Why You Need More Salt in Your Diet

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hey welcome everyone i have a very special  guest today um on a book that i wanted to actually two books that i want to interview this  Dr. James DiNicolantonio so welcome thanks for having me on dr berg appreciate it absolutely  i’m guessing that’s an italian name right yes it is indeed just a wild guess so listen  um i want to just dive right in um you wrote a very fascinating book actually too i want  to cover the first one first called the salt fix and that’s such a confusing topic to so many  people and there’s a lot of false information so i want to pick your brain if you don’t mind and get  some data on this we’ve all been told that salt is bad for us and it causes high blood pressure etc  etc um give us some basics on what you found with salt sure well i think um even back from an  evolutionary perspective in the book i talk about this we’ve had this preconceived notion  that our ancestors ate this very low salt diet um and these are based on calculations  um simply looking at um land muscle meat so not aquatic vegetation or aquatic animals  and not um nose to towel where we would have consumed the salty blood and interstitial fluid  but simply looking at a piece of meat and so those calculations had put our paleolithic  ancestors are consuming about 500 milligrams of sodium per day but if you look at it from  the perspective of consuming nose to tail and the fact that we would actually follow animals  to salt licks and we could consume salt directly that that’s just a complete falsehood and  a very low estimation of how much salt we would have consumed so yeah uh you had a question  potentially i was just gonna say like uh i think what we’re told is um a certain amount like how  much what what from your viewpoint what is the um the recommended amount of salt um i guess we  can do it in teaspoons it’d be easier or a half a teaspoon or teaspoon well so the american  heart association essentially recommends less than a half of a teaspoon of salt per day however  they also recommend that we should be exercising an hour per day and we actually lose about a  half a teaspoon of salt per hour of exercise through sweat um and then you have the us dietary  guidelines that recommend less than a teaspoon of salt per day now from actually all the  prospective studies the lowest risk of death or heart attacks is actually a consuming  about one and a half teaspoons of salt per day or about you know 3. 4 grams of sodium is  essentially where the lowest rates of mortality cardiovascular disease things like that  actually set and not to mention the other big recommendation is to drink a ton of water right  you start drinking more water you have low salts then you develop hyponatremia and you have  a whole series of issues with that alone you’re exercising and sweating right and i mean  most of us do are consuming caffeine and i didn’t realize up until a couple years ago how actually  caffeine the reason why it causes diuresis is because it causes us to lose sodium and chloride  so it is it causes natural recess so the typical loss of sodium from four cups of coffee is a half  a teaspoon of salt or about 1200 milligrams of sodium wow i didn’t know that that’s fascinating  so you know all of us are the our java junkies now are consuming caffeinated sports beverages and it  that is slowly depleting you of both sodium and actually even more chloride for some reason  caffeine in coffee is a tremendous chloride waster about even two times higher than the  amount of sodium we lose so the typical athlete you know who sweats you know half a teaspoon of  salt out per hour they’re also losing iodine too through swat so you typically lose about 50 to  100 micrograms of iodine per hour of exercise and so if you’re constantly sweating out salt  in iodine and you’re never replacing those things that can lead to hypothyroidism low  salt hyponatremia poor exercise talents wow now um if you’re let’s say you’re a football  player and it’s it’s summer and you’re you’re in practice i’ve heard that um if you’re doing  some type of intense exercise you could lose up to six grams of salt or at least sodium per per i  guess workout that’s like an ungodly amount of loss of electrolyte that’s true so in in the salt  fix i actually do cite one study it was um soccer players in practice in the heat and the goal i  believe it was the goalie lost 6 000 milligrams of sodium in the one hour of practice and i think the  average loss was about 1800 milligrams of sodium per hour but certain individuals can lose you know  six grams or six thousand milligrams excuse me six grams of sodium wow now as far as what  people um should be eating and they’re let’s say they’re concerned about um well there’s  their doctor said there’s certain studies what does the actual now you mentioned  the studies that say well if you consume at one and a half teaspoons then you start to  have issues is that true or just incomplete data i think um so we have to look at salt which  is sodium and chloride from the perspective of overall dietary intake because if you consume  a good amount of potassium bicarbonate fruits vegetables citrate things that are increasing  your alkalinity you can handle and tolerate much higher levels of salt that’s what that’s what i  was going to bring up yeah it’s a huge it’s so people that are salt sensitive typically a are  either insulin resistant and you fix their you know high insulin levels and they they’re no  longer self-sensitive so it’s really they’re sugar-sensitive in a way these people it’s just  showing up as salt sensitivity or you increase their potassium magnesium and bicarbonate forming  substances either potassium citrate or bicarbonate and you’re going to be able to virtually  eliminate salt sensitivity in probably 99 people that’s just a point that i want to bring up  because i found that um the great majority of the population have no idea that they the quantity of  potassium need to need so they’re usually going to be under doing it especially if they’re you know  an average american consumes like one and a half cups of greens and so now we’re going to get low  potassium now you’re going to have more tendency to be more sensitive to sodium just because  that ratio is not there so you can’t buffer it so i guess they didn’t play in they didn’t talk  about that or study that variable uh with people i don’t know if they looked at the potassium  levels when they checked the sensitivity to salt at all maybe they didn’t i don’t know right  and well that’s that’s the thing and it’s very difficult to actually find studies testing this  out and i do mention a couple in the sulfix where they actually took these high salt consuming  japanese people who had high blood pressure they were consuming 15 grams of salt so about twice  what we typically consume or most people only consume about 8 grams of salt per day in the  united states and they decided to raise their potassium intake from 3 grams to 7 grams  and they kept the high salt intake the same and it significantly reduced blood pressure  essentially to a normotensive state or normal blood pressure so it goes to show you  you can consume a very high salt diet as long as you get the potassium level  fairly high got it um now as far as what you recommend um that an average consumer should  consume how much salt should they be consuming if someone is eating a whole food diet right so  they’re not consuming these high refined carbs and sugars then really that one and a half teaspoons  is perfect for someone because when you start going below three grams of sodium you start to  see the increases in the sodium retaining stress hormones aldosterone renin angiotensin ii that  is indicating that your body is in a stressed out state to retain the salt and so you always want  to keep the body in homeostasis and that starts to separate fro