Why does salt make everything taste better? Why do humans like it?
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Salt enhanced flavour. It doesn’t make everything taste better. If something tastes bad, adding salt will make it taste worse
Sodium – one of two substances needed for every single cell in our bodies. The other Potassium.
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Salt is super important! If you don’t have enough salt in your body you wont retain water, and you will dehydrate much quicker. If you get seriously low on salt, it might not matter how much water you drink, you’ll not be able to uptake any so you’ll still be dehydrated. So salt is super important for pretty much all animals. It’s why some coastal animals will occasionally drink a few sips from the ocean, or why animals love to congregate at salt licks.
Humans in particular also sweat. It’s a super rare ability all things considered. But sweat works so well in part because it contains salt, the salinity of your sweat allows your sweat to take more heat away when it evaporates. So human need for salt is more than most animals because of sweat.
Salt is also super important to our nervous system, where it acts as an electrolyte. When we get low on salt we lose control of our muscles, we cramp, we get weaker, not because our muscles are worse but because we cant control them. because our nerves arent working. Because they don’t have enough electrolytes to be properly conductive.
So yeah, salt is super important. And like most things critical to our survival, our bodies make it feel good. For us that means salty things taste good.
Salt is a vital ingredient for a functioning human body. Evolution steered us towards enjoying the taste of salt and salt happens to be very functional mechanically in food preservation and other things.
It both vital and convenient in how things work in us and how thing work outside of us. There was time where workers and soldiers were paid in salt when currency was low, since salt could be traded with anyone for anything do to its high demand.
Because it’s an incredibly important nutrient, and we would die fairly quickly without it. Salt is necessary for countless chemical processes in the body, especially in your muscles.
We evolved to enjoy the taste of things that helped us survive and pass on our genes, and that’s what salt does.
It’s also fairly rare to find in the wild. Many animals remember the locations of salt deposits and travel huge distances to get to them. This could be a salty pool, or even a salty rock face that animals will lick at for ages just to get tiny amounts of salt.
Like most ‘unhealthy’ things these days, the damage comes from us taking far too much of it. Salt is essential for your body to function, but when you pour it in every meal and snack, are already overweight, and don’t exercise, you’re asking for a heart attack.
Sodium (salt) is immensely important for driving action potentials and in the case of taste salty foods and added salts basically activate more taste receptors due to the sodium.
Many of these answers are not really answering the question. Some are just plain wrong.
Taste is a neurological process involving the stimulation of certain nerves. In this case, specialised cells on our taste buds.
Many different types of nerve cells, or neurons, become activated or excited by chemicals or compounds when they come into contact with receptor sites on the neuron cell’s surface. This kicks off the message relay, passing a message from one neuron to the next, until it gets to the brain, where we process and experience the stimulus. The stronger the initial stimulation of the first neuron, the more likely the message will get pushed all the way to the brain and be noticed. If it’s too “quiet”, not enough of the food to taste, or it’s bland, we may not taste something if it never reaches the threshold.
So what does this have to do with salt? Some neuron cells have what are called gated channels on their surface. These gates ‘open or close’ more depending on how much of a certain substance comes into contact.
For example, sodium or salt, can cause these ion gated channels to open up really wide, and as a result, the cells fire messages a lot faster/stronger, and creates a stronger flavour message. The chain reaction of the flavour message that follows on to the brain is therefore much “louder”.
Put simply, Salt works as an amplifier for neurons in your taste buds, so it literally enhances the neurological sensation of flavour.
Mind you, salt also has it’s own flavour that we find desirable and pleasant. So it works on two levels. Increasing the reception of flavour in the food (not necessarily changing the foods flavour itself), plus it adds the salty goodness we also like (which many have pointed out we have an evolutionary desire and requirement for).
This is also one of the reasons why putting salt on a wound hurts like hell. It causes neurons to fire their messages much more strongly because the cells receptor channels are much more open.
Edit: I want to postface that this certainly is not the single answer to the question. I’m no expert. Salt does all kinds of things at molecular and physiological levels – but thank you for the award!
basically your body has learned to love the things it needs badly and are super useful like fat sugar and salt. its your bodies way of saying that its very usefull for your body.
fortunately we have an overabundance of food now and even the poorest in my country can get fat on free meal services.
sadly this means we crave the things that are full of energy and fast to use and help our bodies immediately in hard times so following our bodies urges can easily lead to obesity.
your body doesnt know that every winter you still get to eat strawberries and oranges and steaks and fatty foods whether you live in the arctic or the desert.
your body doesnt know that water is available to you in mere seconds.
your body just wants to be ready for the worst and those urges drove your ancestors to pack on extra fat and keep well hydrated and to survive the hardest times
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