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.