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