, sweating. When you sweat, the water that comes out is filled with electrolytes, particularly the electrolytes that are chiefly present in the extracellular fluid rather than in the intracellular fluid. It's the extracellular fluid that's coming out when you sweat, and it's mostly filled with sodium and chloride. You lose your table salt when you sweat. That's normally not a problem. In fact, normally it's great because most of us these days probably eat too much sodium chloride.
So this is yet another reason why exercise is good. It gets rid of some of that excess salt we eat. But when you're being active for an extended period, say playing a game of American football, which lasts around three hours, during which time you are running around in extremely heavy protective equipment that makes it really hard for you to shed body heat. Say you're doing this somewhere in these sweltering swamps of North Central Florida, where lots of alligators happen to live, and the Gators are probably much more comfortable than the people because it's incredibly humid there and high humidity makes it harder for your sweat to actually evaporate off of your skin, which is how it jettisons your body heat.
When it's humid, lots of your sweat cannot evaporate. It just falls off you in big droplets or in sheets because of the high surface tension of the water because of its polarity. If you're a football player at the University of Florida, you're running around for three hour, straight, sweating profusely, drinking water, which helps you replace your body water, but you're probably not eating, which you need to do to replace your electrolytes. You're playing a game of football.
You either don't have time to eat, or you don't want to eat because having stuff in your stomach while doing strenuous exercise, that makes you nauseous, for reasons we should talk about another day. All of this results in electrolyte imbalance, which generally manifests as you just getting tired and weak. And in extreme cases, you lose nearly all muscular control and you collapse in a wobbly heap, which has been known to happen to competitors in extreme endurance sports, like triathlons and such.
It usually doesn't get to that point
When you play american football.
More likely, your electrolyte depletion will manifest
As you just getting tired and your muscle's not working quite as well as they could.
You get slow.
You get less powerful. You get less accurate. Plus, you're still dehydrated. Even if you're drinking water, because your body needs balanced electrolytes in order to hang onto the water and not just pee it out. It's a vicious cycle. Athletic coaches, particularly those coaching in hot climates, they have known about this for a long time and they have given their athletes salt in the middle of competition. I imagine that people at one point just ate handfuls of salt on the sidelines. Though eventually somebody came up with the bright idea of a salt tablet that you just swallow.
At Florida, they devised a recipe for a drink that would have everything the athletes need in one swig. It's got the water, it's got a bunch of sugar for energy, for pep, and it's got your sodium, your chloride, potassium, phosphate. All the electrolytes, everything the athlete would need to replenish. They called their drink Gatoraid A-I-D, because it aided the Gators in winning their little football games. Eventually they changed the spelling to A-D-E, ade, because that was just a nonsense word that conveniently avoided the medicinal implications of having a product called A-I-D, aid, and it thus kept them out of potential regulatory or legal trouble inherent in claiming that your product is a health aid of any kind.That's what a sports drink is, and they are great for people doing actual sports and hardcore athletic effort, especially athletic activities that go on for a very long time in a hot climate.
When I used to cycle avidly back in Southern Indiana, my mid-20s, I would go out on the bike and I would ride just 50 miles straight away from home. And it was always way easier to pedal back home when I brought sports drinks with me instead of just plain water. I used to pack the powder and I would mix it with water that I would acquire in the field somewhere.
But pretty much everybody else has absolutely no business drinking this stuff. I never touch sports drinks anymore unless I've been puking my guts out, which happens sometimes. Sports drink, it's just sugary fake juice with salt. A healthy person sitting at a computer all day in a developed country is probably getting all the salt and other electrolytes hand all the sugar that they need from food, with the possible exception of potassium and magnesium. So eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and you'll get plenty of those. One of many more reasons to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables. There have been a lot of times in my life, or a few at least, when I have suffered some symptoms of electrolyte imbalance, simply because I wasn't eating. I was crash dieting, which I absolutely do not recommend.
