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 from homeostasis as soon as you go below
three grams of sodium per day so this brings up an interesting point you're saying or talking about
if someone's not consuming enough salt the body can then start stressing out and activating more
adrenal hormones and other hormones right correct right and even in animal studies this is really
interesting if you put them on a low salt diet they have to continuously secrete the
sodium retaining hormone called aldosterone and that has been shown to lead to hypertrophy of
the adrenal glands and that can lead to adrenal fatigue but it's physiologically you can see it on
a hypertrophied adrenal gland from a low salt diet so you can see that this would play out in
humans as well if you're constantly pushing out 10 times the amount of aldosterone because
you're on a low salt diet that can potentially hypertrophy the adrenal glands and lead to adrenal
burnout wow is there any data that shows that doing a low sodium diet can trigger increased
cortisol that's a good that's a good question i don't know not sure but i would assume that
it would because you are stressing the body out and cortisol helps retain salt a little bit
but it's what i call the the sodium releaser in the body um it has if you are stressed
out and you're trying to run away from a lion the cortisol helps the body to release the sodium
increase blood volume so you can run longer well aldosterone is the salt store so it helps
you store now when someone has a condition where they're completely shot their adrenals
are shot and they have the condition called addison's where they don't have any more adrenal
function then they they have to consume salt like 24 7 right because they have a hold of
bucket there's no retention of that salt right i actually in this in the salt fix i
have this unique story it was a child that was constantly raiding the um the kitchen cabinet and
just consuming just ungodly amounts of salt and the the mother was obviously concerned and they
hospitalized this child not realizing that the child had salt wasting kidney disease and the
child ended up dying because they essentially restrained the child on the bed from being able
to go and get the salt that his body was telling him he needed and so right you're correct when you
start losing the cortisol and the adrenal hormone functions then you're going to start wasting
more salt yeah interesting um what about you you mentioned this briefly i want to know a little
bit more about insulin resistance so you take a typical person who's insulin resistant um they
want to get on keto uh if you're insulin resistant um you have do you have a problem retaining
salt or you just can't absorb it or what happens so typically if you're if you haven't damaged
the kidneys which can cause salt wasting and you're sort of maybe early on or
middle stage in your insulin resistance it's causing you to over attain salt um and
essentially that's because as insulin levels increase it tells the kidneys to hold on to more
sodium so as soon as you drop the high refined carbohydrate intake and lower the insulin levels
your kidneys will then start flushing yourself out of salt and typically most salt sensitive
people become fixed once they do that this is why you see diabetics uh have these swollen ankles
and they're just filled with fluid like crazy right they're just holding they're like a a water
water log basically they are they are water logged and it's also due to the elevation glucose because
glucose also has an osmotic effect as well like sodium it pulls fluid out of the cell into
the plasma volume so we have so we have that effect and then we also have the storage of
glucose as glycogen you store three molecules of fluid or water for every one molecule of glycogen
so there's a there's a lot of different dynamics happening that you're holding fluid so that's
fascinating um as far as the quality of um salt um what type of salt do you recommend of course
i'm guessing it's not going to be table salt yeah i mean i do appreciate the the pink salts
yeah because they contain natural iodine so the biggest question they get is if someone purchases
a pink salt it'll say not a good source of iodide d e and that's because they're not artificially
adding iodide to the salt it just naturally contains iodine so the fda makes them state
that it is not a good source of iodine but your pink salts do contain natural amounts of
iodine in fairly clinically significant amounts so i like either the original himalayan pink salt
which um seems to have about 25 micrograms of iodine per 10 grams of salt and uh redmond real
salt which their mineral analysis indicates 170 micrograms of iodine per 10 grams of salt so
depending on if you are sweating a lot and if you're not getting a lot of iodine in the
diet maybe a redmond is a better salt for you if you are someone who already gets a lot of
iodine you're eating a lot of pastured eggs you're drinking their uh milk or eating cheese
and you're not sweating a whole lot maybe a lower either in salt pink's himalayan salt would
