salt on a wooden spoon with black background

The salt fix – Dr James Dinicolantonio

This book “The Salt fix” really opens up your mind.
It’s backed up with recent research studies, along with the history of how we were mislead (again) with information about salt and how important it is in our diet.

Just like the ‘low-fat’ era, we have mistaken what our bodies really need, and why!


Once you read below, some of the highlighted aspects from this book, I hope you too, will start to connect the dots on why our health has deteriorated over the past 50 years and why our society now battles with so many diseases and health concerns.

My job is to help share information like this, to help you understand why it’s important to ask questions.
Please read up more on ligiterment information.
Do not be mislead by articles that have an agenda to purchase products.

* Remember leading manufacturers only have their bottom line as their priority, not your health.


Please take the time to read over the following review of such a well written book. Dr James Dinicolantonio has taken a great amount of time to put this together, dating back to 1905 where the important historical events relating to salt and sugar began.

Like anything if you learn the history – you will understand why people get confused with what they read now, but most importantly you will make your own common sense decision.


Salt depletion leads to cravings


Research suggests that chronic salt depletion may be a factor in what endocrinologists term “internal starvation”. 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 insulin levels are elevated, the only macronutrient that you can efficiently utilize for energy is carbohydrate.

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. The overeating of processed carbs and high-sugar foods virtually ensures fat cells accumulation, weight gain, insulin resistance, and eventually type 2 diabetes.


Salt’s benefits

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We cry salt, we sweat salt, and the cells in our bodies are bather in salty fluids. Without salt we would not be able to live.

Salt can turn a bland meal into a very tasteful meal, it knocks out bitterness and can really sweeten up a meal without adding SUGAR like most people do these days.

Salt plays a fundamental role in dozens of critical functions in our bodies.

Salt is needed to maintain the optimal amount of blood in our bodies; it’s needed by the heart to pump blood throughout our bodies.

Salt is needed for digestion, cell to cell communication, bone formation and strength, and prevention of dehydration (think gatorade without all the sugar – it’s call electrolytes).
Electrolytes – such as sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium. – these help carry out electrical impulses that control many of our bodies’ functions.

With adequate sodium intake, our blood volume goes down, which could lead to the shutting down of certain organs, such as the brain and kidneys. Basically without sodium we could die.


Our brain and body automatically determine how much sodium we eat, reabsorb, and excrete.
This is controlled through our hypothalamus – a part of your brain.
This will transmit signals that drive us to crave salt or feel thirsty.



Salts connection to hormones and vital organs


Iodine is also a mineral, like sodium and chloride, but it is only found in trace amounts in the body.
Despite being a trace mineral, iodine is essential to our entire body’s health.

Iodine is the main building block of our thyroid hormones, with three iodine atoms making up the thyroid hormone T3, and four iodine atoms making up T4.

A deficiency in iodine decreases the body’s production of T3 and T4 and can enlarge the thyroid tissue, causing goiter and possibly leading to underactive (hypothyroid) or overactive (hyperthyroid) thyroid function.

With less iodine in the liver this also slows the metabolism, and they hydration within the cells.

Hormone side effects:

Our adrenal hormones are critical in our fight and flight nervous system response (cortisol) as well as our salt balance (cortisol and aldosterone).


Cortisol (stress hormone)
– cortisol also seems to be involved in the release of sodium from our skin stores to aid us during stressful times.

(FYI Insects can fly faster when saltier, so what’s to say we can’t run faster with increased sodium levels).

Think how you bonk when running after sweating so much – remember what is sweat??? Yes it’s your excretion of salt!
When you sweat heaps – you slow down due to decrease of salt in the body!

So when you replenish your salt – you regain your pace!.

Aldosterone – another hormone released by our adrenal glands, soaks sodium away into our skin and allows us to reabsorb more salt from the kidneys in times of deficit or need.
So aldosterone is a salt storer whereas cortisol seems to be a salt releaser, with the interplay of both hormones helping to determine our overall salt status.


Blood pressure and salt – the real story

If blood sodium levels drop too low, water from the blood will go into our tissue cells in order to increase the level of sodium in the blood back to normal, but this fluid can lead to cellular swelling.

If sodium level in the blood goes up, water will be pulled out of the tissue cells and into the blood, in order to lower sodium levels back to normal – but this can cause cellular shrinkage.

The low salt guides we have been accustomed to is not how little effect they have on normal functioning, such as blood volume. When the intake of sodium is severely restricted, blood volume can go down by 10-15%.

This change indicates the body is under stress of dehydration.

