Sodium

Sodium and Your Body - Nutrition Tips

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• published: 29 Aug 2011
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Sodium and Your Body - Nutrition Tips - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Sodium is one of those things that people have a lot of questions about, particularly my cardiovascular patients. Interesting thing about sodium is not everybody is as sensitive as we have kind of been led to believe. So we will start there is that some people may have a sensitivity to sodium with regards to high blood pressure, not everybody. S, that said, how much should you have in a day? No more than a tea spoon. That is the general recommendation for adults in the western world. It is no more than a tea spoon and that is extra salt. That is the extra salt you find in processed foods. That is the salt you put on at the dinner table. That is the salt you cook with. It is not naturally occurring salt that you may find, for example, in a piece of salmon. This is the extra salt that is get added during processing. So what do most people get? Most people get at least half again as much. So they are getting one of this plus half again as much and that is the average. So there are people that are not having any added salts at all and there are people that are having four and five times this. So, when you are looking at the back of that label, the label in most of those feeds are going to show you salt in milligrams. This is another one of those places where people get really confused. Well, what is a teaspoon and what is a milligram? A teaspoon is going to be roughly 2,300 mg. That is 2.3g. So when you are looking on the back of that label, you want to be sure that no single serving on that label is even a third of that especially if you are looking at eating your three meals or taking those three meals and dividing them into six. You want to be thinking about that in terms of divisions not in terms of 'Oh, I can have it because it is 2,000 mg in one serving.' No, it is 2,300 mg for the whole day. So that is something to keep in mind. Why is it important? People keep thinking 'Oh, sodium, I have got to avoid it. It is bad.' Well, there are some really, really important parts to what sodium does for our bodies. It is a really intrical layer in nerve transmission. It is a really important part of muscle contraction and relaxation. So, if you do not have enough sodium you cannot operate your body properly. It is also one of the key players-and this is where it comes into relationship with the potential for hypertension-it is a key player in water balance in the body. So whether you are keeping water or releasing water. A lot of people that are having the tendency to keep too much water, those are the people that have a tendency to be told to not go so high on the sodium. One of the things to keep in mind on a day to day level for your salt intake is that it is really important to have some, it is really important not to have too much and that is going to be really regulated by you. The other thing to keep in mind is the taste for salt changes. As you add salt, you need more to taste it. So you can easily get over habituated to the taste of salt. It is the same thing with sugar by the way. The more salt you have, the more salt you need to taste salt. So try backing off a bit and really paying attention and I think you will use less.