An idea as old as it is inaccurate 🧂

Salt is an essential nutrient that our body depends on to live.

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In fact, for most of us, more salt would be better for our health rather than less.

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A white crystal that, consumed in excess, can lead to high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and chronic kidney disease: not salt, but sugar.

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outdated, disproven theories

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For more than forty years, our doctors, the government, and the nation’s leading health associations have told us that consuming salt

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increases blood pressure and thus causes chronic high blood pressure.

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“salt–blood pressure hypothesis.”

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But that wasn’t the full story, of course. As with so many old medical theories, the real story was a bit more complex.

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with normal blood pressure (less than 120/80 mmHg) are not sensitive to the blood-pressure-raising effects of salt at all.

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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

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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.

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When you start restricting your salt intake, the body starts to panic.

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increase insulin levels,

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You start craving sugar and refined carbs like crazy, because your body believes carbohydrate is your only viable energy source.

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fat cell accumulation, weight gain, insulin resistance, and eventually type 2 diabetes.

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Low salt is miserable.

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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.

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you could literally live the rest of your life—and probably a much longer one—if you never ingested another gram of added sugar.

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If salt has always played such a fundamental role in human health, how did we ever begin to doubt it?

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needed to maintain the optimal amount of blood in our bodies;

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needed by the heart to pump blood

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essential for digestion, cell-to-cell communication, bone formation and strength, and prevention of dehydration.

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critical to reproduction, the proper functioning of cells and muscles, and the optimal transmission of nerve impulses to and from organs such as the heart and brain.

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salt and water regulation is a well-adapted survival mechanism

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Even early humans who lived far from the ocean’s brackish waters had this hunger for salt.

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3,383 milligrams of sodium

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the average amount of sodium we modern humans eat in an entire day).

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From an evolutionary standpoint, evidence does not suggest that we evolved on a low-salt diet.

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The idea that our human ancestors consumed very little salt, generally less than 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day, is both old and current.

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45 to 60 percent of our Paleolithic ancestors’ calories came from animal foods39 that are naturally high in salt.

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The salt restriction recommendations hardly make sense from a physiological viewpoint,

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low-salt diet an energy hog and a tremendous stress to the kidneys.

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Getting enough salt

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prevents dehydration, low blood pressure, dizziness, falls, and cognitive impairment.

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just like any nutrient, salt has an optimal level of intake that provides longevity and ideal health—but that optimal level comes with both an upper and a lower limit.

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as hypertension and chronic disease were on the rise in the Western world, salt intake was already on the decline.

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An Idea as Old as It Is Inaccurate

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The theory that salt raises blood pressure is over one hundred years old.

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The theory, at first, made a lot of sense: excess quantities of salt cause the body to retain excess water and lead to high blood pressure in most people;

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reducing your salt intake to around 2,300 milligrams per day (1 teaspoon of salt) may only lower your blood pressure by a meager 0.8/0.2 mmHg.

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when salt intake is severely limited, the body begins to activate rescue systems that avidly try to retain more salt and water from the diet.

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There’s no denying that we are in the midst of a nationwide obesity epidemic that threatens our collective health, well-being, and longevity:

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Conventional wisdom blames obesity on an imbalance between our consumption of calories and our expenditure of energy

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Consuming too little salt can set into motion an unfortunate cascade of changes that result in insulin resistance, an increase in sugar cravings, an out-of-control appetite,

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one of the body’s defense mechanisms is to increase insulin levels.

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When insulin resistance kicks in, the body is less able to shuttle glucose into cells, and it needs to secrete more insulin in order to control blood glucose levels.

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low-salt diet may cause you to absorb twice as much fat for every gram you consume.

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When your insulin levels are elevated, the only macronutrient you can efficiently utilize for energy is carbohydrate.

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high insulin levels basically force you to eat more carbs because you can’t readily get energy from anything else.

