Is SALT BAD For You? (Real Doctor Reviews The TRUTH)

hello health champions a lot of you have asked about salt is salt bad for you is

salt good for you it's been called an essential nutrient and it's been called

a poison that causes disease that you need to avoid so today we're going to

talk about it a little bit more depth so that you understand what salt does in

the body and also how the body processes salt because that is going to be

critical in your understanding about how much you can eat or not coming right up

hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss

anything but when we talk about salt we usually refer to sodium chloride and

it's one of the most abundant minerals on the planet there's almost a hundred

pounds of sea salt per ton of ocean that's a lot of salt because there's a

lot of ocean when we look in the body then calcium is the dominant mineral in

the solid tissue potassium is the dominant mineral in intracellular

compartments and sodium is the dominant mineral in extracellular fluid so

everything that is bloodstream and everything outside of the cell that's

liquid sodium is by far the dominant mineral and because of that it helps

regulate body fluids it's critical for the body to be able to regulate fluid

balance in the body so without sodium we couldn't send

signals the way that the body sends signals is that there's a lot of sodium

outside the cell and when the body needs to send a signal it has sodium rush into

the cell and it changes the resting membrane potential of nerve membranes of

nerve cell membranes that's how the body creates signals so

without sodium we couldn't do that properly like I said it regulates fluid

balance it's only with enough sodium that we can create a proper blood

pressure and when we have enough we can get rid of the excess and we can retain

the amount that we need so the biggest reason that salt has a bad reputation is

that it's been associated with high blood pressure but they're only giving

you a small part of the picture so here's the picture that they give you

and this is correct you start with normal blood pressure of

let's say 120 over 80 and then you take in a lot of sodium you eat a lot of salt

and now that salt is going to pull water to it that's what salt does water and

salt follow each other through osmosis so with a lot of salt in your

bloodstream the volume is going to pull water to it and the total blood volume

the liquid fluid volume of your blood increases and a larger volume is going

to exert a higher pressure on your blood vessels and your heart has to work

harder and that's a problem but and then you end up with a higher blood pressure

but that's the only part of the story they tell you they stop right there as

if your body had no ability to regulate these things as if it had no ability to

increase or decrease water or salt so what happens is something called

pressure diuresis and your kidneys filter fluid so any excess fluid is

going to create an additional pressure on the membranes on the filters in the

kidneys and anytime you have extra fluid it's going to push its way out

through the kidneys and your body is gonna return to normal blood pressure

and once you push that fluid out it's going to take this extra sodium with it

in this mechanism of diuresis which is getting rid

water through extra pressure which also is known as nature rhesus because it

takes out the natrium or the sodium they kind of go together salt and water

follow each other this is by far the dominant mechanism in regulating blood

pressure and it is so powerful that you could reduce a normal salt intake by ten

times where you could increase it by ten times and you would only see a very

slight variation in the volume of the extracellular fluid and of the blood the

body is so good at regulating this that very very large changes will have very

little effect on the blood pressure and the fluid volume in the body but in

order to really understand what's going on we need to start thinking about the

kidney the way it really works so most people think that the kidneys only

filter things out and that is the smallest portion of what they do so

here's what I mean by that if you have a certain amount of water in the body

that's going to be filtered out through the kidneys but it's also going to be

reabsorbed through the kidneys so the amount that you filter out is more than

a hundred times more than what you're going to lose through the urine about a

hundred and eighty liters every day of fluid is pushed out through the kidneys

but water is so precious that we're going to reabsorb a hundred and seventy

nine liters out of that and what ends up in the toilet is about one liter so the

body pushes fluid out and it reabsorbs about ninety nine point four percent of

that fluid and we always say that the body is really smart and that seems like

a lot of extra work right you push all that fluid out and then you have to

bring it back in that's a lot of work yes it is so why does the body do the

because it allows the body to sift and get rid of the bad stuff and keep the

good stuff so it filters out all of the bad stuff and all of the good stuff and

then it brings back in the good and when it circulates this fluid volume so you

have somewhere around three liters of liquid of plasma you're actually

recycling you're passing that water in and out of the kidney you you filter it

out and you reabsorb it 60 times per day and that exchange that frequency allows

the kidneys to keep your fluids clean that's how you get rid of the junk and