And I have resolved to stop doing myself. I have improved my body composition significantly over the last six to eight months, and I've done that nice and slowly. Making very minor changes that only produce results over the long haul, which is exactly how pretty much anybody should do it. Whenever I crash diet, or whenever I have crashed dieted, I don't intend to do that anymore, but whenever I crash diet, I get charley horses. If you are blessed enough to have never experienced charley horse, let me tell you about that. Charley horse is an incredibly painful involuntary muscle contraction. It's a cramp, but not just any cramp. All of a sudden it feels like the muscle is tearing itself apart.
I think because the contractions are not coordinated as they are normally.
You've got different fibers firing at different
Times and the muscle just feels like it is ripping itself apart.
I usually get these in my calves, but sometimes I get them in the muscles at the bottom of my feet, and both of those are apparently very common locations. Sometimes it happens at the gym. Like this one time, many years ago, I was riding a stationary bike and my calf suddenly locked up and it was super embarrassing. I fell off the bike. Thank god it was a stationary bike and not a real bike out on a busy road. I fell off the bike at the gym and there I was just lying there in front of everybody in total agony, punching my calf, trying to get it to relax.
I literally could not extend my leg or my ankle enough to stand. That was a fun thing to have happen in front of lots of other people. Many of whom probably had absolutely no idea what was going on. Bodybuilders notoriously get horrific cramps like that on stage because they've starved themselves into the show to lose all their body fat, and then they stop drinking water the day before the competition or so. They do that so that the skin will hug the muscle really tightly and that makes them look extra ripped to get rid of that subcutaneous water layer. Problem is, they're dehydrated and their electrolytes are all out of whack. Precisely at the moment when they are standing on stage, contracting their muscles as hard as they can in order to flex and hold the poses. This is a very bad combination of factors.
The great '80s, '90s bodybuilder Paul Dillett famously had to be carried off the stage more than once because he cramped and basically froze like a giant statue on stage. He was a really tall guy too and it was just, he was like the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz just froze and had to be carried away. More recently, Roelly Winklaar got this cramp in his abs on stage. It's a recent incident. So there's really clear footage of this on YouTube that you can watch. You see on Roelly what looks like the upper corner of his abdominal muscle. You see it scrunch up into a little knot. It is totally visible because we're talking about a top level bodybuilder in competition.
So his superficial muscles are all clearly visible through super thin skin and he looks like an anatomy chart. So you can see this just knot of spasming contracting ab muscle. It looks horrific and he's obviously in agony. He can't strike the poses anymore because he has lost all voluntary control of his abs. He's up there on stage, trying to look cool, trying to lo not let on as to what's happening to him. He's sort of stretching his arms in nonchalant ways like, "Oh, real tired. Oh.". Trying to stretch his arms and trying to kind of stretch the muscle and flush out the problem.
It's real gnarly. Watch that one at your own risk. Most times when I get a charley horse, it's when I'm not eating enough, and it happens to me in bed.
I'll wake up, I'll stretch right there
Lying in bed instinctively, and all of a sudden as i'm stretching, i feel the charley horse coming on.
If I jump out of bed, stand
Up on the other foot and relax the whole rest of my body immediately.
For some reason, sometimes that will stop the charley horse before it fully blossoms. Hurts, but it doesn't hurt bad. But more often than not, that contraction starts and I can't stop it and it feels like a giant is twisting my leg apart.
And it feels like it goes on for a few minutes, although it's probably actually less than that, at least the worst part. It just feels like several minutes because it's extremely intense pain that you can't do anything about. And no one knows exactly why it happens, probably depends on the case, and there are probably multiple factors involved. But one factor that scientists have explored, relative to charley horses and such, is electrolyte imbalance or dehydration, which can be caused by electrolyte imbalance. This makes sense, given the role that electrolytes play in signaling muscles to contract and to relax. Every time I crash diet, I drop down under 1,000 calories a day. Maybe even less than that. Every time I do that, charley horses happen to me, and I suspect it's because I'm not eating enough electrolytes along with everything else.
