Salt series III: Evolutionary salt consumption
Over the last 8000 years, we had an extremely high salt intake. The Romans consumed up to 25g a day, and people in Sweden in the 1600 for example got up to 100g of salt a day! I know, sounds crazy, right? Sounds more like someone confused salt with sugar...
But where did all this salt come from? And why did it not cause damage to the body? Did we even need that much salt?
Let's look at where the salt comes from first. Salt is the most natural antimicrobial and preservative that is out there and we have been using it for thousands of years. Or did you hear of stone age refrigerators and middle age freezer cabinets? Me neither.
We had to heavily salt meat and veggies to extend their shelf life, to inhibit their spoiling over winter times. Otherwise we wouldn't really have anything to eat! There were no supermarkets and amazon prime food deliveries and pizza services.
Also, when we captured an animal, we wouldn't just eat the lean muscle tissue, we did not know about "low fat" then. We would consume the whole organism! The blood, the interstitial fluid, the organs, skin, bone marrow, all of which contain quite a bit of salt! Today we eat just red meat, ground beef and lean muscle tissue, and all these tissues are deficient in salt.
Also, tiger nuts have a lot of sodium, 330mg per handful, and the so-called nut cracker man was one of our ancestors who consumed these nuts. Insects too are high in salt, salt makes them move and fly faster. Maybe it also helps humans to perform better...? We will see ;)
We don't eat organ meats and even though eating insects is legal now (at least in Switzerland), we're far from eating them too. Dry hunks of muscle meat and vegetables don't really add to our modern salt intake. We mainly get it from processed food nowadays. And we don't get as much as our ancestors. Maybe between 5 and 10 grams a day. And it's basically just plain table salt, without any other minerals.
In the next article, I'm gonna talk about high salt intake and why it's not that bad for us.
