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EventsShould you eat less salt – or more?
in Salt 
Is salt a white poison, like sugar and flour? Or is it essential and something a lot of people are deficient in? Could you feel better by including more salt in your diet?
The role of salt is often discussed, and warnings against salt usually win big headlines.
Fox News: New study indicates that reducing salt intake could save 100,000 lives per year
But the science is not nearly as clear as some believe or pretend.
Questionable Scientific Support
A relevant scientific review showed that the evidence is still unclear whether reduced salt intake affects the risk of heart disease or life expectancy. And the reduction in blood pressure level is relatively minor:
- The New York Times: No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet
- The New York Times: Salt, We Misjudged You
To further complicate the picture people get most of their salt intake from processed and junk food. Often from low-fat products, where the salt helps restore some of the lost flavor. Furthermore, there’s a lot of salt in bread and soda.
In other words: if you try to eat less salt you’re also avoiding junk food. So if a benefit is observed in studies (unclear, according to articles above) – then what was the cause? Less salt or less sugar and starch? We can’t know.
Conclusion
Avoid junk food and bread. This will make you avoid unnecessary amounts of salt. Whether you’d benefit from a further reduction in your salt intake, is unclear.
It may also be that an increased salt intake is only a risk factor in combination with a high-carb diet. High insulin levels cause water and salt retention in the body. You may experience bloating (for example around your ankles) and your blood pressure may increase.
Risk of Salt Deficiency?
Eating a low-carb diet, thus reducing your insulin levels, will often make you excrete more fluid and the bloating goes away. In addition, you’ll lose more salt in your urine.
Losing more salt at the same time that you’re avoiding overly salty junk food may push you into salt deficiency. This is most typical when you first switch to LCHF, but may also appear much later.
Symptoms and Solutions
Typical symptoms of salt deficiency are dizziness, headache and fatigue (especially, but not exclusively, in the context of exercising). It can also cause difficulty concentrating (“brain fog”) and increase the risk of constipation.
Fortunately there’s a simple way to cure this: drink a glass of salt water.
- Pour a big glass of water
- Mix in half a teaspoon of common salt
- Drink
If your symptoms improve significantly or disappear within 15-30 minutes, they were caused by salt deficiency and/or dehydration.
Have you experienced salt deficiency? Leave a comment with your story.
Have been reading your blog for a year now and its great !
I have been super happy with my lchf lifetsyle (for a year now), however I have recently started boxing exercise, and the dizzy spells have been almost debilitating - only with extreme exercise. I consciously try to add more "good" salt to my cooking. Is there another thing that may be causing it?
"Mild carb restriction doesn’t seem to require sodium supplementation, but significant restriction unquestionably does."
and
"Evidence implicating sodium in hypertension is pretty weak, but may be context dependent. In other words, other dietary factors, such as fructose, may exacerbate impact of sodium on BP, if such an effect is present. Most recent report by Institute of Medicine says data implicating sodium in HTN is very poor, and low levels of sodium are probably harmful. Ketosis is a unique state that does required supplemental sodium beyond what most people get in their diet."
I think that a low salt level also causes a imbalance in other electrolytes like magnesium and potassium which can cause arrhythmia and other issues. I totally believe that the push to have people lower their salt intake is bad advice.
Association between Usual Sodium and Potassium Intake and Blood Pressure and Hypertension"
This book explains how increasing the ratio of Potassium to Sodium 4 Potassium 1 sodium reduces blood pressure significantly.
The High Blood Pressure Solution: A Scientifically Proven Program for Preventing Strokes and Heart Disease by Richard D. Moore
"Potassium, your invisible friend | Dr. Malcolm Kendrick"
This is interesting.
Answer to the Public consultation on the draft proposal for the first part of the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2012 the part of Sodium as salt
See also "Yin-Yang Effect of Sodium and Chloride Presents Salt Conundrum" low levels of chloride was associated with a higher risk of death and cardiovascular disease.
Off of memory:
60-70% of Africans have this.
5-10% of East Asians.
About 0% for whites.
I don't think you can generalize wrt sodium.
(Since going LCHF, not only do I never crave sugar, sweet or starchy things are unappetizing).
Steve Gibson (grc.com) in a discussion recommended bullion - beef or chicken is usual. It works. Sometimes I'm feeling off, or getting a headache or are sluggish, and it fixes things.
He referenced a study that carbs tend to make you retain salt and water, but if you lose the carbs, your kidneys tend to flush salt so you need more.
Well, that hasn't prevented The Anointed from telling everyone to consume less. We can generalize that the consensus view is almost certainly incorrect.
I suspect the reason this article is titled with a question is that as with carbs, saturated fat, lipids, thyroid and several other issues, what we thought we knew may be mistaken, and things need a fresh look without presuppositions.
And there will be genetic variations. That CYP3A5 look to be more profound than most.
Also, the morton salt lite is a mix of Na CL and Potassim
Helps with salt balance
Salt was only needed tobe added afer the adoptation of grain = high carb diets
Eric
I had understood that this effect wasn't permanent. I do drink broth a couple of times a week, salt my food a little with a broad-spectrum seasalt, and take magnesium in the evening, but I don't go out of my way to salt-load. No problems, although I have had both postural hypotension and painful cramps in the calves when going into low-carb in the past when I haven't been careful.