While at the same time, I'm exercising a lot, which depletes everything. It's a bad combination. Not going to do that anymore. I suppose I could fix this by drinking diet Gatorade while crash dieting, but it's better to just not crash diet, which is why I'm never crash dieting again, and I don't think you should either. I'm definitely too old for that now.
Anyway, electrolytes. The body has to maintain a balance between all the different electrolytes relative to each other and relative to the total water in your body. Eating way too much sodium and or chloride upsets that balance. Everybody used to think that eating a ton of salt makes you thirsty.
You may have had that experience. You eat a whole bunch of pizza or other salty food, and you get real thirsty shortly after. Everybody thought that salt triggers a thirst response so that the body can maintain its optimal water and electrolyte balance. You got to dilute all of that sodium that you just sent down the hatch in the form of pizza. You got to dilute that with water. But a couple of studies came out in the 2010s suggesting it's actually a lot more complicated than that. This is just interesting in its own right. It was a group of Russian and German scientists who were looking at water and salt consumption as it would pertain to longterm space flight, specifically a mission to Mars.
This was part of what they called the Mars 500 Program, to test the psychological and physiological stresses of a mission to Mars. They conducted ultra longterm salt balance studies on a dozen men living in a simulated spacecraft for the 520 days that it would take to fly to Mars. The scientists were able to totally control the salt that these guys ate in that highly-controlled tight closed environment and the scientists were able to have these guys eat more or less salt at different times in order to observe different effects. Scientists collected all the guys' urine to see what came out the other end, and they did this for months and they got real weird results, results no one was expecting. Higher salt intake, over the longterm at least, actually decreased thirst, as indicated by how much water the guys voluntarily drank or didn't drink. Higher salt intake over the longterm actually decreased thirst a little bit. Instead, higher salt intake over the longterm made the guys hungrier, made them eat more, not drink more, over the longterm. Nonetheless, all of their blood pressures went up in response to higher salt intake, acutely and chronically.
Acutely, meaning their salt intake went up suddenly and immediately there was a big jump in their extracellular fluid volume. That initial increase in blood pressure subsided, that acute effect subsided with time. But over the course of four weeks on the higher sodium diet, their blood pressure crept up again. That's the chronic part. Acute is sudden, chronic is longterm. Now, this is one very small study of very fit young men, astronauts, cosmonauts, or perspective astronauts and cosmonauts. One study of dudes like that in highly-specialized circumstances, not very similar to the ones we live out here in the real world. But it was nonetheless an unprecedented opportunity to monitor some people's salt and water and blood pressure with 100% accuracy over a very long time.
And what the results suggest is that salt does raise blood pressure, like we thought, but the mechanism is probably way more complicated than we thought.
It's not just salt makes you thirsty.
Salt actually might not make you thirsty.
It might be something else in the pizza or the fries that makes you thirsty. Water's relationship with salt does probably have to do with electrolytes, facilitating the transfer of water from the bloodstream into the kidneys or not facilitating that. Probably has to do with other things, like urea metabolism, situations that actually cause your body to make water, all kinds of things. Regardless, scientists know as much as they know anything that dietary salt does raise your blood pressure, both chronically and acutely. Some people exhibit a trait they call salt sensitive hypertension, salt sensitive high blood pressure.
Lots of evidence that this is a genetic trait. You either have it or you don't. Everybody's blood pressure goes up in response to eating salt, but people with an apparent genetic variation, they see their blood pressure increase way more in response to the same extra amount of salt. According to the American Heart Association, about half of people in the United States who have high blood pressure are also salt sensitive. About a quarter of people with normal blood pressure are also salt sensitive, according to estimates done by scientists. In the US, salt sensitivity seems to be particularly high among African Americans, old people, obese people, diabetics, people with kidney disease. Now, remember that correlation is not causation. They don't necessarily know which thing causes the other thing.