At that point, the body is facing an emergency, and the salt-retaining hormones are released as a last-ditch means of maintaining the body’s homeostasis – to prevent a large drop in blood pressure.

So a low salt diet indicates a crisis for the body, not a recipe for optimal health.


If someone were to simply consume 3,000 – 5,000 mil of sodium per day, those same salt retaining hormones would stay suppressed.
This fact alone is solid evidence that this level of sodium intake places the least stress on the body and is logically the body’s preferred salt consumption zone to maintain homeostasis.


Research has supported the notion that insulin resistance and high insulin levels were at the centre of salt-sensitive hypertension.

If we treated the insulin resistance by eliminating sugar, we could fix the sat-sensitive hypertension.
But still the myth held, and lowering the intake of salt, not sugar, continued to be the focus for preventing and treating hypertension.

Evidence implicating sugar as the cause of salt- sensitivity hypertension, was cortisol.
So cortisol-induced hypertension was likely being confused with salt-sensitivity hypertension, because as cortisol increased in the body, so did sodium, blood volume, and blood pressure.

This lead to blaming salt as the blame for high blood pressure – when in fact it was the sugar, pushing the levels of insulin up, pushing up the cortisol.

What we are starting to realise is how low salt intake can produce similar physiological effects. 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, and what’s been dubbed “internal starvation” (aka hidden cellular semistarvation), thereby promoting weight gain. Someone who is overweight literally may be starving on the inside.

With internal starvation, your hormones (insulin, leptin, and others) may be working against you, essentially hijacking your appetite and revving up your desire for more unhealthy foods, and at the same time corrupting the internal process that regulate your use of fat and protein for energy.
It’s as if you are no longer in charge of your eating habits and your body has gone rogue when it comes to managing its energy expenditure and intake.


When you start restricting your salt intake, your body will do anything to try to hold on to it.
It’ll increase insulin levels, and become in a state of insulin resistance.

So when a person’s intake of dietary salt is on the paltry side, hormones that compensate to help the body retain salt (such as renin, angiotensin, and aldosterone) are released in greater amounts.
Well these hormones end up increasing fat absorption, too. In essence, compared to someone who hasn’t slashed his or her salt intake, a low salt diet may cause you to absorb twice as much fat for every gram you consume.



Salt and weight

 

Elevated insulin levels keeps stored fat and proteins locked away, making them unavailable to the cells that need them.
With internal starvation, insulin resistant 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. This can make you feel like you’re starving inside while you may be gaining weight at the same time. Moreover, because your body cannot access its stored energy, exercise becomes highly unappealing.
Instead, your brain and body swing into calorie-conversion literally starving for usable energy.


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


We all know that higher insulin levels will lead to greater fat storage, even if your overall calorie intake remains the same – and now we see this higher fatty acid concentration in the blood may also increase damage to the arteries and blood vessels.

Because of our modern health and lifestyle habits, our bodies need more salt than ever before, due to the reasons below:

– overconsumption of sugar leads to specific kidney problems that cause salt wasting.
– chronic diseases such as hypothyroidism, adrenal insufficiency, and congestive heart failure can leads to hyponatremia (low blood sodium).
– commonly prescribed medications such as diuretics, antidepressants, anti-psychotics, and even some diabetes drugs leave us susceptible to salt depletion.
– our java-junkie habits and our dependence on energy drinks, teas, and other caffeinated beverages put us at risk for salt depletion because caffeine acts as a natural diuretic flushing water and salt from our kidneys.
– intense exercise causes us to lose considerable salt and water in sweat.
– low carb as well as intermittent (and especially prolonged) fasting diets cause massive losses of sodium and water from our kidneys and increase our need for salt.

Salt is one of our five innate taste sensations, and with good reason: besides making food taste good, we’ve seen how vital salt is to our health. We have a built in salt thermostat – that helps us get the right amount. It helps regulate our internal fluid-salt-electrolyte balance and resets when necessary (think of float tanks, soaking in seawater after hard training sessions) – but really it’s all taken care of automatically, without us having to put much effort in.

You see we don’t need sugar to survive but we do need salt!



Stress and Salt

Salt intake may help buffer the effects of stress, serving as an adaptive coping mechanism for dealing with psychological and emotional adversity.

Researchers at university of Iowa found that decreased consumption of sodium rich foods caused anxiety in subjects that when presented with mental challenges.
Rats that were deficient in sodium chloride (table salt), shied away from normal enjoyable activities, suggesting salt has a positive effect on mood.
Low salt diets can cause tremendous sacrifice and general misery for those who attempt to follow them.
Pines and colleagues have even suggested that low salt diets may induce serious anxiety, hypochondriasis and invalidism.
In other words, people feel anxious and ill on low salt diets.


