Baroness Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa under the pen name Isak Dinesen, also wrote, “The cure for anything is salt water, sweat, tears or the sea.” I generally like the sentiment of this quote but I don’t think she was thinking about curing high blood pressure.
According to the CDC, about half of Americans have hypertension and only about a quarter of those keep their blood pressure problems safely under control. To help bring blood pressures back in line, the American Dietetic Association recommends people consume less than about 1500mg of salt per day.
That can be tough when salt is in everything we eat, whether it be processed or naturally occurring, but keeping a check on the salt is important because it has a big influence on your blood pressure.
Your body automatically works to keep the concentration of electrolytes (like salt) in your blood near constant, so when you eat a lot of salt your body has to store extra water in order to dilute the salt back to the proper concentration. The extra water increases your blood volume which, in turn, increases your blood pressure. When you cut down on your salt consumption, your body sheds some of the extra water to keep salt concentration constant, and your blood pressure goes back down.
Patients often ask me, “What about sea salt?” Sea salt is still sodium chloride just like regular table salt, and it will still make you retain fluid and raise your blood pressure, but it also contains traces of other electrolytes like magnesium, potassium and iron. Sea salt can be a good way to get those trace elements that you need, and because of those trace elements, sea salt can taste saltier than regular salt so you might feel like you can eat less.
So what is the deal with Iodized salt? Since the 1980s, iodide has been added to table salt because it prevents goiter (enlarged thyroid), but did you know that preventing iodine deficiency also enhances the average intelligence of the population?
And how about MSG? Monosodium glutamate is not actually a kind of salt but it is a flavor enhancer so it makes salt taste saltier and fat taste better, etc. For that reason it is often added to restaurant foods and processed store bought foods. The FDA considers MSG to be “generally safe,” but it has been linked to a whole host of symptoms like headache, flushing, sweats, and chest pain. In fact, there is even a common name for this collection of symptoms — Chinese Food Syndrome.
No discussion of salt would be complete without mentioning salt substitutes. The lowdown on these is that many of them contain potassium instead of sodium.
Potassium tastes somewhat salty so you can use it to cut down on the amount of actual sodium chloride that you eat, but if you get too much potassium it can throw your heart dangerously out of whack so if the doctor tells you to cut back on salt, ask them if a salt substitute would be OK for you.
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Dr. Patrick Parker is the Director of the Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation program at the Cardiovascular Institute of Mississippi in McComb. Visit RoamingParkers.com to see more of what he does to stay fit, well and healthy.