These tend to be complex situations where one factor feeds into the other and vice versa. It's a vicious cycle. And what's more, genetic salt sensitivity seems to predict higher levels of heart attack and stroke and early death even in people who don't have high blood pressure. So people who presumably control their salt intake enough that they don't have high blood pressure despite having the gene for salt sensitive hypertension, those people are still more likely than other people to die of a heart attack or a stroke or some such. Now, that doesn't mean that if you're salt sensitive, you should just throw up your hands and say, "Well, I'm going to have a stroke anyway. So I might as well eat all the salt I want.". That salt will still absolutely increase your risk, says a million studies. High blood pressure is just horrible for the whole body.
It makes your heart have to work too hard to pump all that extra blood volume around, and the extra pressure inside the lines, it just shreds your organs and your blood vessels from the inside out. Heart attack and stroke are the big risks, but there's others, kidney disease. To connect to this week's episode to last week's, when we talked about anabolic steroids, steroids also raise your blood pressure a lot because they increase your blood volume. Not just the water, but the actual blood cells too, just makes your body make more blood. And this is one reason why guys who are on the juice look literally juiced. They look like they've been injected with fluid and their skins tend to be flushed. You ever notice that? You really notice it on white guys who are on steroids. A pale white guy on steroids just tends to be a little red all the time.
That last claim about the red skin, that is not clinically proven, as far as I know. It's just something that anyone who follows body building has noticed anecdotally. Steroids are a nightmare to be on, as we said. Everybody who has ever been on them will tell you they're a freaking nightmare. High blood pressure is one of the consequences, and high blood pressure does real bad things to you.
And even if you're not on steroids,
Even if you're not salt sensitive, it's still possible that you could eat enough salt to raise your blood pressure to dangerous levels.
The acute effect alone, that immediate spike in extracellular fluid following a salty meal. Even if your blood pressure goes back to normal in between meals, if you're eating McDonald's three or four times a day or whatever, the accumulated effect of all of those temporary spikes in blood pressure, that could wear on your body over time, even without any chronic high blood pressure.
I have been following my own blood pressure pretty closely lately, and it's pretty great all the time. I exercise a lot these days, and that probably helps. There isn't much high blood pressure in my family, and that probably helps, good genes. There's high cholesterol in my family and people used to think high cholesterol necessarily means high blood pressure, but turns out to be a lot more complicated than that. Check the old podcast episode about cholesterol. My cholesterol is fine too, by the way. I don't eat all the food that I want. I actively deny myself some of the pizza and some of the sugar and some of the alcohol that I want.
I don't totally deny myself these things, obviously. But I do have to actively stop myself from reaching for a third slice of pizza, because. I know that two was more than enough. I do not deny myself salt at all. I put as much salt on my food as I feel like it needs in order to taste right. I season to taste, as Shem said she does almost an hour ago. I suspect that my salt intake is at a pretty healthy level, regardless. A pretty healthy level for anyone really because I try not to eat too much food period.
More food means more salt. Also, because I almost entirely avoid salty, highly processed foods, which is what the experts are really worried about. They're not super worried about your home cooking. They're worried about the snacks, the prepackaged snacks. A bag of Doritos or whatever just has so much sodium, more than you can even taste. I mean, not necessarily Doritos. I don't know if that's true in that case, but it's certainly the case in some such products. That you have manufacturers, ultra processed food manufacturers using sodium for functions beyond flavor.
They will use sodium as a preservative. They'll use it as an emulsifier, as a stabilizer, pH balancer, all that. They often put in other ingredients to hide some of the salty taste that results, because the amount of salt they want for other functions in the food is actually more than what tastes good to most people. And that's really saying something because we like salt and awful lot. We are evolved to want way more salt than we need. Anatomically modern humans probably first evolved in East Central Africa, a very hot, very inland place. Organisms that live in the ocean or near the ocean, they get all the salt they need no problem because the sea is full of salt.
