Quitting Salt!

The typical American consumes 3,400 milligrams of salt per day, over twice the recommended amount, despite the fact that salt consumption has grown by 50% in the previous 40 years in the US. This is concerning since high salt intake is linked to high blood pressure. heart disease, stroke, and renal disease What genuinely occurs when you give up salt to answer this question

We'll start by discussing what occurs when you reduce your intake of salt, and then we'll discuss what would happen if you eliminated salt entirely from your diet. Spoiler alert: the outcomes are drastically different. First, start with a low-sodium diet, which can contain anywhere from 1500 to 2300 mg of salt per day. After a week, your body will have already dropped your blood pressure, even if you may not notice it physically. Your kidneys play a key role in this by controlling the content of your blood vessels.

When you consume fluids and stay properly hydrated, your body releases any excess water through excretion. Conversely, when you are dehydrated, your body retains more water due to reabsorption of fluids in the kidneys and increased thirst. All of this is done to try to maintain the ideal ratio of salt to water in your blood and cells, but eating a lot of salt can occasionally interfere with this process since your body cannot generate salt on its own; instead, salt is ingested through food and subsequently absorbed into your blood.

Similar to how it regulates excess water, your kidneys should normally remove excess salt from your body. However, over time, a high salt intake causes your kidneys to become less efficient at filtering out the excess salt, which keeps your blood more concentrated with sodium. The extra sodium in your blood causes osmosis to pull water from your cells into your blood because the water wants to be where the sodium is, throwing off the ideal concentration gradient between the two. This causes your blood volume to increase, which raises your blood pressure.

Consuming a low-sodium diet reduces the danger of developing chronic high blood pressure; after a few weeks of low-sodium eating, you may notice a decrease in stress. Research has shown that elevated blood pressure over extended periods of time is linked to several health disorders. Recent studies have demonstrated that eating a lot of salt causes the body to produce more stress hormones and that experiencing stress amplifies your hormonal response. Although these early studies were conducted on mice, future research will focus on stress hormones in humans.

further investigate the function of salt in aggressiveness and anxiety. After four weeks, you may notice a decrease in bloating as a result of cutting back on sodium in your diet. A low-sodium diet has great short-term benefits, but the true benefits are long-term. One of the largest trials examining blood pressure and diet, the Dash Sodium Trial, found that high sodium increased bloating in a dose-dependent manner regardless of the type of diet. In other words, as you decrease salt, you're likely to decrease bloating proportionately.

In a recent study conducted in 600 rural Chinese villages, researchers found that people with a history of stroke or those over 60 with hypertension who consumed low-salt diets experienced fewer major cardiovascular events and deaths from stroke within five years of cutting back on salt intake. The secret to their successful salt reduction was to replace 30% of typical table salt, which is sodium chloride, with potassium chloride salt. While the two tastes different, this is a really clever way to slightly increase the saltiness of food without adding sodium, which is the main culprit and often overconsumed potassium consumption.

however, is typically underconsumed, and adequate potassium intake can help improve blood pressure regulation. As a result, there are benefits to reducing salt intake for many people, especially those who have hypertension. However, cutting out sodium entirely from your diet would be difficult because nearly everything you eat contains some amount of salt. Let's look at the facts: sodium is obviously important for your body because it helps your nerves signal to your muscles how to contract and relax. It also plays a role in helping your body transport nutrients, so when you don't have enough, your body enters a state known as hyponatremia.

Similar to how too little or too much salt can cause issues with blood and cells, your body will try to restore the proper salt gradient and concentration by excreting water. While this may help with one issue, it can also cause severe dehydration. Within a week, you may start feeling queasy and vomiting, which will worsen the condition because our muscles need sodium to contract and relax. Two weeks later, you may start experiencing sporadic twitches in your muscles.

I know what you're thinking, just add some salt back into the diet and you're back to normal, but there's a catch: we actually can't correct our blood sodium too fast or we can cause osmotic demyelination because the brain gets dehydrated. and after three weeks, it's likely that the brain would start to increase in size because the vessels surrounding the brain have less salt compared to the tissue so the water moves into the cells the osmosis resulting in swelling.

This is why reducing salt intake too much can be dangerous, especially for those who aren't already at risk for hypertension. In addition to having an adverse effect on mental clarity and focus, some research indicates that low-sodium diets, when followed to an extreme, may actually raise the risk of cardiovascular disease. Although many people consume excessive amounts of salt, it's crucial to maintain or ingest salt into your system if you're a healthy individual who eats mostly whole foods or low-carbohydrate foods that help your body retain water, or active.

And if you don't have high blood pressure or are at risk for developing high blood pressure, studies generally show that you shouldn't overthink it. Instead, you should find the Goldilocks range—which, according to guidelines, is typically around 2300 milligrams per day for most people—because, for many people, their bodies will tell you what they need. If you have a craving for salt or feel grossed out by it, listen to your body. Of course, you should always consult a healthcare professional to determine whether you're on either end of the extreme spectrum, as some people are more sensitive than others. For instance, it has been demonstrated that women of all ages and ethnicities fit into this category, thus higher salt diets may carry a greater risk. As with anything in life, the dose makes the poison, so going over or under the recommended amount of salt can be harmful.