be better interesting um if someone's going to do a ketogenic diet and they want to consume one
and a half teaspoons and they're you know they're they're sprinkling on their food but then they're
short so do you recommend just putting some salt in some water dissolving it and drinking it or
how would you recommend to consume that salt it depends on the person i i've noticed that some
people like to take salt straight and then wash blew it down whereas some other people like to
take it as a shot or they'll put a little bit of lemon juice a little bit of water maybe just one
ounce and just take it like a quick shot it really depends on the person and i think you know it
also depends on your activity level too because if you're going if you're someone who
works out intensely for an hour per day you probably want to get a
half a teaspoon of salt in you you know 60 minutes before the workout to boost
blood volume boost performance reduce hyponatremia interesting when someone goes on a
ketogenic diet and they lose all this fluid and they don't take enough salt what are some
of the top symptoms that they're going to get that's a good question um based on the clinical
studies we know that it leads to sleep disturbance fatigue and erectile dysfunction based
on actual people that i've talked to um the most emails that i've gotten like a couple
hundred emails have been people that have had afib and just added back salt and it instantly went
away their atrial fibrillation i've gotten the most emails about that so i'm not saying that
that can um do that for your individual case but um for some reason salt is obviously is
important for conductivity electrical impulses that seems to be a big driver
and it could be due to the fact that salt controls magnesium when you don't get enough
salt you start to pull sodium but also magnesium and calcium from the bone and that can lead to
negative magnesium and calcium balance if you're low in salt and so simply adding the salt back can
also fix magnesium deficiency if you're pulling it from the bone and then muscle cramps exercise
intolerance are very common symptoms but dizziness going from a seated to a standing position as
well is very common and then muscle cramps too yes i i've noticed just from also talking with
like hundreds of people uh muscle weakness do you feel weaker i guess that would be kind of
a fatigue but you feel kind of weak and then you take salt and just kind of come right up you
feel stronger obviously you you need i mean in all your cells you have not only the sodium potassium
pump but you have um sodium interaction between your nervous system and the muscles i mean
there's a it's a required electrolyte obviously yeah sodium sodium allows you to pull glucose
into the cell amino acids into the cell it allows you to get acid out of the cell it allows
almost every single neurotransmitter to be moved in and out of the cells of the brain it allows
you to absorb vitamin c and put vitamin c into the brain into the adrenal glands into the bone
you can actually induce osteoporosis in animals by simply lowering their sodium level in the blood
preventing vitamin c from getting into the bone so it's really interesting sodium is the universal
molecule that is used to move almost any single substance in the body fascinating now let's
switch to chlorides so you get sodium chloride as far as building up your stomach acids for
example making hydrochloric acid if you're low on chlorides what type of problems could occur almost
any nutrient deficiency would happen then because you need that stomach acid to in order to digest
your food and then in order to absorb nutrients so you can see things like small intestinal bacterial
overgrowth or a lot of bloating if you don't have good stomach acid which could be due to a low
salt intake and this has actually been tested out in studies people have gone from a normal salt
intake to a low salt intake and it's significantly reduces the the acid in the stomach and raises the
ph of the stomach so it's important to keep a very acidic stomach and you cannot make chloride
we can't synthesize it you have to get it by eating salt fascinating that's awesome well that's
awesome so let's switch to your your other book that actually was co-authored by uh sim land which
uh he came to my summit uh the last last year um it's called the immune fix so tell us a little bit
about that book in very simple layman's terms i know it's you're giving a lot of uh natural things
but give us a little bit more data on that book so the immunity fix was borne out
by some of my publications in the academic literature i was trying to figure
out what potential nutraceutical strategies may help against rna viruses including coronavirus
and we actually published a probably the first review paper in february it was press release
by elsevier on this on this potential strategy and then i said you know i need to really turn
this into a book because nobody reads academic literature and it ended up turning into this
