Harnessing The Power Of Salt: Debunking The Low Sodium Myth For Optimal Health
Misinformation has spread the lie that salt is bad for people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Salt is key to life.
When most people hear the word ‘salt’ they immediately imagine table salt, or sodium chloride.
Sodium is not the only salt-forming mineral, however. Electrolytes such as magnesium, potassium, and calcium also form salts.
Deficiencies in the electrolytes can have devastating effects on the human body. Limiting salt in your diet increases the risk of hyponatremia, mineral deficiencies, hypertension, poor neuronal functioning, fat storage, heart attack, and poor sleep.
Most of us don’t need to eat a low-salt diet; in fact, we need MORE salt in our diets to improve our health.
Stop ignoring your salt cravings while you opt for “low sodium” tasteless foods and bland meals - allow your salt cravings to guide you toward a state of perfect health. Your body is speaking to you - it is time to start listening.
It’s time to, Think Again.
Disproven by Science: The Low Salt Diet Myth
By the turn of the century, the “low salt” diet myth had been thoroughly disproven in the medical literature, drawing upon evidence from hundreds of contradictory studies and reviews, however the myth pervades conventional medical advice and media attention to this day.
Even the US federal and state governments via the FDA and US Department of Health and Human Services, with a seemingly endless stream of high profile initiatives led by power hungry politicians and regulators, have been openly advocating for the general public to lower their salt consumption.
For example, by 2010, Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, convinced 16 food companies to lower the salt levels in their food manufacturing and medical associations like the Institute of Medicine were lobbying the FDA for nation-wide regulations.
But why?
Where did this theory come from? Do we really need to eat less salt to be healthier and why is the government involved?
Like all great conventional health wisdom of the last hundreds years, the salt myth finds its origins in the development and distribution of pharmaceutical drugs.
It all started with syphilis…
From as long ago as the 16th century, mercury had been used throughout Europe for the treatment of syphilis, the sexually transmitted bacterial infection that rose to epidemic levels after Christopher Colombus’ second homecoming to Spain in 1497. Mercury is rapidly absorbed in the bodily areas commonly affected by syphilis - the rectum, genitals, and mouth - and was used for hundreds of years to kill the bacteria.
As you can imagine, mercury treatments are not exactly safe, leading to a host of other heavy metal toxicity symptoms, including sudden death (with no warning indicators) and rapid onset of severe diseases including nephrotic syndrome, or kidney failure. However, use of this treatment spread across Europe and was widely used up until the 1950s, when the US pharmaceutical industry made headway with safer alternative drug development and stopped using mercury and arsenic as antibiotics, replacing them with penicillin which was discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928.
One key element to note about the mercury treatments was that they were diuretics - officially known as mercurial diuretics.
With the development of new diuretic treatments, beyond common historically used organic xanthine diuretics such as caffeine, theobromine, and theophylline which can be easily extracted from plant sources, drug companies began to notice other applications.
The first modern diuretic drug of the 1950s, acetazolamide, a carbonic anhydrase inhibitor, proved an exciting entry into the subsequent development of chlorothiazide, furosemide, and ethacrynic acid.
Scientists soon realized that these drugs had the ability to be prescribed widely for use in many clinical applications, including treatments for hypertension, heart failure, many forms of edema, and even obesity.
They also began prescribing these diuretic drugs to pregnant women with the purpose of decreasing water retention during pregnancy.
At the same time, Walter Kempner, a Duke University scientist who had fled Nazi Germany during WWII, began developing and testing a novel dietary protocol for decreasing blood pressure, with a strict focus on white rice and fruit intake. The lack of salt consumption in his diet protocol quickly led to discussions in the medical literature about salt’s role in hypertension, and the popular sentiment quickly led to physicians accompanying their prescriptions of the aforementioned diuretic drugs alongside a recommendation that the patients also eat a “low salt diet” for maximum effectiveness of the diuretic effect, since diuretics chiefly act to excrete sodium in the urine.
