The truth about salt: From "invisible poison" to a proactive strategy for salt control.

II. On Salt

The average daily salt intake for adults in my country is currently around 12 grams.

The World Health Organization and my country previously recommended a healthy salt intake of no more than 6 grams per day, but now recommend no more than 5 grams per day.

This means that the average daily salt intake per person in my country is more than double the healthy daily intake, and the task ahead is still quite challenging.

A nationwide reduction in salt intake, given my country's dietary culture, is far more complex than simply relying on a single recommended daily intake.

The most important aspect is controlling salt intake.

The high-salt, strong-flavor diet, which has persisted for thousands of years, has a very strong inertia. Many people find dishes with slightly milder flavors taste bland and tasteless.

The key issue is how to get them to "relax" their restrictions and switch to a low-sodium diet without much resistance.

First, we need to explain the harmful mechanisms of high salt content in a more vivid and intuitive way so that the public can understand and perceive these mechanisms.

Secondly, we need to provide technical and lifestyle support for reducing salt levels.

Modern medicine believes that the main component of table salt is sodium chloride, and sodium is the main cation in extracellular fluid, playing a crucial role in regulating water balance.

Excessive sodium intake can increase water and sodium retention in the body, increase blood volume, and cause high blood pressure, heart failure, and other problems.

And this is only a small fraction of the known salt poisoning.

Salt can be considered an absolute "drug," but people are oblivious to its toxicity because they have been dependent on it for thousands of years.

In fact, salt poisoning is far more harmful to humans than modern drugs, both in terms of its scope of harm and the number of deaths.

However, this harm is not manifested in a way that directly kills people, but rather in the way that high salt content shortens human lifespan.

While people's understanding of the dangers of salt poisoning is becoming more and more profound, the actions taken to live a low-salt lifestyle are not keeping up.

When it comes to controlling salt intake, the total salt intake is a particularly important factor.

One common mistake we make unintentionally is that when we find the soup in our meal is too salty, we add some hot water and then drink the diluted soup. In terms of salt intake, this is the same as drinking it without adding water.

Even if the food is half as bland as before, if the amount of food consumed is doubled, the actual amount of salt intake is not reduced.

Conversely, even if you seem to be eating very salty food, if you eat very little of it, your actual salt intake is not high.

Salt control is not complicated in theory, but in the unprepared reality, if we are not vigilant enough, unexpected salt poisoning incidents can occur frequently.

Both fairy and demon, let's talk about salt.

Salt is a necessity for human life and an important strategic reserve. Without salt, humanity would face unimaginable circumstances.

In daily life, when people have a cold, fever, or various forms of shock and receive intravenous drips at the hospital, they mainly use saline solution.

When you sweat a lot during strenuous exercise, replenishing with lightly salted water can help you quickly restore your energy.

In fact, salt is a typical additive (sodium chloride), and it is a chemical additive; it's just that we've been used to it for a very long time.

The idea that salt deficiency leads to electrolyte imbalance and requires timely salt replenishment is similar to the mechanism by which giving a drug addict a suitable amount of drugs to restore their body to "normal" during withdrawal.

The human body's dependence on salt is deeply ingrained, and any deficiency will naturally lead to abnormalities. However, this is a problem that humans have created themselves, rather than a natural physiological need.

Human dependence on salt is not as significant as we may think.

In a few isolated areas of Africa, tribes still live well without consuming salt year-round.

Except for those who lived by the sea, near salt lakes and salt mines, most early humans probably did not eat salt because they could not obtain it.

The history of humankind consuming salt should begin when commodities could be widely circulated and exchanged, which can be estimated to be no more than three to five thousand years ago.

The discovery of tribes that do not eat salt is partly due to their isolation and lack of salt cover, but also likely due to their refusal to be covered by salt.

Looking at many large herbivorous mammals, they only occasionally lick up something salty, yet they are still incredibly strong.

The story of the "White-Haired Girl," which claims that her hair turned white because she couldn't eat salt, is likely an inaccurate misinformation, as people in salt-free tribes in Africa actually have very black hair.

It must be acknowledged that the harm caused by "salt poisoning" to humans is not as rapid and severe as that caused by drugs.

The harm of high salt intake to humans is a long-term, gradual, and cumulative process.

Fortunately, human dependence on salt is not as stubborn and intense as we imagine.