Apart from this specific problem, I think it's rather the other way round. A high-carbohydrate diet actually requires more salt. You'll notice old explorers, people wandering out in the wilds in North America in the old days and so on will often talk of "going without bread or salt". The two go together. In the Russian spiritual classic "The Way of a Pilgrim" the pilgrim goes off with a knapsack containing only bread and salt. You add salt when you make bread; you add salt to panfuls of rice or gruel. Archaeologists and historians sometimes indicate that salt-deposits are necessary for the shift to urban civilisation. For example, Michael D. Coe says that Mayan civilisation was predicated on a particular salt-deposit in that area:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Maya-Ancient-Peoples-Places/dp/0500289026/
Those people switching from a largely meat-based diet to a maize-based diet with urbanisation needed the salt.
Stefansson often mentions that the Eskimo had no salt and disliked the taste -- on one occasion he put some in a stew he made so that no-one else would take any of it!
And anthropologists have in the past made much of the Maasai's having little access to salt as a proof that they ate little plant-food.
I suspect there is a reason for all this. I suspect it's plant-based high-carbohydrate diets that require more salt. People weren't running salt caravans across places like the Sahara Desert for nothing.
IIRC, Sally Fallon of the Weston A. Price Foundation has said that on a more plant-based diet you need salt because you need more HCl in the stomach. That sounds plausible to me -- I don't know where else you'd get the Cl from if not common salt. She's also said that eating a more vegetarian diet and cutting salt, as effectively advised by numerous health bodies and government agencies these day is a bad combination and a quick route to the hospital.
From reading the posts of various places one learns that CREAM is not always the same. The USA has 1/2 and 1/2, light, whippping, and heavy cream. Now I read that in restaurants they have something more like the UK doubble cream. This 40% cream is Manufacturing cream and seems t be availablr in 1/2 gallon size. This is about 1 weeks worth of cream for me so I will see if it is available in Las Vegas when I return.
Does the extra 11 or so grams per cup make a differance? I do not know. Could I add an ounce of Kerry Gold butter to 7 ounces of heavey cream? I do not know
Comments?? Eric
Nine months ago I started LCHF but not very strictly. The only effect I have noticed (without any added salt) is that I no longer cramp at all. I can exercise for approximately 1 hour, 3 days per week at over 90% of maximum heart rate without difficulty, at 58 years old and BMI of 26 (overweight?). Perhaps the fact I have eliminated all junk food and eat mainly home grown organic veges goes a long way to meeting my mineral requirements.
Perhaps information from this old textbook is why:
Nutrition and Physical Fitness, 1966, by Bogert, Briggs, Calloway
It's got all kinds of great nutrition info since it was written just before the science really turned towards blaming fat for all our ills.
The text has the best explanation I've ever seen why low carb diets really require more sodium and potassium (see second bullet point):
page 401 -- Sodium and Potassium loss on low carb diets
• Just as there is a limit to the degree to which soluble substances can be concentrated by the kidney, so there is a limit to the acid-base range within which urine can be excreted. Normally the acid-base balance of the diet is well within the functional range of the kidney. The chief acidic products of the diet are sulfates and phosphates formed in the process of protein metabolism. The organic acids found in most fruits and vegetables do not yield acid residues because they are oxidized in metabolism to carbon dioxide and water and are accompanied in the foods by large amounts of potassium and other basic elements. The most frequently encountered instance in which large amounts of acidic substances must be excreted is when fat is incompletely oxidized in the body and acidic intermediate products of its metabolism (ketone bodies, see p. 388) accumulate, as in starvation and diabetes.
• Ingestion of extremely high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets has this same effect. Under these conditions, basic elements (chiefly sodium and potassium) are required for their neutralization, and thus they are lost from the body.
A couple of summers ago, I started feeling "off." Flu-like symptoms, but not the flu. Abdominal cramps so bad I couldn't get out of bed. I finally called the doctor and he had me go to the emergency room for tests. One of the tests in the panel was for sodium. Mine was 28 on a scale of 35 - 45. They passed that off as "well, you must have been drinking a lot of water" despite the fact that I said I'd had very little water in the past couple days because I felt so bad.
As soon as I saw those results, I remembered everything I'd read from Phinney and Volek and so started supplementing with pink Himalayan salt, almost 2 tsp daily. When I repeated the blood work 2 weeks later, I was smack in the middle of the normal range.
Though I still sometimes forget to take my salt, when I start feeling sub-par, I realize the issue and head straight for the salt.
By the way, I no newcomer to low-carb eating. Been eating this way since 1998.
PS: This probably isn't the place to mention this, but why do I get email notifications on only a small proportion of your blog posts? I didn't get notification of this one, but got an email on the next article in your blog on margarine. Strange.
I agree whole-heartedly. Not common table salt. That doesn't even taste good to me anymore. I always use the pink Himalayan salt.
"In addition to broth, get some Celtic Sea Salt, Himalayan Salt or one of the other grayish, pinkish kind of grungy looking salts and replace your normal salt with these. And don’t use them sparingly. These salts have been harvested either from ancient sea beds or obtained by evaporation of sea water with high mineral content and contain about 70 percent of the sodium of regular salt (which has been refined, bleached and processed until it is pretty much pure sodium chloride, often with anti-caking agents added). The other 30 percent of the volume is other minerals and micronutrients (including iodine) found in mineral-rich seas."
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/saturated-fat/tips-tricks-for-star...
Also this: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/uncategorized/another-one-bites-th...
I started drinking tomato juice 0.35l in the morning and in the evening (each serving 3g salt), totally fixed the problem.