Here’s What Happens To Your Body If You Eat Too Much Salt

TABLE SALT


Healthy in moderation


Shardayyy via Flickr, CC by 2.0

Salt does more than just make your food taste more delicious—it’s important for your body to function properly. Sodium, one of the key ingredients in table salt, regulates blood flow and pressure, and helps transmit messages between nerves and muscle fibers. Chloride, the other chemical in table salt, aids in digestion. Foods in your diet need to have enough salt replenish these nutrients to keep you healthy.

But too much salt can be bad for you. Processed foods are packed with the stuff; restaurants add more salt to their food to make it taste better. As a result, more Americans are eating high-sodium diets (sometimes without even knowing it), which has some pretty drastic effects on their health.

When you consume too much sodium in your diet, your body holds extra water. That’s because the kidneys, which filter out waste from the blood, maintain a special ratio of electrolytes, such as sodium to potassium, to water.

More salt in the diet means the kidneys keep more water in the system. That can have lots of undesirable effects, such as edema (swelling in places like the hands, arms, feet, ankles, and legs); more fluid in general means more blood coursing through veins and arteries. Over time, that causes them to stiffen, which could lead to high blood pressure.

Over time...it could lead to high blood pressure.

You probably already know that salt can make you thirsty—that’s the body’s way of trying to correct that sodium-water ratio. Drinking lots of water can exacerbate issues of edema and blood pressure. But not drinking enough could force the body to draw water out of other cells, making you dehydrated.

People who consume high-sodium diets usually urinate more because of all the excess water. Every time you urinate, your body loses calcium, the mineral that, among other things, makes strong bones and teeth; urinate too often and the body could lose too much calcium, weakening bones and exacerbating osteoporosis.

Read More at:

https://www.popsci.com/heres-what-happens-to-your-body-if-you-eat-too-much-salt

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