Salt restriction, however, is extremely damaging to the prenatal development of the fetus in the womb, and it became well-known by more discerning scientists and physicians that these recommendations, especially to pregnant women, would lead to widespread damage to millions of newborn children.
By reducing salt intake during pregnancy, the developing fetus is not receiving adequate oxygen, due to the lowered blood volume, since sodium is essential for maintaining blood volume. The low sodium in the body also prevents enough blood from circulating through the kidneys, which causes the kidneys to release more renin, a signaling enzyme, which is a compensation mechanism the body uses to increase blood pressure in order circulate blood more quickly.
This lack of oxygen to the growing fetus, and the resulting reduction in CO2 production, not surprisingly, can lead to developmental disorders in the child and postpartum hormonal imbalances in the mother, which commonly symptomize in the forms of hair loss, depression, and skin issues.
The opposition to mass prescription of modern diuretics and low salt diets was mounting, however diuretic drug sales continued to prove massively profitable for the drug companies, and the low salt diet myth quickly became the conventional cliche, parroted in the popular media and throughout doctors’ offices around the country.
The ball was already rolling down the hill, and with so much profit to fuel its acceleration, it became impossible to stop.
But is salt really the cause of hypertension or edema?
In short, no. The castle was built on a foundation of sand.
While it’s easy to find an array of studies demonstrating small drops in blood pressure with lowered salt intake, these results do not necessarily indicate any sort of causative role of salt consumption in high blood pressure. The results seen are typically so minimal that it becomes obvious to a scrupulous eye that there is a more intricate story at play.
For example, the Department of Health and Human Services funded an 11 trial salt restriction study executed by the Cochrane Collaboration in 2004, that demonstrated an average of just a 1.1 mmHg drop in systolic blood pressure and 0.6 mmHg drop in diastolic blood pressure with salt restriction in healthy humans. This is basically going from 120/80 to 118.9/79.4, results that can easily be achieved in any number of ways.
However, the headlines in popular media outlets chimed out the bells that “Salt causes high blood pressure!” further perpetuating the myth in the public’s mind and within the medical community, while continuing to ignore highly contradictory results from other wide scale population studies, such as the Intersalt Study of 1988, a data-driven collection of results from 52 international research centers, that demonstrated that the highest salt-consuming individuals (up to 14g of salt per day) had lower blood pressure levels on average than people who consumed half of that amount.
The results of the 2004 government-funded Cochrane study, and ensuing media attention, become even more tenuous when you understand that the Cochrane Collaboration had conducted a study just one year prior, in 2003, reviewing 57 salt restriction trials, and concluded that “there is little evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake.”
A large study done in 1995 on 3000 people over 4 years led by Dr. Michael Alderman, and published in the journal Hypertension, demonstrated that individuals who ate less salt indeed actually had a higher prevalence of increased mortality rates than those who ate more salt. They also found that by adding more salt to their diet, the subjects had a 36% decrease in heart-related mortality events.
Three years later, in 1998, the Alderman team published another set of findings on a 22 year long study they’d been conducting with over 11,000 people that showed a clear inverse relationship between salt intake and mortality.
In basic biochemistry, it’s well-understood that the breakdown of ATP to ADP + phosphate is required for the cell to use glucose and oxygen in order to maintain homeostatic functioning of the body’s core metabolic processes.
This breakdown to ADP and phosphate cannot happen without the presence of adequate sodium in the fluid around the cell.
The more sodium present in this fluid, the better the cell is able to increase its energy consumption, which leads to more CO2 production, fueling the metabolism properly and balancing the effects of intracellular calcium.
When unchecked by sodium, and the resulting lack of CO2 production, calcium can exert toxic effects on the cell, causing premature cell death. All of these compounds must be present in healthy levels in order to ensure the proper functioning and movement of ions through ion channels on the membrane.
Put simply, you need sodium. Badly.
What is Salt?
At this point, I think it might be helpful to take a moment and clearly define what salt actually is, in order to better enrich your understanding of how important it is to your health.