But inland, there's hardly any salt at All.
Unless you live on an ancient, dry
Ocean bed, like the salt flats in utah.
In a geologically normal inland location, there's really very little salt to be had. And East Central Africa, where we all evolved, that's also very, very hot. So people sweat a lot there and they're hemorrhaging salt in the process. Added salt probably did not enter most human diets until a few thousand years ago when people started mining rock salt and crystallizing salt out of sea water in ponds. For most of human history, we got the salt we needed simply from eating other living things, other plants and animals that have salt in their tissues for the same basic reason that we do. Meat has some salt in it naturally. Fruits and vegetables do too, depending on all kinds of genetic and environmental factors.
I pulled a tomato out of the garden the other day and it was so salty. If someone else had served that to me, I would have assumed that they put a bunch of salt on that tomato. I noticed that more with the late season tomatoes. I don't know if that's an environmental effect or if it's just that my late season varieties also happened to have more sodium genetically, draw more sodium out of the soil. I don't know. I don't usually salt fresh tomatoes when I eat them raw in a salad or just with a little olive oil on them, which is how I usually eat them. I don't usually put salt on them. I said that and a bunch of the chef crowd in the audience laughed at me, mocked me.
One dude said, "Do you need a science lesson to explain why salt makes things taste better?". And I said, "Do you need a science lesson on how lots of living things need salt for the same reason that you do and they therefore have salt inside them to varying degrees already?". We certainly do not need as much salt as we desire because we live in an environment of endlessly abundant salt, but we evolve for an environment of almost no salt where we're constantly sweating and sweating out what little salt we have. That's the environment we evolved for. We do not live in it anymore. So we want way more salt than we need. We're super sedentary now, and we have air conditioning, so we probably don't sweat as much as we used to, and there's salt everywhere. As Shem observed an hour and 10 minutes ago, some people seem to like salt way more than other people, and that in turn may affect how much excess salt they consume.
Scientists have been talking for years about a group of people they've loosely identified as super tasters, people who just seem to taste stuff much more intensely than other people, probably for genetic reasons. Roughly speaking, research indicates that about a quarter of all the humans are super tasters. Half of all the humans are medium tasters, and the remaining quarter of the humans are what they call non-tasters. But that's a bad name because most of them probably do have a sense of taste. It's just abnormally dulled. You might suspect that the 25% of humanity that are super tasters, you might expect that they would prefer less salt on their food because they're hypersensitive. So they would need less salt in order to hit the spot, as it were. Weirdly, it seems to be the exact opposite.
According to research done by actually an acquaintance of mine, Dr. John Hayes, @TasteProf on Twitter. He's at Penn State, my alma mater.
And Hayes's research indicates that that super
Tasters usually want more salt, not less, and he thinks that's because super tasters are more sensitive to the bitter components of food.
So they need the salt to either drown out to the bitterness or neutralize the bitterness somehow. It's not fully understood how exactly saltiness cancels out bitterness, but it does in effect. And super tasters seem to need extra salt to make foods palatable. Otherwise, foods taste bitter to them.
I don't know if I'm a super taster, but I do know that under-salted fast food French fries do tend to taste unbearably bitter to me. They don't know what the genetic basis for super tasting is, but there is one gene that has been pretty strongly tied to enhanced bitterness perception and people who have it tend to avoid alcohol because it tastes bitter to them. But also they tend to avoid vegetables. And there's one study showing that super tasters have an increased risk of colon cancer, or least carriers of this bitter perception gene. Those people in one study were found to have an increased risk of colon cancer, perhaps from lack of vegetables. Vegetables, with all of their excellent micronutrients and antioxidants and fiber that help you to avoid colon cancer. Yeah, not great. Salt deficiency, actually getting clinically not enough salt, that has been clearly shown, generally in animal studies, to show an increased desire for salt.