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consuming high levels of refined carbs triggers greater insulin release, and the cycle repeats and reinforces

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endlessly perpetuating the problem of high insulin levels—which, in turn, perpetuates obesity.

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iodine deficiency,

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needed for proper thyroid function:

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hypothyroidism, a condition in which your metabolic rate slows down, more fat is stored (particularly in the organs), insulin resistance develops, and weight gain occurs

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low-salt diets increase the risk of overall dehydration

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well-hydrated cells function much more efficiently and consume less energy than dehydrated cells do.

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The less energy that’s available in your body, the greater the state of internal starvation, and the more calories you’re likely to consume.

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“skinny fat”).

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disproportionate amount of visceral

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your weight could remain within the normal range, but you could still have a dangerous buildup of fat in and around your organs as well as insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome,

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large waistline, elevated fasting blood sugar, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, and low HDL cholesterol

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internal starvation, insulin resistance essentially degrades your body’s fat metabolism system, encouraging you to overeat to compensate for all the calories that are being vectored into your fat cells and locked down there.

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your brain and body swing into calorie-conservation mode and you seek relative stillness, rather than energy-expenditure mode, because you’re literally starving for usable energy.

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weight gain and further body fat accumulation, another continuous cycle that perpetuates this unfortunate state of internal affairs.

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Insulin resistance and higher insulin levels are likely physiological adaptations to salt restriction. Insulin helps the kidneys to reabsorb salt, a compensatory mechanism to help the body retain more salt. The elevation in insulin levels makes us fatter and shifts us further into internal starvation. Our skeletal muscle and fat cells become insulin resistant to prevent the higher insulin

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levels from causing our blood glucose level to drop too low (hypoglycemia), which could be potentially fatal. This leads to higher glucose and fatty acid levels circulating in the body, which damages blood vessels and causes more fat to be stored in and around our vital organs instead of being stored where fat should be—in our fat cells. Eating too little salt, rather than too much, triggers this entire unnecessary, self-reinforcing, ever-downward health spiral.

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high fructose intake can also decrease the adipose tissue’s fat-storing capacity, slamming that fat into and around organs like your heart, pancreas, and liver.

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eating enough salt to satisfy our salt cravings may just be the key to kicking our sugar cravings for good.

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This built-in system helps regulate our internal fluid-salt-electrolyte balance and resets it when necessary—and it’s all taken care of automatically, without any effort on our part.

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(at a certain point the body tells itself to reduce intake),

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We adjust water intake by listening to our thirst. Salt consumption works exactly the same way.

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your body knows better than the experts how much salt it needs—

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Our salt intake is unconsciously controlled by our internal salt thermostat.

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Scientific research suggests that the optimal range for sodium intake is 3 to 6 grams per day (about 1⅓ to 2⅔ teaspoons of salt) for healthy adults, not the 2,300 milligrams of sodium (less than 1 teaspoon of salt) per day that’s commonly advised.

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eat a high-salt diet live long and in good health, such as those of France, Italy, South Korea, and Japan. The difference is that these cultures eat real unprocessed food and add salt, rather than consuming processed foods (that also just so happen to be high in salt).

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Salt naturally comes in many different flavors—smoky, earthy, nutty, peppery, sweet, or even sulfuric

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lifting weights or doing resistance exercises (using resistance bands, weight machines, or your own body weight) is one of the best ways to help with insulin resistance. While aerobic exercise helps your body use insulin better and decreases storage of visceral (abdominal) fat, resistance training makes your body more sensitive to insulin and helps your muscles take up more glucose (sugar) from the blood, thereby lowering blood sugar.

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Just 1 teaspoon of salt improves your stamina; it gives you a much more intense “pump” due to an increase in blood circulation, blood volume in the arteries is increased as water is pulled into the arteries, and your organs are perfused better.

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we should all focus on limiting our intake of the more harmful white crystal—sugar—for the sake of our waistlines, our health, and our longevity.

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One of the most powerful and impactful is to simply eat more salt.