We can switch from high-salt to low-salt intake in just a few months, without experiencing the psychological craving that makes it difficult to reduce salt intake even when it is physiologically low.

Human "high salt dependence" is fully reversible.

Looking back at our early childhood, at least before the age of one, our food did not need to contain salt, nor should it contain salt.

There are no "policy obstacles" to eliminating high salinity; it all depends on our understanding and actions.

This is also the basis for the existence of the Wuyan tribe to this day.

Previously, it was believed that high-salt diets were mainly associated with high blood pressure. However, recent studies by domestic institutions have pointed out that high-salt diets are also a major cause of stomach cancer. High-salt diets can damage the gastric mucosa and its protective layer, making the gastric mucosa more susceptible to damage and attack by carcinogens.

Salt's water-retaining properties increase blood volume within blood vessels, which in turn helps raise blood pressure.

In the early days, when grassroots hospitals did not have blood banks, blood for surgery was often provided by registered blood donors in the surrounding area.

When a blood transfusion is needed from someone with a certain blood type, the donor should be notified in advance. However, the hospital found that these donors would drink more saline solution beforehand whenever they had time. As a result, the blood drawn at the hospital was significantly thinner, which reduced the effectiveness of transfusion per unit volume.

Therefore, when hospitals needed blood, they would make emergency calls to minimize the time donors had to drink saline solution. This gives us a clear understanding of the physical relationship between salt and blood volume.

Increased blood volume in blood vessels means that the heart has to increase its pumping power and increase blood pressure to ensure normal blood supply. This full-load operation of blood vessels for a long time, and the result of continuous stimulation and maintenance, is one of the key mechanisms by which high salt intake leads to high blood pressure.

High salt intake can accelerate blood vessel aging and harden the soft tissues surrounding the vessel walls, which is another cause of high blood pressure.

Another well-known function of salt is its preservative effect. Meat with added salt has a strong preservative effect, which can turn a corpse into a mummy that does not decompose for thousands of years, because salt prevents the natural metabolism of meat.

The water-binding properties of salt can also have a significant impact on weight loss and body control.

If you accidentally make the food too salty on a particular day or at a particular meal, or if you succumb to the temptation of eating more salty dishes at a restaurant, then even if the total amount and texture of the food you eat that day are exactly the same as usual, and your activity level is the same as usual, but you just drink more water, your weight will increase abnormally that day.

This is due to the water retention effect of excessive salt intake, which draws water from the body and soft tissues into the bloodstream, and the fact that high salt intake hinders metabolism (meaning that even if you can resist drinking more water, your weight will still increase due to reduced urination).

Of course, if salt intake returns to a low level in the following days, the weight will drop quickly after this water retention.

If high salt levels persist, the physicochemical processes will continue, and the water stored in the body will become the framework structure of new tissues.

It is important to understand the pros and cons of salt to avoid misattributing unexpected phenomena during weight loss or body control, and to avoid thinking that your body is acting strangely.

The most obvious example of salt poisoning is that a small handful of salt can instantly kill a bucket of live loaches.

Because killing live loaches is very troublesome, there is a common practice in my hometown: after draining the water from the bucket containing the live loaches, sprinkle in a small handful of salt, cover it, and after a while, you will hear a crackling sound, and the loaches will all be stunned and die.

Salt has a remarkable effect in neutralizing the highly toxic potassium cyanide. If an animal bites into potassium cyanide, applying salt to its teeth in time will ensure its safety (the scenes in movies and TV shows where biting into potassium cyanide and instantly dying are exaggerated).

Potassium cyanide is colloquially known as "three-step fall," meaning that a person bitten by it can still walk a few steps, while an animal bitten by it can walk even further.

Potassium cyanide is a rapidly acting neurotoxin, and salt can neutralize it, indicating that salt has some effect on the nervous system.

There is reason to believe that what we know so far about the dangers of high salt intake to humans is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

The World Health Organization recommends that humans consume 0.5 grams of sodium per day to meet their physiological needs, which translates to less than 0.6 grams of salt in our daily lives.

Scholars conducted comparative studies on salt intake and found that the proportion of people with high salt intake was much higher than that of people with low salt intake. The high-salt group in the sample generally consumed 15-20 grams of salt per day, while the low-salt group consumed 5-6 grams of salt per day.

I currently consume 3-4 grams of salt per day, and I rarely use pure salt when cooking. I only add some salty seasonings such as chicken essence and MSG. It seems I can still work harder.