My father died from heart disease when he was 52 and I was 10. Since then I have been told that salt is bad for me. Is this still true? Why?
I avoid Mono-sodium Glutamate and other salts found in snacks (potassium this and that). I generally only use Tamari/Soy Sauce and sea salt. Is it really that bad for me?
I have the high end of acceptable cholesterol and normal blood pressure (tested yearly and it has been roughly the same for the past 5 years).
I guess one could add eggs to this discussion too…
It is my understanding that salt is only dangerous if you have hypertension that is sensitive to sodium.
Here is the Salt Institute’s totally unbiased take on your question. (They do give references in their article, though.)
Here is an interesting Australian site that comes to the conclusion that salt restriction is important in those with high blood pressure, helpful in those with slightly high blood pressure, and not important in those with normal blood pressure.
Try searching google for “normotensive” and “salt restriction”. You’ll get lots more stuff that I don’t feel like coding. Note–there are some experts who feel that eating too much salt can directly cause high blood pressure. I don’t buy it myself, and I don’t think this conclusion is well supported in the literature, but read up on it and you can make your own decision.
Salt is not in itself bad for you, but it can cause high blood pressure, kidney problems and disruption of electrolyte levels if used in excess. Unfortunately for sodium, excess is really easy to achieve, since the sources are so very concentrated.
More fun with Google. Try “cholesterol” and “eggs”. Loads of hits. There are those who swear that eggs are loaded with cholesterol, and are best avoided. My high school biochem teacher said that there was enough lecithin in an egg yolk to break down the cholesterol in it. As my dad had high cholesterol (sorry about your dad–I lost mine too)–I looked into the dietary cholesterol question.
From all I could find at the time, eggs don’t significantly raise your serum cholesterol. Large amounts of animal fat in your diet can raise your cholesterol, and that includes the butter that you fried your eggs in, and also the bacon you’re serving with them. But the most significant factor seems to be the amount of cholesterol that your body manufactures.
I’m not sorting through all of those google hits, though. Some agree with me (eggs are ok) and some heavily disagree (eggs are death). I could find cites from “experts” for either view on end.
Sodium Chloride is not a bad thing per se; it’s important to have some, and important to avoid having too much all the time. Check out the http://www.fda.gov/ and see how much you should be getting.
The indisivulaized number for you i’s based on your mass, your lean mass, your activity level, and your urine output. There IS a standardized number for most people that works just fine. 3000 mg of sodium is listed as a suggestion. I don’t think it particularly matters so long as you eat fairly normally, aren’t training for a marathon, and don’t drink several gallons of water a daty.
If you eat American processed food, you’re likely getting more than enough salt. I don’t suggest adding salt to anything that doesn’t look like it came directly from the plant or animal.
Then again, I have a strange situation in which I need an abundance of sodium. I don’t know why, and I don’t think my doctor does either In any case, I use the salt shaker two meals a day.
There was a very interesting study in Science about three years back that looked at all of the other studies done on salt and concluded… we have no idea. No well controlled, large studies have been done. The only study that didn’t have SERIOUS flaws suggested that salt intake had no effect on blood pressure, but it was a fairly small group of people they tested, so who knows. Net result was, there is no good evidence out there to say that salt is bad for normal people.
Actually, this makes sense. The kidneys are remarkable organs and seem to have no trouble clearing salt (or keeping it if necessary), unless there is some previous problem. Obviously, if you are in renal failure or on dialysis, you should be watching your salt intake, but it’s probably okay for the rest of us.
Areas in your body with a high concentration of salt undoubtedly suck water from other parts of the body. So if your blood was salty, it would attract water and this would raise your blood pressure. While this seems to be a good reason for people with hypertension to avoid salt, in practice things are trickier. Blood is filtered by the kidneys and if these are working well, one can handle the extra sodium load without this causing high blood pressure. On the other hand, salty foods are often processed, less nutritious foods and there are other good reasons for avoiding many of these foods if you have health problems.
Well, the saying is that the dosage makes the poison. Anything, and I do mean anything, could cause cancer or some other horrible effect in lab rats if you feed them enough of it. As for salt, while it seems to be that there’s a definite limit on how much you can have, I don’t know how or why it affects you.
One other note: Sodium chloride is sodium chloride. Mixing it with other substances, such as soy sauce or the other salts in sea salt, won’t make it any healthier for you - or more poisonous, unless the stretch of sea they got the salt from is on the polluted side.
In any case, I use the salt shaker two meals a day.