2500 referenced sort of like bible on immunity but in in essence and we're really not being told
this and you know by you know the common process is that you are in control of your own immune
health and how healthy you are metabolically and how your nutrition status is can directly
determine how well you can fight off viruses and i'll give you a really great example of this
there's a virus an rna virus called coxy virus and in some kids it causes hand foot and mouth
and in most people it doesn't cause anything you don't even know you have it but if you're
deficient in just one mineral selenium it causes ketone disease which leads to cardiomyopathy
and death and you treat those people who have this rna viral infection that are dying by simply
giving them selenium because selenium is important for your antioxidant status right increasing
glutathione thought making thyroid hormones so it goes to show you that your resilience
which depends on your metabolic health and your nutrient status directly determines how
well you are going to handle any type of virus the elephant in the room is that there's a
huge huge omission with this whole coveted situation going on it's like there's no no real
focus on building up your own immune system which is ultimately your greatest protection
instead it's all about avoiding this pathogen and trying to stay clean and be sterile but it's
it's a huge missing thing and i know in your book that you go into uh major details so this
book is also really good for people that are um uh unders want to know all the details um i mean
your immune system also needs salt and chlorides as they're they use that as part of their
weapons to kill off certain things and so um so you cover that in great great depth um one
quick question about viruses in general um in your book you get a lot more into
it but what what is what is like maybe the top nutrient that someone needs to
focus on more if if they're concerned about a weak immune system and viral protection i
would say the two nutrients because they're very highly linked is magnesium and vitamin
d and so you have one billion people globally that are vitamin d deficient and half the global
population is vitamin d insufficient so and that increases if you are severely d deficient that
increases your risk of dying from cova 19 by 15 fold and you can't change how old you are but
you can certainly fix your vitamin d levels um and then magnesium is required to activate
vitamin d in the body of these hydroxylase enzymes and about 50 of the us population is deficient in
magnesium so taking those two together are very important for maintaining a healthy immune system
see i thought i thought you're going to say zinc but but when you said magnesium you're basically
you're telling me that um which makes sense magnesium is required for vitamin d so without
vitamin d if was that that's like your weak thing so if you're low on magnesium the vitamin
d really won't work that well right all so i think what you're saying is like vitamin d is
like the pinnacle the most important thing because it's like the immune modulator well right and you have these vitamin d receptors
on almost all of your immune cells and in order to activate those you have to form the active
hormone called calcitriol and once calcitriol binds to those receptors you can get you fix sort
of like these over active inflammation when you do that but in order to get the calcitriol you need
the magnesium to convert d to the active hormone what about um some of the worst foods that someone
should avoid for their immune system probably the worst would be the omega-6 seed oils and not only
from the fact that they're highly oxidized and you form more oxidation products in the acidity
of your stomach when you consume these oils which is very damaging to the gut and then you
don't absorb nutrients once you damage the god but the fact that omega-6 will actually get into
almost every single immune cell and once you start saturating your immune cells with omega-6 they
start producing more pro-inflammatory cytokines so that would be the number one thing to avoid is the
corn oil right safflower soybean oils that a lot of people are cooking with absolutely um and then
of course uh then on the flip side maybe omega-3 would be good to take as well right yeah so many
people are deficient in omega-3s and that helps to form these you know pro-resolvents that help
result literally this is how our body resolves inflammation it's utilizing things like epa and
dha and forming these these substances called resolvence and protectants and it's essentially
how our body heals from inflammation well this has been an incredible interview everyone's going
to love this data i put both of your links down below for both of your books and i highly suggest
you guys get these two books they're fascinating one is called the salt fix and the other one
is called the immunity fix because it's all about just gaining knowledge to not just about
you know treating symptoms but getting rid of getting to the core getting to the cause so thank
you so much for your time thanks for having me on