retain the good stuff so glucose for example is very precious the body

maintains a certain glucose level for a reason and it's not supposed to get into

the urine and therefore normally if you have a normal blood sugar level about a

hundred and eighty grams are going to get filtered out and a hundred and

eighty grams are gonna get reabsorbed the body is gonna spend energy bringing

it back in so that one hundred percent of it is reabsorbed salt is equally

precious so if you eat three grams of sodium per day then your kidneys are

going to filter out five hundred and forty grams even though you don't even

have that much sodium in your bloodstream because it goes around sixty

times the total amount filtered is five hundred and forty grams over a pound a

day over half a kilo per day gets filtered out but it's so precious that

537 grams get reabsorbed back and the three grams that you ate get secreted so

that we maintain a balance in the body the goal of the body is to maintain

equilibrium or homeostasis so however much you put

in is the amount that the body has to get rid of so GFR here means glomerular

filtration rate and you might see that on your blood work and that is the

amount of fluids that the kidneys filter out on your test if you see it it needs

to be above 90 and it's on your test as EGFR estimated glomerular filtration

rate and if you have a number of EGFR over 90 on your blood test then you

don't have to worry about salt because your body has the ability to regulate

these things and get rid of the excess so overall your body spends energy it

uses up resources it uses up its ATP energy currency to bring back ninety

nine point four percent of the sodium that it filters out that doesn't sound

like a bad thing to me that doesn't sound like salt is evil if if salt was

hurting the body I think the body would have figured out a way just to kind of

let that go instead of spending energy to reabsorb it another precious mineral

is calcium which is reabsorbed at about 99% potassium is not as precious but

it's a little different because most of it is inside the cells where there is

very little turnover so the extracellular potassium has a pretty

high turnover and we're replenishing it through the diet but that's why we need

a good amount of potassium every day normally we secrete about twelve percent

of the potassium every day we reabsorb eighty eight

percent but if we're on a diet that's extremely low in potassium then we could

reabsorb as much as 99% of the potassium as well so the body has all these

different mechanisms it has a lot of flexibility a lot of leeway in deciding

how much it wants to keep or how much it wants to get rid of it has an

enormous flexibility but then we get to the stuff that the body doesn't want to

keep so one of the main waste product is called urea and even though it's a bad

thing that we don't want it doesn't get rid of a hundred percent every time

through but every time it runs through it gets rid of about fifty percent and

then there's some other things like creatinine which is another waste

product that does not get reabsorbed at all so 100 percent of creatinine gets

secreted gets expelled so zero percent is reabsorbed so let's say that you went

on a high sodium diet and you ate 10 grams of sodium every day and which is

like 4 teaspoons because sodium is only about half of the weight of the salt the

other half is chloride then your kidneys would still filter the same say five

hundred and forty grams of sodium it would push that much out through the

filter every day and it would bring back what it needed which in this case would

be five hundred and thirty so it would get rid of ten grams and now that

percentage would be down from 99 point four but your body still even with

eating all that salt it's still going to reabsorb over 98% of all the salt that

it filters out let's say you went on a really low sodium diet you've restricted

to eat hardly any added salt you get all the way down to one gram of sodium well

now you're basically lacking sodium and your body is going to do everything it

needs to bring it back it's going to reabsorb 539 gram it's going to waste

one gram and now that reabsorb some percentage is close to a hundred percent

so if you eat more your body gets rid of more if you eat less your body reabsorb

some more your body has a very extensive mechanisms in place to regular

these things so what about the research well the research is very very

inconclusive for every study that says that there is a relationship between

high sodium and high blood pressure there is another one or several that

says we couldn't find any correlation whatsoever and it all depends on how the

studies are done and if they are only observing a relationship or if they're

doing a double-blind study and how well they controlling all the variables so

for the most part their observational studies and that means they ask people

how much salt do you eat what type of foods do you eat and of course the

people that eat the most sodium are also the ones who are eating the most junk

food and the most fast food and the most hamburgers and now they're not just

getting salt they're getting sugar and they're getting starch and they're

getting chemicals and they're getting omega-6 fats so what really drives this

is if something interferes with the mechanisms that regulate blood pressure

there are some things that will change the glomerular filtration rate and those

are primarily hormones so if you have stress then your body says we need more

blood pressure so now it's going to tell the kidneys don't filter out so much and

