Why Salt Destroys Your Health – and Why People Like It

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3 years ago (Last updated: 2 years ago)

Salt (Sodium Chloride)

The balance of Sodium and Potassium regulates the amount of water that is bound in the body. Roughly, Sodium binds it, Potassium releases it. If the balance is disturbed, it is harmful for the health.

The daily need of sodium is 1000-2000mg, for potassium it is 2000mg. An increased intake of salt gives a lot of sodium but no potassium, and creates a relative potassium deficiency.

2.8g common salt, Sodium Chloride, gives ca 1g (1000mg) sodium. It is not uncommon that people of the "civilised world" use 14g salt or more per day!

Things get even worse if you eat refined sugar, because it "steals" potassium for its metabolism, thus further changing the balance in the same direction.

Most people are aware that common salt raises the blood pressure, and that, if it is high, a reduction of the salt intake is beneficial.

To express it very, very simply, the sodium of common salt binds water, and with more water in the system, the pressure against various tissues increases. Compare this to a balloon filled with air. The more air you push into the balloon, the higher the pressure against its inner wall becomes. If it gets too high, the balloon will burst. If it is already somehow damaged, it will burst earlier.

Too much water in the body makes blood pressure rise and causes various forms of oedema. In order to protect themselves against the higher pressure, the arteries grow thicker walls. With growing thickness elasticity decreases, which reduces their participation in the driving pulse of circulation, thus putting a higher strain on the heart. The reduced elasticity makes the vessels less able to parry further rising pressure, and they become more prone to burst.

At this stage you are in serious trouble and well on your way to serious cardiovascular disease.

(It should be noted that common salt is not the only possible reason for hypertension - high blood pressure. There are several others.)

This is not the only thing that happens when the balance between sodium and potassium is disturbed. These elements also regulate the electric voltage between the inner and outer side of the membrane of the cell. The membrane is like a door to the cell, and the voltage regulates what will be allowed into it and out from it. When this electrolytic balance is disturbed, nutrients are not let in, and waste is not let out properly. The cell becomes ill.

Excessive sodium forms very alkaline compounds, which irritate and damage the body. Alkalinity can be neutralised by something acidic; so, as protection the body produces lactic acid. But this creates a new danger: this acid is a contributory cause of cancer.

So, common salt contributes to cancer in two known ways, one by disturbing the electrolyte balance, the other by causing a production of lactic acid.

Just as sugar, salt is an addictive drug. If you are used to a lot of salt, it is hard to stop taking it, but it is possible. There is absolutely no nutritional need for common salt. The required sodium quota is well filled by ordinary foodstuffs. The only time it can be justified is during extreme sweating, since the loss of sodium through sweating can be considerable. In such a situation, you can get heat stroke, which is often a result of acute sodium deficiency.

To get the salty taste without ingesting a lot of sodium, you can use sodium-reduced salt, where some of the sodium is replaced with other minerals, like potassium or magnesium.

An even better alternative is to use kelp powder. Kelp is a brown algae, and pure superfood. It is a nutritionally valuable and well balanced mineral (and to some extent vitamin) supplement, and it is salty. A problem is that it can be hard to find it in form of powder. Most kelp preparations are made as tablets (sold as a mineral supplement), and in that form it cannot be used for salting.

Salt has also been used in magic to remove evil forces. Interestingly, it is biologically purifying externally. On the skin, salt water can be used for disinfection.

Why Do People Like Salt?

Why have people come to love salt?

Salt has drug-like properties: it is hard to stop once started with it. That, along with the fact that food habits to a large extent are inherited, is why salt abuse is still so common. But originally it had a practical purpose. Salting was the first widely used method of preserving food and it has surely been used as a preservative for millennia. As such, it was important and valuable. Not good for the health, but better than starving to death. After all, it provided the possibility to store food and use it later, in a period of scarcity. Today, however, it is not needed at all, except in times of extreme sweating. But people got used to it, so it remained in the cooking habits.

If you feel that food doesn't taste anything without salt, it is just a habit. If you skip salted food entirely for half a year or a year, you will feel the real taste of food - and if anything is salted, you can hardly eat it.

Incidentally, the English word “salary” can be derived from the Latin word “sal”, which means salt. It shows how important salt once was. Roman soldiers are said to have received a part of their salary in form of salt.

(This article is partly based on material previously published in Meriondho Leo.)

Copyright © 2020 Meleonymica/Mictorrani. All Rights Reserved.

More articles on health medicine can be found here.

You find all my writings on Read.Cash, sorted by topic, here.

Also, please join my community: The Mechanisms of Health (d52e).

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3 years ago (Last updated: 2 years ago)

Comments

Long before we had refrigeration, salt was used to preserve and/or cure our foods. I imagine we got used to the taste. Often when you are eating something that taste bland, when you add a little salt, that usually does the trick! It's no wonder people like salt.

