10 Facts about dietary sodium (salt) you may not know.

1) Babies are designed to drink human breast milk. The sodium content of human breast milk is very low.

2) Almost all natural foods contain very little dietary salt.

3) Even today only 25% of all the salt you eat was added by you. The rest was added before you bought the food in tins or packets or by the restaurant. Unless you know to ask or check you often have no idea how much salt is in that food.

4) Primitive societies that eat little salt do not have high blood pressure (hypertension) , and their pressure does not rise with age.

5) Primitive societies  that do eat large amounts of salt do have hypertension and as every body gets older their pressure increases.

6) In ‘modern’ western societies the incidence of blood pressure rises with age and about 50% of the over 60 year olds have hypertension.

7) Once you have hypertension restricting your salt intake has a significant but small effect on reducing your blood pressure. Best start before you get blood pressure especially if you have a family history.

The effect of a high salt intake can be reduced somewhat by eating a lot of high potassium foods such as fruits and vegatables

9) A high salt intake is associated with an increased calcium loss in the kidneys: that predisposes to osteoporosis.

10) Many restaurant and manufactured meals can have a higher sodium concentration than that of sea-water.

Tagged as: Health, Hypertension, Salt, Sodium chloride