SALT: Vital for Life or Something to Avoid?

By Kim Marquardt, RN MSN

This blog post is from the Nurse Kim archives of myth busting. I want to share some "alternative" or maybe just lesser known health and wellness viewpoints for you to chew on.

*These posts are not intended as official medical advice.

They ARE meant to be fun, informative, and thought provoking, hopefully sparking an interest for you to do your own research (you can start with the links I provide!) and discover the marvels of the human body, and how it can function at its optimal performance level if we understand how it works and interacts with our environment and our diet.

I have a passion for health and wellness through lifestyle and nutrition and have done thousands of hours of research in addition to being a registered nurse for 23 years. I have done A LOT of self-experimentation in and around diet, lifestyle, body care, and supplementation and have spent a lot of time looking into the science behind it all (or lack thereof!). Check back weekly for the latest post!

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At this point, if you are a regular reader of my blogs, you will not be surprised to hear me say that salt is IN FACT a health food and not something to fear. But as always, I am going to take a deeper “sciency” dive and back up my claims with facts.

First of all, let’s differentiate SALT and SODIUM.

“Salt” and “sodium” are often used interchangeably, but they do not mean the same thing. And it is important to differentiate because SALT is the health food we are talking about today, not necessarily sodium.

Salt

Salt is a crystal-like compound abundant in nature and the element by way in which humans (and animals) ingest sodium and chloride, two of the body’s main electrolytes (potassium, calcium, magnesium, phosphate, and bicarbonate being the others). I’m sure you are well aware that electrolytes are super important and electrolyte imbalances are bad. That is because nearly every cell in your body contains electrolytes which regulate little things like chemical reactions, nerve impulse conduction, contraction and relaxation of muscles, and maintenance of water to mineral balance of cells (i.e. hydration), among other things.

There are SO many ways we lose electrolytes – anything that causes us to urinate, like drinking water (especially in excess to be “extra healthy”😒), coffee, alcohol, sweating, medications, etc. Therefore, we need to be cognizant of replacing those electrolytes and paying attention to how our bodies feel when electrolytes may be imbalanced.

Have you ever wondered why your body MAKES you eat salt through intense cravings? In nature, animals will walk miles to lick a salt lick. In fact, ancestral humans used to follow the animals to find the salt! Does that sound like an element we are suddenly, in the last 50 years, supposed to purposefully avoid?

We could probably end the blog right there and I will have made my point that salt is essential and not something to fear. But we need to unpack a little more due to the confusion between salt and sodium, and I promised some juicy speculation regarding the very questionable “science” that led the powers that be to recommend all humans limit their salt.

Sodium

Sodium, on its own, unlike our friend salt above, is a food additive and found in almost all processed foods (packaged and boxed products) added for curing, thickening, retaining moisture, enhancing flavor, and most famously, as a preservative (MSG anyone?).

While natural salt is a health food (or so I claim), sodium, in processed food, is not. So, I am not saying go out and slam down several bags of Lays and a few packets of Top Ramen to improve your health, DARN!

The other important piece of info to remember in differentiating salt and sodium is that they are not the same measurement gram for gram. 1,000mg of salt is only 40% or 400mg of sodium (and 600mg of chloride). So, if the government is so concerned about people’s sodium intake, shouldn’t they be recommending we cut down on our processed food consumption, NOT our “salt” intake which is merely 40% sodium and contains other important elements?

Instead, they tell us to consume 6-11 servings of ultra-processed grains per day (bread, pasta, cereal, tortillas, popcorn, oatmeal, etc.) all positively PACKED with processed sodium food additive. That’s peculiar?? Oh well, moving on…

What's the “science” that villainized salt in the first place?

Well, in good ole 1977, the year of my birth, AND the year the USDA released its first set of dietary goals (later becoming the official "dietary guidelines" responsible for the vast majority of modern chronic illness in my humble opinion), the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs (whoop! Sounds important!) released a report recommending that Americans cut their salt intake by 50-85%. 

Why in the world did they do that?

The recommendation was based on the work done by a scientist named Lewis Dahl, who, in 1970, claimed he had hard evidence that salt caused hypertension. His “evidence” was based on a study that was done where they fed rats an absolutely ridiculous 500gm of sodium per day (people generally consume around 8.5gm per day) and watched their little rat blood pressures fly out of control. Well gee whiz. Never mind that humans would NEVER consume that much salt in a day.

Dahl also cited population trends that associated increased salt intake in some people groups with increased overall blood pressure and related health risks. Only problem was, another scientific paper came out a few years later showing that when you compared within these populations, genetics played a huge factor in who was affected. And it was a small percentage of the population who showed a sensitivity to salt where their blood pressure was concerned.

But why squabble over these silly details when you can instead make massive, sweeping policy recommendations to the entire general public??!!   

Unfortunately, to make our fearless leaders look even worse, many studies since then have shown NO CORRELATION or in some cases, an INVERSE correlation between those who consume the most salt and those who have high blood pressure. An inverse correlation means the opposite was found, as in, the more salt the study participants consumed, the lower their blood pressure [insert WOW face].

But fortunately for said fearless leaders, if you get the medical community and the mainstream media to just repeat something over and over again, it simply becomes true. And that’s precisely what has happened here. There is not a single person I run into that thinks salt is a health food and should not be feared. Not. A. Single. One.

And it boggles my mind. Except…

Doesn’t salt cause water retention we’ve ALL experienced firsthand?

Here’s where it gets really interesting, and I get to talk about my favorite subject: INSULIN.

The answer to the above question is, yes and no. You see, salt does in fact come with water, which means when we have more salt, our kidneys retain more water, put it back into our system, and we swell up. But is that how the human body is supposed to work? Is it just dysfunctional… craving salt and then blowing up like a balloon?

Hmmm, might there be another “broken” mechanism here causing the kidneys to respond that way?

So glad you asked.

Turns out... chronically elevated insulin levels, or hyperinsulinemia, (resulting from molecular dysfunction in the processing of glucose likely linked to processed foods), tells the kidneys to retain sodium. We are all such insulin factories because of our standard American diet high in ultra processed foods that this has become quite a vast field of study in recent decades.

What we have learned is that insulin has a direct action on the kidneys, sending it the message to improperly retain salt (and therefore water).

Nothing to do with salt being “bad” and everything to do with elevated plasma glucose (blood sugar) levels and insulin malfunction. If we have learned anything with these studies, we have learned that consuming large amounts of processed carbs, starches, and sugar and pumping out huge and unusual amounts of insulin to force the glucose into the cells that can't process it due to metabolic dysfunction causes many problems in the body, yes including the retention of salt and water.

Moral of the story? 

Cut the processed foods and enjoy your salt. In fact, many people who embark on a whole foods diet find that they lose a bunch of weight within the first week or two, which is certainly thrilling. But this is not fat weight, this is your body peeing off all the excess retained fluid it was holding for the reasons above. You see, the body wants to self-regulate, and is so good at it if we feed it a proper human diet.

There is SO MUCH MORE to this story and to the virtues of salt, but as always this is becoming a novel of epic proportions. If you are interested, go and pick yourself up a copy of The Salt Fix by Dr. James DiNicolantonio (one of my favorite brains on a stick) and indulge yourself. Or you can get the free and abbreviated version in one of his many interviews on YouTube.   

Until next week!