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2 years ago

True talk

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3 years ago

I know that, salt is very harmful for health. Eating so much salt, causes many problems in health. But I like eating salt so much.😢

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3 years ago

Salt is like a drug, it is addictive. You are used to eat much salt so you crave it. If you want to eliminate it, or at least reduce it, try to do so in small steps. Take a little less; when you are used to that new level, lower the intake again, and so on.

If you can abruptly just stop, there is nothing wrong with that, but it will be difficult for you to stay away from salt during some months. After some time without it, however, you will not crave salt any longer, and if you eat it then, you will not even like it.

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3 years ago

Thank you for your instractions. I will must be follow it. Thank you again.

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3 years ago

Salt was the 1st spice ever created it didnt kill people then ? We are the problem i believe we go into detail on the most useless things

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3 years ago

It probably did kill people then, if they were not dying from something else first. We must remember that degenerative disease evolves slowly, it takes decades for it to become significant. If most people die by infections, injuries and such things before they are 40, degenerative disease never becomes much of a problem. It's after 40 it has reached such a stage that it really matters.

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3 years ago

True degeratove disease kill a handful slowly but is it not better if our scientist do not make research on such things unknown

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3 years ago

A handful! Today more than 50% of humanity die by degenerative disease, perhaps much more. Two big killers are cancer and cardiovascular disease, both examples of degenerative disease.

Of course research is needed. All new knowledge is valuable. But I see no contradiction between that and how salt causes degenerative disease.

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3 years ago

😭😭😭😭😭

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3 years ago

50% I surely learnt something from you via @read.cash platform.

We can be alive but still dieing slowly so sad how events turn out

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3 years ago

Read my article here, which is about that slow dying by self-inflicted degenerative disease. https://read.cash/@Mictorrani/suicide-is-not-painless-50c9969b

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3 years ago

I read all through did you see my comment there

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3 years ago

I don't think I missed any comment. Do you feel there was something I didn't answer to.

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3 years ago

Nah not at all, I was going thru all my notification to make sure i replied .. Goodmorning

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3 years ago

Definitely will thank You

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3 years ago

Good article! Heath is wealth. Everything taken in excess will definitely affect the body negatively. It is, therefore beneficial to our body system to balance the salt intake into the body.

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3 years ago

Someone who is very knowledgeable once told me that if you need to put salt in your food you should always put salt while cooking and while the food is hot. You should always try to avoid topping up with salt on things you eat.

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3 years ago

I can imagine that you get more saltiness from the salt that way, and can use less without losing the taste of salt.

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3 years ago

There is good and bad in everything. Yes for sure if taking too much. It will be very harmful.

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3 years ago

Well, as I have said about drugs somewhere else, and it goes for salt and all foodstuffs and maybe everything: There is a difference between use and abuse, the difficult thing is to find the borderline between them and keep oneself from crossing it.

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3 years ago

To reduce salt intake, it is good to steam vegetables without additional salt, the other way is to add natural seasonings such as coriander, chives, mint, rosemary, etc. to your food and eat plenty of natural fruits.

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3 years ago

Definitely, yes.

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3 years ago

I never knew how dangerous salt was until I read this..Thanks for the info

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3 years ago

Very good articles,I have made Low sodium salt, as in common salt 39% Sodium is present while in low sodium you can adjust sodium up 20% ,So it would not be less harmful.I ABSOLUTELY AGREE with your article!!!

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3 years ago

I find it odd that this kind of valuable content receives almost no attention, yet some unimportant topics and posts are always covered by thousands of people. Thank you for explaining how salt contributes to cancer. I had no idea about that.

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2 years ago

Yeah, sometimes it's hard to understand why the attention goes as it goes. But in case of this article, it was published here in April 2020, over one year ago. Back in those days it was only articles about BCH and crypto that got any attention worth speaking of.

In the next step came huge groups of people already knowing each other, and they read and upvoted one another. That was so much that it threatened to destroy the whole platform. Getting attention here based on quality only, has always been difficult.

At the bottom lies the fact that most members are here to write and earn BCH, few are interested in reading at all - a problem I addressed already April 1, 2020, only 2 weeks after my arrival to read.cash. https://read.cash/@Mictorrani/evaluation-of-readcash-identifying-problems-a704b399 But note the read.cash then was different from what we have now. There was no fund tipping posts, only direct tips from members.

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2 years ago

You're absolutely right regarding "writing, not reading", that's why I am posting links to my articles on other platforms. We need an influx of newcomers. It feels weird to scroll down the newsfeed and know each and every author. Perhaps it would be a useful thing to create videos for YouTube and sponsor our read.cash profiles. I am looking forward the creation of Gemstone channel, but so far I haven't saved enough money to buy doodly program for the creation of videos.

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2 years ago