No surprise there. Right? When you're legit, clinically deficient, you will probably get very hungry for salt. But very few humans in this modern world are ever salt deficient for any great length of time. If they are, it's generally as a symptom of some other problem. A healthy person will only need a tiny little bit of salt, and so basically nobody who is sufficiently fed is salt deficient anymore. Salt deficiency is probably not a common reason why some people around you, Shem, seemed to more salt than others. Though, I suppose that if you really, really can't get enough salt, Shem. If that's real and you compulsively need it, it might be worth discussing with your doctor to see if you have some other problem that is keeping you from actually absorbing the sodium that you are ingesting.
Google it, the clinical condition of not having enough sodium in your blood is called hyponatremia. Google hyponatremia. The most common cause is an extended period of exploding out of one end or the other. But there are other causes, like certain endocrine disorders. Addison's disease will cause you to have clinically low salt in your blood. There's a certain kind of lung cancer that can do it. Liver diseases, kidney diseases. There's a few things that can cause salt deficiency, which in turn makes you crave salt like crazy to compensate, and that could be going on.
People who abuse diuretics might be salt deficient. Diuretics are the drugs that make you pee a lot. People, like bodybuilders, take diuretics for cosmetic reasons. People who abuse those might be salt deficient. I don't know if you do a lot of Molly, Shem, but MDMA, ecstasy, Molly, that can result in salt deficiency.
There are also people who have straight
Up taste disorders that make it hard for them to actually taste what they eat.
That's called ageusia, which yes, sounds kind
Ageusia is when you can't taste.
That's different from anosmia, which is the loss of smell sensation, which is something that people all around the world have been suffering lately because of stupid. Anosmia does affect your perception of food, because much of what we perceive in food, much of what we perceive in flavor is actually smell, not taste. But your basic tastes, your salty, your sweet, your sour, you're bitter your umami. Those don't happen in your nose. Those happen in your mouth, and there's some taste buds up at the base of your throat too, but it's mostly in your mouth and mostly on your tongue. That's where you have most of your taste buds, and they can get messed up by all kinds of things. By infections, apparently often caused by poor oral hygiene. They can get messed up in other ways.
Radiation therapy for cancers that you get in your head or your neck, cancers in your head or your neck. The radiation therapy to treat those, that will knock out your taste buds. This famously happened to Grant Achatz, chef at a very famous place in Chicago called Alinea. Just as Alinea was really taking off and he was getting famous for the first time, Grant. Achatz got mouth cancer that spread to his lymph nodes and everybody thought he was going to die. Until doctors at the University of Chicago heard about his case on the news and they called and they said, "Get this guy down here. We've got new treatment treatments that we can try.". And they saved his life.
It's an amazing story. But the radiation completely wiped out the chef's sense of taste. Talked about he was throwing back pinches of salt, whole pinches on his tongue and just getting absolutely nothing, no sensory reading whatsoever. It was like Beethoven composing the Ninth Symphony without being able to actually hear anything. It's an amazing story. But Grant Achatz, he did eventually get his sense of taste back, eventually. Head injuries, they can mess with your sense of taste. Just as they can mess with your sense of anything, because it all gets processed in the brain and if you break your brain, you can break anything about what you perceive.
PMS, that causes salt cravings, salt and sugar cravings. That's very well documented and relevant to anyone who menstruates, Shem. But here's a real big one that might explain why some people like salt more than other people do. Eating lots of salt every day, that makes you less sensitive to tasting salt over time. It's called chronic desensitization, and it happens with all kinds of things that we perceive. People who eat really spicy chilies all the time gradually become numb to them and they just need more and more chili in order to have the exact same sensation that they used to get with just a little sprinkle of chili. And what that means is that the person who likes super spicy food, they're not necessarily tougher than you if you don't like such spicy food.
They might just be experiencing the same exact amount of pain as you're experiencing from less chili.
They're just chronically desensitized to it.