Think back to high school chemistry class, when you learned about ions. You may recall discussions about anions and cations, usually paired with anxiety-inducing equations on your final exams.
Cations (cat-eye-ons) are ions with a net positive charge. They have more protons (positive charge) than electrons (negative charge).
Anions (an-eye-ons) are simply ions with a net negative overall charge. They have more electrons (negative charge) than protons (positive charge).
Easy, right?
An ion itself, is really just an atom or molecule that carries an electrical charge.
Our bodies are like big, organic magnets. The principles of electromagnetism apply to us, just like they apply to the U-shaped polar magnets we used to play with as children to grab metal paper clips off the ground.
Every second of every day, millions of imperceptible ionic reactions are taking place inside you. They’re vitally important to your survival. If they all stopped happening, even just for a second, you would die on the spot.
A salt, then, is quite simply the chemical compound that is created when a cation and anion are attracted to one another due to opposing charges and join together in a chemical reaction in order to reach a net neutral charge.
Let’s take table salt for example… NaCL.
The cation, sodium (Na+) carries a net +1 positive charge. The chloride (Cl-) carries a net -1 negative charge. Combine them together and boom, you have table salt with a net neutral charge.
Since naming conventions indicate that the cation must be first and the anion second, it’s common for people to refer to salts simply by using the cation, like “sodium.” However, it’s important to know that there can be many different types of sodium-based salts, and the same is true with other cations such as calcium, magnesium, and potassium.
Salt itself is so essential to the human body, that “saltiness” is one of the 5 classifications of perceptible taste by taste receptors on the tongue, and so essential to life in general, that it is the main mineral constituent of ocean water and a huge part of the Earth’s crust, especially underwater, where hydrothermal vents in the oceanic crust, basalt, continually pump minerals into the ocean from the Earth’s surface.
Is salt is good for your health?
Restricting your salt intake compromises your body’s ability to function properly, especially on the cellular level.
Any sort of dysfunction at this micro level can have wide-reaching negative effects on the macro level as the body’s natural compensation mechanisms kick in to attempt to overcome the lack of salt it requires. For example, I previously mentioned that when the kidneys don’t have enough blood flow, which is facilitated by sodium, they will compensate by releasing a signaling enzyme called renin to increase blood pressure in an attempt to bring more blood to the kidneys.
This leads to a full activation of the RAAS, or the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, which quickly increases risk of hypertension, kidney problems, heart complications, and rapidly increases serotonin production, another poorly-understood, insidious health issue I will discuss in more detail later in this book.
Long story short, salt restriction actually causes the very health issues the medical community believes it solves. This is just one of many examples highlighting the dangers of parroting conventional wisdom cliches, a multi-generation propagation of misinformation that continues to harm millions of people’s lives.
When your body has enough salt, you reap the rewards of vibrant health. You move closer to the Thermo State effortlessly. Your body is a self-healing organism; provide it with the raw materials it needs to operate correctly.
The next time you reach for that extra pinch of salt to enhance your food’s taste, think of it as a daily ritual to support a faster metabolism, lower stress hormone levels, and lower inflammation.
That extra pinch of salt can also protect your brain against anxiety and depression while improving your brain’s ability to learn new things and retain information.
By following the simple nutrition tenets outlined within these pages, your body will efficiently use glucose as a metabolic fuel, supporting healthy functioning of important organs like your thyroid, pituitary, kidneys, heart, and liver.
When your body is using glucose properly, your metabolic rate increases rapidly, and the self-healing properties kick-in, which brings your health back into balance. When your body is not using glucose properly, free fatty-acids start dumping into the blood as an alternate fuel source, which requires a systemic increase in stress hormones cortisol, estrogen, and adrenaline, which serve to catabolize tissue and slow down your metabolism while compromising the basic functioning of those vital organs.
