Salt series IV: Surprising effects of a high salt diet and the kidney link
Isn't consuming a huge amount of salt causing damage?
No. Actually, the opposite is true. Decreasing salt intake too much can lead to death. As mentioned earlier, salt is an essential nutrient!
First, I will tell you were we have salt in our body. In fact, our blood is very salty! The concentration of salt compared to other minerals in our blood is the exact same as the one of the ocean!!! 90% of all minerals are sodium and chloride. Also, in our organs we store a lot of salt, and our bones are rich in minerals too. This is going to be very important later, so keep that in mind ;)
Our blood is filtered through the kidneys, and they can flush out 100g of salt, no problem. Through the filtration by the kidneys, blood salt is lost and it needs to be reabsorbed. In fact, 60 % of the energy expenditure of our kidneys is just for reabsorbing this "bad" salt! This is an indicator that we really NEED salt. It's vital.
Some people also blame high salt as a cause of kidney stones because of the enhanced calcium content in the urine. But a study in humans showed that giving more salt reduces the risk of kidney stone formation, because you drink more and your urine volume increases, so the actual concentration of calcium oxalate and things like that in urine goes down.
Consuming a lot of salt can be a relief for our kidneys, they say "Thank you, now I don't have to spend that much energy on reabsorbing salt because we have enough and it's not that bad if I just let go of some!"
But what if we do not have enough salt in our body? How do we actually lose salt when the kidneys try to reabsorb everything? You'll discover the consequences in the next article.
Read the next article here: How we lose salt and the body in a low salt state.
