The Salt Fix

Low salt is miserable.

Low salt is dangerous.

Our bodies evolved to need salt.

Low-salt guidelines are based on inherited “wisdom,” not scientific fact.

All the while, the real culprit has been sugar.

And finally: salt may be one solution to—rather than a cause of—our nation’s chronic disease crises.

You start craving sugar and refined carbs like crazy, because your body believes carbohydrate is your only viable energy source. And, as the now-familiar story goes, the more refined carbs you eat, the more refined carbs you tend to crave. This overeating of processed carbs and high-sugar foods virtually ensures fat cell accumulation, weight gain, insulin resistance, and eventually type 2 diabetes.

When you start restricting your salt intake, the body starts to panic. One of the body’s defense mechanisms is to increase insulin levels, because insulin helps the kidneys retain more sodium. Unfortunately, high insulin levels also “lock” energy into your fat cells, so that you have trouble breaking down stored fat into fatty acids or stored protein into amino acids for energy. When your insulin levels are elevated, the only macronutrient that you can efficiently utilize for energy is carbohydrate

Our mistake came from taking such a small sample of people—unethically small!—and wildly extrapolating their benefits from low-salt eating without ever mentioning the risks. Instead, we focused on those extremely minuscule reductions in blood pressure, completely disregarding the numerous other health risks caused by low salt intake—including several side effects that actually magnify our risk of heart disease—such as increased heart rate; compromised kidney function and adrenal insufficiency; hypothyroidism; higher triglyceride, cholesterol, and insulin levels; and, ultimately, insulin resistance, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.

why salt may increase blood pressure in some people but not in others.

We believed so strongly in sodium restriction because we believed so strongly in blood pressure as a metric of health.

just because one thing (salt) may sometimes lead to another thing (higher blood pressure), which happens to correlate with another thing (cardiovascular events), that does not necessarily prove that the first thing caused the third thing

In the salt–high blood pressure hypothesis, that excess salt then causes the body to hold on to that increased water, in order to dilute the saltiness of the blood. Then, the resulting increased blood volume would automatically lead to higher blood pressure.

there was no evidence that a low-salt diet would prevent the increases in blood pressure that often occur with advancing age

Scientists have found that across all populations, when people are left to unrestricted sodium consumption, they tend to settle in at 3,000 to 4,000 milligrams of sodium per day. This amount holds true for people in all hemispheres, all climates, all range of cultures and social backgrounds—when permitted free access to salt, all humans gravitate to the same threshold of salt consumption, a threshold we now know is the sodium-intake range for optimal health.