Because of this reality, the fatty-acid metabolism is also known as the “survival state,” where reproductive function decreases, metabolic rate decreases, blood pressure increases, blood sugar issues become dysfunctional, and vital organ functioning slows down… all in your body’s interest of preserving resources.
In 2011, a detailed meta-analysis of 6250 human subjects published in the American Journal of Hypertension found no evidence to conclude that salt restriction helped people lower their risk of high blood pressure, heart attacks, or stroke.
A few months prior to those findings, another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that lower salt intake increases the risk of premature death from heart complications.
The interesting thing to note here, is that those medical journals are well-known and respected resources in both the US and international medical communities, and receive government funding, however their findings on analysis of the salt restriction myth continue to fall on deaf ears within those same communities because of the deeply-entrenched groupthink that has been established for so many decades to this point.
In 2006, the Journal of American Medicine published their findings on a massive analysis of the salt consumption of 78 million Americans over 14 years, reporting that, much to the chagrin of the proponents of the conventional wisdom on the subject, the more sodium a person ate, the lower their risk of dying from heart disease.
By consuming salt regularly, your cells function properly, utilizing glucose for fuel and shuttling more oxygen through the blood to your vital organs. Blood pressure normalizes and the thyroid gland is able to produce plenty of thyroid hormone T4 to maintain a well-regulated metabolic feedback loop.
Sodium has a thermogenic effect within the body. By increasing overall body temperature, it increases the metabolic rate of brown fat by increasing the activity of the fat synthesizing enzyme. This sodium-induced increase in metabolization of brown fat also interestingly improves sleep, since it improves production of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, which gives you a nice sedative effect when you’re ready to relax and lay down for a good night’s sleep.
An increase in brown fat metabolism has been shown to improve slow wave sleep (SWS), known colloquially as deep sleep, which is the deepest form of NREM sleep, where most of the body’s recovery mechanisms kick-in, such as pulsatile release of growth hormone, and when learning and memory consolidation happens. During SWS, all of the neuronal connections that were made during the waking hours of the day via long-term potentiation, are given a chance to consolidate, and the brain is able to prune the weakly-potentiated synaptic connections, strengthening the more useful connections. SWS is vital for this learning and memory process, synaptic plasticity.
How Much Salt Should I Consume For Optimal Health?
How much salt should you eat?
Remember, you need to regularly consume the right amount of salt in order to allow the sodium to regulate calcium in the cell and prevent excess electrolyte loss in general.
The average person will need to consume roughly 60-65mg/kg body weight of salt daily in order to maintain the proper balance of sodium to calcium, magnesium, and potassium in the cellular milieu.
Salt is roughly 40% sodium, so the typical person, depending on body weight, needs 10-15g per day in their diet. If you’re consuming baking soda, sodium bicarbonate, you will need 20-22g daily, since it is roughly 27% sodium.
Yes, these recommendations are well above the government RDA guidelines. And that’s the whole point. Government guidelines are wrong.
These recommendations are especially important if you’re an athlete and/or you exercise regularly, since studies have shown that athletes can lose up to 30g of sodium per day, which will clearly impair your physical performance since these levels of sodium loss can wreak havoc on fluid balance and your body’s ability to use glucose properly.
Dropping below 3-5g of salt intake per day, depending on body weight, has been shown to actually increase water retention, due to the decrease in overall blood volume and oxygen delivery.
The Bottom Line: EAT MORE SALT
Stop restricting your salt intake. Sodium is necessary for your body to function properly, starting at the most basic cellular level. Adequate sodium in your diet allows your cells to use fuel properly, releasing energy and oxygen, so you can subsequently produce more carbon dioxide which brings order to your tissues, organs, and ultimately your entire organism.
By increasing your daily salt intake, not only will your meals taste more delicious, but you will actively support a healthy thyroid gland, a higher body temperature, a faster metabolism, more brown fat burning, better sleep, normal blood pressure, and a fertile reproductive system.
Salt is your friend.
So throw that salt on your favorite dishes, enjoy the delicious taste and the health benefits, and you’ll be glad you started to Think Again...
