“If you’re not careful, you could die suddenly … from the silent killer.”
With a warning like that from your doctor, who wouldn’t throw away every salt shaker in the house? Who wouldn’t run from any food with salt in it?
Scaring you away from salt has been the conventional wisdom in allopathic medicine for the past half-century. The doctor crowd, especially the cardiologist crew, has told you that eating salt means getting high blood pressure, which leads to heart disease.
But salt has never been bad in and of itself. If salt were bad for you, why would the first thing doctors do when you get admitted to the hospital be to immediately hook you up to an IV and run saline solution directly into your bloodstream? Why would our bodies have been created to naturally crave salty foods? Why would God have sabotaged our health by making something inherent to our bodies make us diseased?
On the contrary, our bodies know that salt means health. Salty foods usually mean animal products that are high in nutrition and will give us the sodium we need to live.
The average person has 250 grams of sodium distributed throughout his body. It’s plentiful in all body fluids. Sodium is the major mineral in plasma, making it abundant in the fluid part of blood. When your blood is the healthiest it can be, it’s slightly salty.
Sodium is also abundant in the fluids in and around the body’s cells.
The Harvard Health Letter puts it like this: “Without enough sodium, all these fluids would lose their water, causing dehydration, low blood pressure, and death.”
Today we have a lot more data on salt’s health benefits. They confirm my suspicions that God wouldn’t create us to naturally crave something that’s going to give us disease. It’s the stripped down, man-made form of salt that does that.
So mainstream medicine’s warnings, despite being misguided, are correct with respect to processed salt. The “sodium” in the foods you find in grocery stores isn’t anything like salt from natural sources. It’s chemically refined, bleached and is so devoid of the micronutrients and co-factors that salt is meant to have, like potassium and magnesium, that it’s almost not salt at all.
Studies are increasingly showing that low-salt diets not only do not work for heart health, but that staying away from salt can be a health disaster.
What type of salt? We are talking about many kinds of sea salt: Mediterranean, Himalayan, Pacific and many more. They all have slightly different tastes. You can choose whichever you like best. When shopping for sea salt, just be sure that it has not been refined or boiled to produce the crystals. The sea salt should be harvested and allowed to dry by evaporation in order to be labeled “natural.”