Why is it bad to eat more salt? Won’t that just make us more thirsty, and then the liquid rinses out the salt from the body?
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Because your body needs a certain concentration of salt for proper cellular function. If you ingest too much salt your body will retain more fluid to dilute the salt in your body. This will cause higher blood pressure because you have more fluid in the same volume.
A big thing is that chronic intake of excess salt can’t be easily flushed out by water – water flushes sodium (among other things) out of your body through sweating and peeing, but it can only do it so much, and only intermittently. So you wind up with big swings of sodium levels, rather than a straight decrease, and in the meantime, the excess salt is in your system. If you occasionally eat a high-salt meal and balance it out with some good hydration, it’s unlikely to cause a problem, but constantly high levels aren’t as easy to balance out.
But a bigger issue is that lots of people are both chronically eating too much sodium and also chronically dehydrated. The people over at /r/hydrohomies will tell you that most people just aren’t drinking enough water, so for many people, they’re creating the problem of excess salt without even mitigating it with ample hydration. Which leads to all of the negatives associated with high-sodium diets, from headaches to high blood pressure.
Salt will raise your blood pressure.
Eating more salt is ONLY bad if you already have high blood pressure. For people with normal or low blood pressure, salt restriction is not a thing.
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