So they need more in order to get the same amount of burn. Similar thing seems to be true with salt, and boy, have I experienced it anecdotally. Again, when crash dieting, which I absolutely do not endorse and don't plan to ever do again. But when you stop eating most food, your salt intake is probably going to plummet just because you're eating less food period and salt rides along in your body on food. And I remember coming off of crash diets and tasting normal foods for the first time in a couple of months and thinking, "Oh, this is so incredibly salty.". There's a little research on this.
Seems like your salt perception adjusts over a period of weeks to big, consistent changes in your overall salt intake. So if you have high blood pressure, and in particular if you have salt sensitive high blood pressure, you absolutely should eat less salt. There's all kinds of other health conditions we haven't even talked about for which your doctor might tell you to cut salt, and you should absolutely listen to your doctor. Not some dude on the internet. Even if your food just tastes terrible that first few days when you've cut your salt, just stick with it. It might start tasting normal again after a few weeks. Your taste buds might adjust. Should everybody do that? Should I make an effort to make that adjustment even if my blood pressure is perfect? Maybe, because I'm 40 and salt sensitive hypertension is not just correlated with genetics.
It's also correlated with age. As I get older, salt might start having more of an effect on my blood pressure. And certainly as I get older, I'll probably be less physically active and I won't sweat out as much of the salt that I eat. So maybe I will have to consciously lower my salt intake at some point. But here's the real big question. The final question of this epically long pod. Is salt bad for you independent of its effect on blood pressure? Meaning even if your blood pressure is fine, should you still try to lower your salt? Might it be hurting you in some other way? This is a particularly important question nowadays, nowadays that big pharma, for all of their flaws, they keep producing new and better blood pressure medicines.
You can control high blood pressure very effectively these days with pills with minimal side effects, which is a good thing.
Which again, raises the big question, is salt only bad for you if it gives you high blood pressure or is it bad for you in other ways? And the answer is, yeah, it might be bad for you in a few other ways. Even if your blood pressure is great. The more salt you eat, the more you pee and the more you pee, the more calcium you pee out. When your body needs calcium and doesn't have enough flowing around in your bloodstream, it's going to leech calcium out of your bones, and over time you get osteoporosis, bone loss. There's a study looking at postmenopausal women, and that is the group generally associate with osteoporosis. And what they found was that groups of postmenopausal women who reduced their sodium intake, they prevented just as much bone loss as the other group that increased their calcium, which is what they normally tell you to do to prevent bone loss. Sodium reduction is apparently, according to that one study, just as effective. That's important.
And then there's the big C, stomach cancer specifically. Stomach cancer, high salt intake is linked with stomach cancer. The World Cancer Research fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research jointly call salt a, quote, "Probable cause of stomach cancer.".
The theory is that, like anything that
Damages the interior lining of the stomach, that creates an opportunity for cells to grow back and to grow back with mutations that become cancer.
What kind of damage to the stomach
Lining are we talking about? well, damage caused by things like acid problems, chronic acid reflux, damage caused by infections, and possibly damage caused by lots of salty foods.
It's easy to imagine how lots of contact with salt could damage tissue. Though nobody knows for sure what causes stomach cancer. It's a topic that apparently needs a whole lot more research.
Stomach cancer is pretty rare, so maybe it doesn't get as much attention as the other cancers. But it is particularly fatal. In part because it doesn't give you a lot of early warning signs, and in part because it tends to hit old people. So even though it's not a super common cancer, stomach cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death globally, and that's not great. Mr. Rogers died of stomach cancer, so did Ronnie James Dio. That's two of my favorite people right there. So according to Harvard and many other sources that I consulted, that's probably the biggest reason to cut salt that has absolutely nothing to do with blood pressure.
Blood pressure is the main problem with salt, but there's the stomach cancer thing too. And there are other large scale observational studies where they look at the health records of tens of thousands of people and they conclude that eating lots of salt just increases your chance of death period. Death by any means. There's studies showing that excess salt is the leading cause of preventable death in all of China. But with that kind of study, it's real hard to isolate variables. It's real hard to say that the salt is what killed everybody and not other factors that are associated with salt. High blood pressure, obviously, sure. But also just eating way too much junk in general, that's associated with salt too.
