What makes humans so special?

In addition to providing a salty taste, salt plays an important role in human life processes, such as regulating the balance of water in the body, participating in the absorption and transport of nutrients, maintaining the ion concentration difference between inside and outside cells, and the pH balance in the body, among other functions.

As you can see, salt is an essential substance for human beings, in fact, if not enough salt intake, the human body will have various adverse reactions, such as limb weakness, muscle cramps and vertigo, etc.. Fortunately, we humans are smart and have long mastered the method of extracting salt in large quantities in nature. Normally, we only need to add some salt to our food to easily meet the body's need for salt.

However, as far as we know, those wild animals in nature do not have the habit of "salt", but they also live a good life. So the question arises, why wild animals do not need to eat salt, but humans must eat salt? Why are humans so special?

In fact, other animals also need to eat salt, in fact, humans in the storage of livestock is also to provide them with salt, and even some people will directly place a large piece of salt for cattle and sheep to lick.

Wild animals do not have the care of humans, they can only eat salt by their own skills, the good thing is that salt is widespread in nature, after a long evolution, the Earth's existing wild animals have a way to find salt in nature, and the most simple and direct way is to "eat dirt".

In fact, the earth's crust itself is a natural source of minerals, many soil and rocks contain a certain amount of salt, careful observation of cattle and sheep should know that cattle and sheep in the grass, but also often "eat soil" or lick the stone, they do so, in fact, is to obtain the salt, and this way is also the wild animals (especially This is also a common way for wild animals (especially herbivores) to get salt.

For carnivores, salt is relatively easy to obtain, because their food (animal meat) contains salt, and its salt content can already meet the carnivore's own needs, so carnivores usually do not need to take salt through additional means.

By the way, many animals do not have well-developed sweat glands, and most of the salt in their bodies is excreted from the urine through the kidneys, so these animals can not consume too much salt, otherwise they will cause kidney damage (pet owners need to pay attention to this problem).

In short, it is not that wild animals do not need to eat salt, but they are not smart enough to add salt directly to their food like humans do, and can only "eat salt secretly", which gives us the illusion that "they do not need to eat salt". It is important to note that in this regard, eating salt, humans are really special, relatively speaking, humans need salt more than other animals.

The main reason for this phenomenon is that humans have developed sweat glands, very easy to sweat, usually, after a certain degree of exercise in humans will be a lot of sweat.

In order to catch the prey on the grassland, they adopted a special method, which is to track the prey by running until the prey is exhausted.

Humans developed sweat glands is thus, which can effectively help humans in long-distance running to reduce their body temperature, thereby substantially improving human endurance, allowing humans to run longer and farther. Although the powerful long-distance running ability to help humans survive in the grassland, but this also makes humans need more salt, after all, the secretion of sweat contains a lot of salt.

After the transition from nomadic gathering life to settled farming life, the human food structure has changed greatly, the proportion of meat significantly reduced, and when the salt contained in food can not meet the human need for salt, humans have to eat salt to replenish the body's salt needs.

Over time, humans have become accustomed to the saltiness of salt, and think that salty enough food is more delicious, so salt has developed into a necessary human condiments, usually, humans like to add some salt to food, and still do so today.