Understanding Salt in your diet
Salt, known as Sodium Chloride officially, is often over looked in terms of how much we should be taking in, what’s the recommended amount and what side effects are there if we take in too much or too little salt in our diets.
Salt is very common place these days from home baking and cooking to eating out and food stuffs bought in shops.
For a lot of home bakers that use bicarbonate of soda, this is essentially salt or at least a very large portion of it. Same goes for a lot of processed meats that are packaged for sale and on display at shops which use sodium nitrate as part of their preservative. So unknown to a lot of us we are taking in extra salt and paying it little attention.
70% of our daily salt intake comes from processed foods, takeaways or eating out at restaurants. 20% is from salt that we add in ourselves at home be it through cooking or just adding salt at meal times and the last 10-15% is salt that occurs naturally in food.
Sodium listed in ingredients is not the same quantity as salt. For example if you see 1g of sodium listed, this is actually 2.5g of salt, you multiply the sodium amount by 2.5 so be careful not to take them as the same value when looking at intake amounts below.
This is a video we recorded live on our facebook page where we go through all things salt, how much we should be taking in and the side effects of it.
What do we need salt for?
The body needs salt to maintain a healthy heart, a healthy liver, healthy kidneys, prevent low blood pressure and to help with the muscle and nerve function in the body. It also helps to balance the fluids in the body. So it is a crucial part to operating a healthy and balanced body. But there is a fine line between optimal salt intake, too little and too much.
How much salt is recommended?
The recommended daily intake of salt is 4g to maintain a healthy fluid balance in the body, the muscle and nerve function and all the other important areas mentioned above. The maximum recommended daily salt intake should not exceed 6g of salt. When we look at what 6g of salt looks like, it would fill your average teaspoon. That’s not a lot when you look at the size of it but it’s a lot in terms of salt so it should be sinking in now how easily salt can get in to the diet but also the effects of it, if that small amount is the high end of what we should be taking in.
The reality of how much we really take in though is closer to 9g or 10g so that’s 2.5 times where we should be at and men are the main culprits of those numbers
What happens if the salt intake is too low or too high?
If your salt intake is too low you could experience some symptoms like dizziness, muscle twitches, and low blood pressure. And because your salt levels can affect brain activity as well you can feel lethargic or sluggish if your levels are low.
On the other side of that then is if you take in too much salt the biggest concern is high blood pressure. Over time with elevated blood pressure you run a higher risk of heart attack and stroke. According to the Irish Heart Foundation if everyone in Ireland halved the amount of salt they were taking in, assuming a maximum of 6g, so basically if everyone just took in 3g per day it would prevent 900 deaths per year from heart attack and stroke related deaths. That is crazy.
Not only is high blood pressure a side effect but excess salt can also lead to fluid retention and in some instances, particularly for women, can cause swelling in the ankles and feeling bloated.
One of the biggest culprits of salt in our diets are some packeted foods like powdered soup packets that you pour into a cup. Did you know that one cup of soup can contain as much salt as two cups of seawater and seawater is salty! In fact, one cup of seawater contains about 9g of salt so the average cup of soup can contain upto 18g which is super high.
Is there a difference between Himalayan Salt and Table salt
Pink himalayan salt calm to fame a number of years ago with praise of being super good for you but if we look a little deeper into why that may be there may not be much difference after all.
In terms of salt content there is very little between this, garlic salt or other types of salt and your common table salt. The big difference is that the himalayan salt is hand mined so it goes throught less processing than table salt and so has a lot more minerals in it but the overall intake remains the same, so while it may be better quality it’s not like you can go off and start eating table spoons of it
Life is about balance, so let’s keep our salt intake under control and we won’t have to remove it completely
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