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