If you eat a ton of ultra processed high sugar, high fat garbage food, that will also almost certainly be high in sodium. You'll have a high sodium diet in addition to a high other junk diet because all of those foods are crazy salty in addition to being crazy sugary and crazy fatty and all of that kind of stuff. So on a big population level, it's really hard for scientists to say if it was the salt in the chips that's killing people, or if it's the sugar or the obesity or the lack of fiber or the lack of micronutrients that's associated with eating a lot of that kind of junk. All of that. Or if it's maybe some of the other terrible health habits that are common among people who tend to live on ultra processed bags of garbage, like smoking. Popular among such people, and drinking and not going to the doctor as often as you should and not exercising. I mean, scientists absolutely do try to disentangle these factors when they do those big observational studies. They try to just isolate the salt and see what the salt is doing to people.
But it's real hard to do that. And none of the people who author those studies swear by their results with 100% certainty. Because it is generally poor quality data to begin with because a lot of it is, it's self-reported information. People guessing about what they do and what they eat in response to a nurse asking them to fill out a form. So who knows if they're even responding honestly. I'm sure it's all of the above. I'm sure all of these bad things in our diet are hurting us and killing us, and I'm sure salt plays a really big role within that in all kinds of these modern human melodies.
These diseases of success is essentially what
They are.
I have no idea what Shem, our questioner, should do with her diet. I have no idea what you should do with your diet. I'm not even sure what I should do with my own diet. But for what it's worth, here is how I'm thinking about my own body and my own choices as they pertain to salt. Particularly after I just finished doing all this research. I'm trying to eat less food period, especially less junk food. And that's probably lowering my sodium quite a lot right there, and that's probably a good thing. Even if my blood pressure is fine, that's still probably a good thing.
And eating more fruits and vegetables, which I'm trying to do. That's probably raising my potassium, my magnesium, which is good. Sodium and potassium effectively balance each other out in the body and modern diets have way too much sodium and not enough potassium. So I'm going to try to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables. Always. I accept that. I will probably have to keep reducing salt as I get older. I'll keep watching my blood pressure.
But if it gets high, I will probably try one of the new wonder drugs before I give up on my favorite salty foods. I think I'll try modern medicine first. No reason not to. No shame in it. These new blood pressure meds are pretty awesome. High blood pressure is almost certainly the main way in which salt hurts you, and if I can keep my BP in check, that's probably going to keep me out of most trouble. I sure don't want stomach cancer. That's not a good way to go.
But if it gets you, it usually gets you when you're pretty old anyway, I don't want to live forever. At 40, I already feel like I've done most of the things I wanted to do in this life. The main reason I want to live a long time now is to take care of my kids, and hopefully some grandkids. I would absolutely give up all delicious foods. I would totally give them all up if I had to in order to stay alive and healthy while my kids are still young and they really, really need me. If I had to eat kale puree and nothing else in order to stay alive while they're really young and while they really need me alive, I would do that. But once they're off to college? Life is about making choices that balance different interests, different priorities. Fresh baked bread with big crunchy salt crystals on top, that's one of the main reasons I like being alive.
It might even be in the top 10 reasons to be alive in my book. I have to balance those pleasures against other ones that make life worth living, like the pleasure of not having stomach cancer. Then again, my bread would probably taste just as good to me in a few weeks if I reduced my salt and stuck to it and was patient enough until my taste buds adjusted. I should probably do that. I might already be doing that right now without even thinking about it because I've been reducing my food intake generally, and in particular, my junk food intake. I've probably reduced my sodium considerably and that's probably helped my taste buds to adjust already. Home cooking probably isn't where most people are getting the bulk of their excess salt, say all the experts who talk about this. Cut out the junk first, then look at your own cooking.