Why is salt bad for you?

Answer 1

• Salt is a compound of two elements, sodium and chloride. Sodium, along with other elements help balance the water in our bodies. It also helps muscles contract and helps send nerve impulses through our body. It is important to our health.

• A healthy diet should have sodium but presently, westernized diets (fast foods and packaged foods) contain a lot of sodium. We average about 5 - 6 grams a day and some sources report up to 10 grams a day. We should get no more than 2.4 grams a day or what is equal to 1 teaspoon of salt. In a nutshell, we need sodium but not too much.

• However, some people are very sensitive to sodium intake and it can increase blood pressure placing them at a higher risk for heart and blood vessel diseases. In such cases, they should use less or none. Sodium is also found naturally in foods and that will be enough for those people.

• The above point is correct about the daily grams of salt, however, most people measure it in milligrams. Don't take in more then 2,400 mg of salt per day. In other words, you can not ever eat McDonald's fries, burgers, chicken nuggets, chips, all the bad junk food because they use extra sodium to preserve it. Sodium is an excellent preservation agent and it's quite common in pork since pork decomposes more quickly then other meat.

• It would have been helpful to copy into this answer an article that dismisses the link between salt and high blood pressure (citing scientific studies). However, it is probably copyrighted. If you wish to read the article, please see the page link, further down this page, listed under Related Links.

Answer 2

If you get too much of it - yes. In a small amount - no. Trouble is that much of what we eat today has quite a lot of salt inside already to begin with, which makes it hard to maintain a balanced intake.


THE TRUTH:

British health advice (as an example) for years has been that anything more than 6mg daily (considerably less than average intake) is unhealthy and may lead to Heart disease. However:

1) 6mg is an arbitrary number settled for no particular reason other than that this was not high enough to measurably affect blood pressure, but just enough (without taking anything else into consideration, such as flushing sodium from your system with excess drinking or sweating) to provide the body's minimum requirements.

2) There is NO evidence that salt intake has a causal relationship with heart disease- this was an assumption that has (repeatedly) been proved wrong- controlling blood pressure as a defence against heart disease is like controlling your sneeze reflex as protection against the common cold.

In fact, several studies have concluded that the recommended intake should be up around 18mg daily. 27mg and above will lead to measurably higher blood pressure (which can logically increase the likelihood of stroke in those that are prone) but this has no causal link to heart disease whatsoever! Your food may have a lot of salt in it, but over-

Reducing your salt intake unnecessarily is a terrible idea; it can damage your health. In the case of the elderly or pregnant individuals, it can even be a risk to life!

Sodium is a very important element in your body- it is essential to neurological and intestinal health, as well as myriad other functions and processes in the body. It is used in the production of digestive juices, which are important not only for adequate uptake of nutrition, but for protection against infections that might be present in your food.

Your body is ingenious in design, and has a number of checks and balances in place for dealing with excess salt. Eat too much salt and you will urinate more- you just need to drink more to maintain hydration. Too little salt cannot be rectified, and your sodium levels will drop- low sodium levels can lead to neurological impairment and long-term organ damage, and there is no balancing mechanism for a lack of essential chemistry!

It is better to have a little too much salt in your diet than to have too little, and there is not an expert worth their salt who would argue otherwise in the face of substantial study results (and in the absence of a funding bias). Those that continue to argue that you need to actively reduce salt in your diet (without having studied your lifestyle and diet for a protracted period in great detail) are deluded by indoctrination and argue from a point of scientific ignorance.

Answer 3

Salt is not inherently bad. Certain amounts of the sodium found in salt is absolutely necessary for the health of all living things. Amoung other things, sodium helps regulate the body's water balance, and is a principle component of the system used by neurons to transmit electrical signals through the body. Salt becomes "bad" when we simply injest too much of it and it is this excess that has been linked to high blood pressure, ulcers, and other ills.

Answer 4

salt is a good question because if we didnt have salt then we couldn't live but too much salt could lead to other health problems suchs as high blood pressure

Answer 5

Sea Salt is not considered bad.

it contains salt and it contains other elements that we need.

It is supposed to be better than refined pure salt.

Regards.