Ann Louise Gittleman - Get the salt out : 501 simple ways to cut salt out of any diet

The Facts about Salt and Sodium

A ll of us should restrict our intake of common table salt. This is one recommendation on which health experts agree. Every major medical and nutritional organizationfrom the American Heart Association to the American Medical Association to the United States Department of Agriculturesays the same thing: salt, in the amount we currently consume, seriously jeopardizes our health.

Just how much salt do we consume? According to The Sodium Counter (Pocket Books, 1993), the average Americans salt intake is two to three teaspoons a day. This may not sound like a lot, but it provides 4,000 to 6,000 milligrams of sodium a daywhich can be double the Food and Drug Administrations maximum recommended daily quantity of 2,400 milligrams.

No other mammal eats this much salt, and no other mammal has the health problems we do. High blood pressure, for example, was never even seen in animals until researchers found they could induce it either by surgery or by introducing large amounts of salt into animals diets.

If salt added to your food seems like a natural and necessary part of life to you, consider that the human race is about fifty thousand years old and we discovered salt only about six thousand years ago. (Sanskrit, one of the oldest human languages, does not even have a word for salt.) Throughout history, most human cultures have not used salt; the sodium that occurred naturally in their diets provided all they required.

In The Paleolithic Prescription (Harper & Row, 1988), anthropological researchers S. Boyd Eaton, M.D., Marjorie Shostak, and Melvin Konner, Ph.D., point out that our hunter-gatherer ancestors consumed approximately 700 milligrams of sodium a daythe equivalent found in one-third of a teaspoon of salt. While the amount of stress that we experience in our modern-day lives may require us to consume slightly more sodium than our ancestors did, it is clear that today we consume far more than we need.

We unknowingly absorb excessive salt not only from food, but also from an unsuspected source: the salt-softened water in which we bathe. Since the American Heart Association now warns that salt-softened water can cause an elevated sodium level, many health-conscious Americans no longer drink salt-softened water. Few of us, however, realize that we receive a lot of unwanted sodium every time we take a shower or a bath or wash clothes in softened water. Sodium is very efficiently absorbed through the skin, and topically ingested salt has become a common culprit of excess sodium.

The sodium we consume from food and water is only part of the problem. The highly refined nature of common table salt is the other part. Although our bodies are not designed to handle large amounts of sodium, healthy individuals usually can tolerate some excess sodium if it is in a naturally occurring form that our bodies can readily use or excrete. Commercial table salt used in our food and to soften water, however, is the furthest thing from this ideal. During the refining of table salt, natural sea salt or rock salt is stripped of more than sixty trace minerals and essential macro-nutrients, leaving a single chemical compound: sodium chloride. This minerally unbalanced salt is then treated with chemicals such as bleaches, conditioners, and anti-caking agents, rendering a difficult-to-absorb salt that stresses our systems and invariably causes severe health problems.

Most of us already know that excessive salt consumption contributes to the development of high blood pressure, but recent research shows that it is also associated with strokes, migraine headaches, and osteoporosis among other health problems. (For a complete listing of the ailments associated with salt consumption, see the section The Problems with Salt and Sodium in this Preface.)

Some of you might be well aware of the hazards of refined salt and are eager to move on to the tips for reducing your intake. If you are, please understand this: like fat, sodium is misunderstood by the public. Sodium and fat are nutrients we need for health, but not all forms of them are healthy. Refined or common table salt is an unhealthy form of sodium we all should avoid.

If you would like to understand better the vital distinction between sodium and refined salt, keep reading. If, however, you decide to skip the next section and move directly to the tips, I strongly suggest that when you have more time you come back to the crucial following information. Understanding the role sodium plays in the body and the difference between good and bad sources of sodium will help you get the salt out of your diet while you still meet your sodium needs.

Sodium is essential to life.

Sodium is so important, in fact, that humans have a specific sensor on the tongue that can detect salt. Thousands of years ago, when the diet of humans was potassium-rich and sodium-poor, this sensor for salt was a crucial survival tool. Nature, in her infinite wisdom, devised a way to help humans (as well as animals) seek out salty foods so they could be assured of receiving adequate sodium from their diets. This is important because sodiumoften found in the form of sodium chloride or saltplays countless roles in the body.

To begin with, sodium is crucial for maintaining the health of every cell in the human system. It permeates the fluid between cells (often called the extracellular fluid) and potassium exists mainly on the inside of the cells (in the intracellular fluid). These two minerals need to be in constant dynamic balance so nutrient and waste exchange can take place across cell membranes. If either of these minerals is deficient or in excess, cell permeability becomes compromised and the health of all our cells suffers.