People then turn to sugar becoming dependant on sugar as a short term stress fix.

The negative effect of that coping mechanism would only be heightened on a low salt diet, leading to perpetual cycle of ‘medicating with sugar’ – and eventually, sugar addiction.


Salt healing for shock or trauma


Salt helps the body withstand accidents and other kinds of traumatic events.
Besides excessive bleeding (hemorrhage), we experience a loss of fluids in states of shock from burns and trauma.
This loss of body fluid happens without any water actually leaving the body, as injured regions draw fluid to speed the healing process, making that fluid unavailable to other areas.

Since sodium is the main determinant of body fluid status, patients experiencing these forms of shock require greater amounts of salt.
In fact, evidence suggests that a loss of salt is actually more dangerous than a loss of water, because it decreases the body’s ability to circulate blood around the body and reduces blood volume out of the heart more than water loss does.

Salt depletion, even in untraumatized animals, can lead to a form of peripheral vascular collapse that looks like traumatic shock.
This doesn’t happen with water depletion.

 

Salt for pregnancy and lactating

A low salt diet seems to act like a natural contraceptive in both men and women, causing reduced sex drive; reduced likelihood of getting pregnant; reduced litter size (in animals) and weight of infants; and increased erectile dysfunction, fatigue, sleep problems, and age at which women become fertile.

A mother’s salt status not only determines her ability to get pregnant but may control the future health of her infants.
Salt is so important for numerous functions in the body, a depletion of salt from either a lack of dietary intake (following the low salt recommendations), or salt loss (think of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy), not only worsen the health of the mother but can impair health of the growing child even into adulthood.

Pregnancy and lactation place increased nutritional demands on the mother in order to supply the baby with enough nutrients for proper growth and development – and salt is one of those nutrients. Salt restriction in pregnant or lactating mothers seem to increase the vulnerability of their children to multiple hazardous outcomes.

Unfortunately health organizations promote low salt diets, but it’s vital for pregnant and lactating women to increase their iodine.


I can’t stress enough to women in this circumstance to read more into having adequate salt.


Studies have been done on low salt and they have revealed more miscarriages, premature babies (born prior to 34 weeks), still births, perinatal and neonatal deaths, edema preeclampsia and bleeding.
And since there was less preeclampsia in those on the high salt diet, it was decided later that cases of preeclampsia would be treated with extra dietary salt!
28 women were diagnosed with this – 20 where given more salt, and the other 8 weren’t. All of the 20 women gave birth to healthy full term babies, the more salt the more quicker recovery.



Adding salt to a low carb diet

Most people that start a low carb diet (less than 50gms carbs per day) will lose between 4 – 8 gms sodium in ten days, but some may lose up to 20gms during this time. That’s why it’s a good idea to increase your sodium intake by at least 1 gm per day for the first 2 weeks of a low carb diet or by 2 gms per day in the first week.
You can do this by eating about 3 more large dill pickles, 5 large olives, add anchovies to your salads or capers, or more chicken bone broth per day.


Salt and Autism:

Autism is a complex disorder, with many likely causes and genetic links.
However, one theory holds that autism could be a disorder of overhydration, with low sodium levels in the blood depleting certain essential brain nutrients, such as taurine and glutamine.

This may be one reason why children with autistic disorders tend to have salt cravings.
Children with autism may benefit from consuming more salt, whereas low-salt diets may actually worsen their condition.
Oral rehydration salts may also be of benefit in autism.

So remember salt makes food taste great and salt restriction may lower blood pressure, but that isn’t a good thing because a reduction in blood pressure with salt restriction isn’t necessarily healthy.
It generally indicates problems with low blood volume or dehydration.

So while your blood pressure may be lower, your circulation is down, your organs are working harder, and the oxygen and nutrient supply to your organs is down.

Mix up your salt from himalayan and sea salt, use what you need from day to day, place some in your water when you’ve been sweating more, say after a workout or run, or if you job is very labour intensive.
It doesn’t have to be as salty as the bay/ocean, just enough to keep electrolytes up.


I thank you for reading this and I hope you feel comfortable in increasing salt in your diet.

Please try it for a week and take note on how your energy levels feel, how you recover from a training session and how you feel after a long day at work.

Here is some help to help your energy increase in my free ebook

To your health

Kerrie
#healthycoach

Professional health, fitness and wellbeing coach.