“Salt is not Your Friend”

I must apologize for having jumped on board the pro-salt bandwagon with my wife for 4 years, and for being so slow to recognize the error and come out of it, starting about 2 years ago with the publication of The Copper Revolution.

Part of my error is that I avoided salt for most of my life, for health purposes, and I tended to be on the skinny side, and I’ve always wanted to gain weight. Salt is well known to be helpful for weight gain, so it aligned with my own goals.

Another reason for my error is that so many alternative health gurus promoted salt in recent years, starting with the book, “Your Body’s Many Cries for Water” in 2008, which promotes a bit of salt to help the body retain water. True, salt does help the body retain water, but in the wrong places; outside the cells where the sodium-potassium pump puts salt at concentrations at around 33 times more salt being outside the cell. Water flows towards minerals to dilute them, so when there is too much salt, the cells become dehydrated.

Then, the iodine doctors promoted salt for bromine detox. They admit it’s the chloride that helps detox bromine, and chlorides are also found in potassium chloride and magnesium chloride, so it does not have to be sodium chloride.

Another reason for my error is that my wife is also very intelligent, and she has also read from many health gurus, and I have learned many things from her. Within our first year of marriage, we counted up that we each learned about 30 major things from each other!!!

The University of Colorado Varsity Ski Team used to use salt flushes as a cleanse at the start of every ski season. So there are plenty of pro salt voices out there.

In my 4 year test of high salt, I recognized problems. But I made excuses. I lost my ability to do cardio and run. Well, I twisted my ankle. And I was getting older. And I was gaining weight with bodybuilding. And I gravitated towards teachers who taught against doing cardio, such as the Dorian Yates / Mike Mentzer / Arthur Jones schools of thought. I did not know that losing cardio ability was one of the negative side effects of a high salt consumption.

In fact, you can go back and read about how I was mystified about my “air hunger” in my introduction to my book, posted here:

Key excerpt: “I had a few months of labored breathing at levels from 30 mg to 70 mg [copper], when I first pushed it to those levels. Now, I no longer have that problem. I don’t know why. Was it detox? Was I taking too many other copper-blocking supplements just to be safe, and that was continuing to block my copper? Was it dehydration from getting too thirsty?”

I finally figured out this mystery. It was not from high copper, it was from the high salt that I was also experimenting with at the same time!

This is a major learning moment. Humans invent excuses. My book established and collected the research that shows that copper heals 200 different things in the body. This is not well known. Just as I did not realize that salt was the cause of my loss of cardio, the world does not recognize that copper is a major healing mineral. So they invent 200 or more other major excuses (that are not correct) as potential causes for all the health problems that could easily be fixed by increased copper supplementation.

Getting back to sodium/potassium. None of the pro-salt voices seem to acknowledge any of these basic facts:

  1. Most Americans consume 1500 mg to 10,000 mg more salt than is healthy.
  2. Salt is known to be responsible for many popular health problems, ranging from heart disease to kidney disease, to being fat, to edema, to nerve destruction, and on and on.
  3. Salt depletes potassium, and most Americans consume about 2000 mg to 3000 mg too little potassium.
  4. It is impossible to eat a zero-salt diet, the minimum is usually around 500 mg. Health recommendations say to consume from 500 mg salt to about 2000 mg of salt.
  5. In the debate over the “best forms” of salt, while people may acknowledge that refined sodium chloride is bad, or in other words, “pure” sodium chloride is bad, they fail to acknowledge that 90% of all other sodium chloride based salts, whether sea salt, or rock salt, are 90% sodium chloride. The rest is 95% magnesium chloride, which can be purchased separately, with all the other minerals at higher concentrations.
  6. While healing might happen with the addition of salt under some circumstances and at unspecified amounts, that is not the discussion at hand. The question is whether or not the addition of potassium, and the lowering of sodium, will improve the health of most Americans, rather than whether or not some salt might benefit some vegans who might not be getting enough salt.

And just as when I was mistaken about taking salt, when I did not realize it was causing the loss of my cardio ability… when the pro-salt voices do not acknowledge basic facts, that’s how you know they are wrong.

One of the recent implications of my research into salt and potassium is based on one of the claims, and I’ve been waiting to see if anyone caught it, and nobody has yet done so.

The Average American has about 150 grams of potassium in the body, and the research suggests we need about 250 grams. The implication is obvious. It will take a minimum of 100 grams of potassium intake to fix this discrepancy. If we consume 3 grams of potassium per day, it will take about 33 days to fix the depleted potassium, and that’s only if we are not kicking out that potassium with an excessively high salt intake as many Americans get.

One teaspoon of potassium Chloride provides 3 grams of potassium.

So, in order to test this claim, we would need to eat low salt, and do high potassium supplementation for about a month, OR MORE, in order to really understand what we are talking about. We have been at this now for over a year, but we continue to make mistakes and accidentally consume too much salt. As I discovered last month, a single medium Pizza has 4,500 mg of sodium! And I could feel the difference and the problem for about 3 days.

The advocacy of a single grain of sea salt, in the context of this reality, is literal insanity. Amounts matter.

It is important to both get the right directions and the right amounts.

If you attempt to travel from California to New York, but only travel at 1 mile per hour, it will take 2914 hours to get there, or 121 days. But if you travel by car and drive the speed limit, you can get there in 43 hours of road time. Advocating salt, in this analogy, is like driving backwards. You’ll never get there.

It seems I’m one of the slowest drivers on the roads these days. If everyone else likes to drive so fast, why are people not rushing to take the correct amounts of minerals to fix their basic health problems?

As always, make mineral changes slowly, and do your own research to confirm things. Don’t even trust me. You can’t. I’m admitting I made a mistake on this. I could be mistaken now. But I’m not likely going to be corrected by people who don’t understand basic numbers and facts. These days, I find baseless claims to be offensive.

Seriously. Don’t trust me. Go out, and confirm if what I’m saying is true or not. And then test it. Then share your own research. That’s how we learn from each other and refute the disinformation agents of the world.

Remember, while some are paid disinformation agents, others are genuinely tricked by them. I was. Be kind to people.

Now that Jennifer and I are really fixing this problem, we are enjoying running together nearly daily. Our upward spiral of health continues!