that stress is originated by your sympathetic nervous system your

fight/flight system and it tells the adrenal glands your stress response

glands to release epinephrine norepinephrine and epinephrine those are

stress hormones that cause vasoconstriction and when they

vasoconstrict they raise blood pressure but at the same time they're tightening

up the filter in the kidneys because when the body wants more blood pressure

you don't want to push all that extra pressure you don't want that pressure to

push the fluid out through the kidneys and bring it back to normal that would

the purpose so when we have stress then the kidneys closed down temporarily if

it's a short term stress or if it's a long term stress now we've kind of

tightened up the kidneys on a chronic basis another hormone that effects the

glomerular filtration rate and sodium retention is insulin so when they do a

study and they ask people what they eat I bet anything that most of the time

these people also are insulin resistant and they're moving into metabolic

syndrome and now we know that these are very closely associated with high blood

pressure but it's not the sodium per se it's the fact that they have a hormonal

situation that tightens up and reduces that kidney filtration rate so does that

mean that everyone should eat as much salt as they want no because if your

kidneys are compromised if you have hormonal imbalances if you have stress

now your kidneys don't have the full capacity to regulate the way they're

supposed to and now sodium could make it worse

because if your body has lost the ability to regulate and now you're

pushing in extra salt now that will potentially not every time but it has

the chance of raising blood pressure so in those people reducing sodium can be

beneficial for blood pressure but it doesn't mean that salt or sodium causes

high blood pressure okay it can exacerbate a pre-existing condition but

if your body is healthy and it has the ability to regulate it then sodium is a

non-issue use as much salt as you like use put salt on the food as long as it

tastes good and when it tastes too salty then you cut back and I recommend that

you're using a natural salt I think you should

use a sea salt or a pink salt why is that not to reduce sodium all right

there's still about ninety seven point five percent sodium chloride in sea salt

and pink salt versus table salt which is a hundred percent sodium chloride so

there's not a big difference as far as the sodium content what matters is the

other two and a half percent because we have some minerals that we need a lot of

and we have a bunch of them 50 60 different minerals that we need

tiny tiny tiny amounts of and those are what are mixed in to the other two and a

half percent so when you're using a sea salt or a pink salt you're getting more

than eighty different trace minerals whereas in table salt you're only

getting one mineral you're getting sodium chloride that's it and it's also

a very refined product so I would suggest don't use the table salt it does

have the benefit of iodine and on a worldwide scale that has been beneficial

in reducing thyroid disease and goiter because some areas the soil is deficient

in iodine but I still would recommend that you limit the use of table salt

that you use one of these more natural salts and then you make sure that you're

not living in an area where iodine is deficient and then you get the iodine

from other sources in the diet if you know you're in an area where soil is

deficient and you don't have access to any supplemental iodine then go for the

table salt but other than that go for a more natural form of salt because you're

getting that whole spectrum of all those trace minerals another thing to keep in

mind is that because insulin has a sodium retention effect and a fluid

retention effect then once you start reducing insulin

once you go on a low-carb diet once you go keto and you do some

intermittent fasting wherever you are on that carb and fasting spectrum you will

reduce insulin and once you reduce insulin you will lose some fluids and

you lose some minerals all right so it's especially important that you get enough

salt if you're on a low-carb diet because especially in the beginning when

you go on a low-carb diet then your body will shift and it will start losing some

minerals so make sure that you get some and salt of good quality is the number

one thing to replenish the second one would be potassium and in the end

everyone is different so if you have a normal blood pressure then you're pretty

much free to use as much salt as you like if you already have high blood

pressure now we know that there's something off already so now it wouldn't

hurt to reduce the sodium a little bit and see what happens at least until you

can get your body into balance as you can get your insulin under control and

you can get your EGFR up to a good level if you enjoyed this video make sure that

you take a look at that one thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in

the next video