Bruce, what is the relationship between salt intake and sweating?

I like my salt, but I also lose a lot of salt just about every day, from extensive sweating due to a good hard hike or run most days and bushwalking most weekends. My blood pressure is excellent and always has been.

Can salt have negative effects such as contributing to the hardening of your arteries and hence to an increased likelihood of heart attack or stroke, while outwardly appearing to present no problem if your blood pressure remains good?

If you sweat a lot, how do you know how much salt is too much?

Reducing salt consumption is an important factor in reducing blood pressure. Perhaps even more important is switching the salt you do use from the highly refined table salt to naturally harvested salts full of beneficial minerals.

Mind you, the cause of 90% of high blood pressure is 'unknown'. But there is still lot you can do to reduce it - like eating dark chocolate and drinking a glass of red wine everyday, after your 30 minute walk outside.

Best regards,
Simon Foster
http://highbloodpressurebegone.com

Bruce, I just saw you on Food Investigators on SBS, talking about salt. Good program.

http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/foodinvestigators/episodes/detail/episode/66

However, I still have no idea as to what difference a good regular sweat might have on one’s salt intake or the negative effects thereof.

Perhaps you could advise me Simon Foster (please see my post above for further info).

I don’t get it. The author is either not monitoring his thread or not interested in answering my questions, or unable to answer them!

Simon Foster has transferred my post to the ‘High blood pressure be gone’ blog and responded to it directly….but then amazingly completely failed to address the questions! (same response there as posted on OLO)

Hi, to answer the questions that I think were directed to me ...

I was diagnosed with extreme hypertension with no apparent cause (195 / 122).

No one has to take prescription medication. It's always a choice. (At least it is in this country - Wales).

I have lowered my blood pressure using alternative and natural methods. But the journey is not over and my levels are still dropping (between 125 - 145 at present).

I intend posting information on good eating for hypertension when I get the time (probably starting next week).

Too much salt is not good. Common table salt is not good. The right amount of good salt is good.

Regards,
Simon Foster
http://highbloodpressurebegone.com

Hi All

Apologies for not responding to your comments earlier:

1. Sweating - if you sweat a lot your body pretty soon reduces the amount of salt in your sweat (so you probably don't lose a lot of salt that way). Unless you are an extreme athlete it is very unlikely that you need to take extra salt to control for salt losses. The physical activity you do working up the sweat will be the main reason why you will get health benefits. Not the salt loss.

2. How does salt cause harm - the main reason why salt causes adverse effects appear to be through the impact it has on your blood pressure. Whether there are effects independent of the blood pressure rise is not entirely clear although there is a strong link between excess salt consumption and stomach cancer.

3. Sea salt - I am afraid to say that sea salt is almost entirely sodiuum chloride and just as bad for you as other types of salt. If you must eat salt then use a high potassium, low sodium salt substitute. The potassium in iot will actually help lower your blood pressure. And teh reduced sodium content will stop it pushing your blood pressure up as much as it otherwise would.

4. The causes of high blood pressure - it is a fallacy that the cause of 90% of high blood pressure is unknown. This comes from the old medical way of thinking of things where lifestyle exposures such as salt, overweight and physical inactivity were not considered as causes. High blood pressure can be explained by lifestyle factors for almost everyone that suffers from it. The other 10% will have some unusual medical cause most often associated with some aspect of kidney function.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

Bruce

Thanks Bruce. Appreciated.

It seems that it is safe for me to assume that even though I probably have a fair bit more than the recommended daily intake of salt, there is nothing significant to worry about, given my exercise regime, considerable regular salt loss and ongoing excellent blood pressure, right up into my fifties.

Hi Ludwig,

Your comments about how your somewhat higher-than-normal salt intake is probably okay, because of high sweat loss through exercise, and how you like your salt, remind me of myself in the days when I was a State-level distance athlete. Oddly enough in that era, despite our habit of loading up the night before a race with salted fish & chips, pizza etc, I used to perform poorly in very hot conditions. I also used to have a very salty sweat.

For the last 15 years I have followed a low-salt diet which has provided brilliant drug-free treatment for Meniere's syndrome. As a considerable side-benefit my BP has dropped from around 130/90 to (at last reading) 100/60 (my age is 61). My sweat is no longer salty and when doing a solid few k's under very hot conditions I find my heat tolerance is noticeably better than it was before. I only wish I knew 30 years ago what I know now. This includes the fact that when your body has to excrete a lot of salt it also has to excrete a lot of potassium, which for a distance athlete or bushwalker is bad news. Rather than loading up on salt, we are far better off cutting down on salt and loading up on potassium-rich fruit & vegs.

You'll find comprehensive discussion of all this in Dr Trevor Beard's book Salt Matters (published by Hachette/Livre)and at a more technical level in Salt, Diet & Health: Neptune's Poisoned Chalice by G.A. MacGregor & H.E. de Wardener (University of London), which was published by Cambridge University Press 10 years ago - try Abebooks.com to locate a secondhand copy.

Cheers,

Ricardo

Thanks Ricardo.

“Rather than loading up on salt, we are far better off cutting down on salt and loading up on potassium-rich fruit & vegs.”

For sure. I’ve always been right into a good range of vegies. However, if we are sweating a lot, I presume we still need a considerably larger dose of sodium chloride than the recommended daily intake.

What are the problems with having too little sodium, or potassium, in your system for an extended period of time?

To re-iterate, you almost certainly don't need to worry about replacing salt lost through sweating unless you are an extreme athlete. The human body has spent millions of years perfecting ways of retaining sodium because there used to be hardly any in the diet. For the last five thousand years we have been overloaded with dietary salt but the body hasn't had time to evolve to address this and still fiercely protects against salt loss. With resultant chronic high blood pressure for most of the population. Regular exercise is unlikely to be a good way of loosing excess salt although the exercise will be good for you in other ways. As you note, fresh fruits and vegetables, low intake of saturated fat, low intake of salt and not getting obese are the dietary fundamentals we should target. Cheers Bruce

I reduced from 180/120 to 120/80, by only cutting out salt. I have no salt bread from IGA ( 7mg per 100g), rather than normal bread which varies from say 120 to 650 mg per 100g. No salt tomato paste actually tastes salty and I use heaps of spices and olive oil instead of margarine or butter. A no salt diet gives you the the sweet subtle flavours of food, rather than a salt masking of flavours. Cheers