What are the expected impacts to your health later in life from consuming too much sodium? And to what extent are those impacts mitigated by having healthy eating habits around the sodium intake and drinking lots of water daily?
Edit: My follow-up question would be after reading some of the comments - does drinking lots of water cancel out a high sodium intake if you drank enough water in theory?
Sodium is an important electrolyte that helps with hydration, muscle functioning, blood volume.
Too much of it can lead to Hypernatremia - too much sodium in the blood, in relation to water. This can lead to an increased in blood pressure as a result, and potentially to other cardiovascular related episodes (e.g. ruptured blood vessels in brain). This is why people who are diagnosed with high blood pressure are often told by their doctors to cut out excess sodium from their diet.
Theoretically, if you consumed enough water and you exercised regularly, you would be able to get rid of most of the excess sodium through your urine and sweat.
It’s also to keep in mind - only small amounts of sodium occurs naturally in foods, and typically excess sodium comes from processed foods. For example, breads, cheeses, ham and other cold cuts.
From the CDC..
The body needs a small amount of sodium to function, but most Americans consume too much sodium. High sodium consumption can raise blood pressure, and high blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke. While sodium has many forms, most sodium we consume is from salt.
https://www.cdc.gov/salt/index.htm
The max daily intake should be 2300 MG. To much sodium causes high blood pressure and retention of water. I have been trying to keep my sodium below this value due to doctor orders. You should read the amount of sodium in Chinese food wow. I make everything my self and very little prepackaged foods. Every meal I make I check the sodium level and when I don’t my blood pressure rises and my legs and feet swell up. Maybe it’s okay not to care when you are young but later in life you will definitely have medical problems and salt is one of the culprit.
In my experience in trying to get my blood pressure down of which I was successful after about six months, having adequate potassium intake (2600mg) is key. I no longer concern myself about daily sodium intake which has been averaging about 3145mg looking at my food diary that I’ll have kept for a year now at the end of this month.
Issue is less to do with sodium and more to do with electrolyte imbalance. Most people who eat “too much salt” really just dont have enough potassium, magnesium, etc.
Or more accurately, the issue is the high sugar/processed diet and lifestyle.
Sodium itself is not bad for you at all and is very important. Low sodium can increase heart rate which can cause heart issues down the line, it can tax the kidneys and can lead to insulin resistance which will lead to high blood pressure which is why many people with high blood pressure do not get better results from lowering their salt intake. As long as you cook most of your food and use unrefined salts like redmonds real salt, Mediterranean sea salt, celtic sea salt and so forth, and balance sodium to potassium at a 3:2 ratio (krebs cycle) you should be fine, refined grains, sugar and even refined salt are the things to be concerned about.
Additionally drinking too much water to lower sodium levels is essentially just dehydrating your body, salt retains water, and this is largely why elderly die in high heat. Many elderly folks have extremely low intakes of salt and when it gets hot they just drink and drink water and run their sodium low.
Be very careful with lowering sodium. Dr. James DiNicolantonio has great information on this subject, but a lot of my information comes from dealing with low blood pressure, which required me to better balance my electrolytes including salt. Of course it is anecdotal but what Dr. James talks about just adds to what I found to be true in my life. Remember in an hour of good exercise you can lose up to 1,000mg of sodium if you cant replenish that your cells and muscle will not recover properly.
Sodium is an essential mineral.Sodium It creates specific channels in the membranes of our cells which carry out different vital tasks. For example, sodium channels help to control the amount of water that gets in and out of cells and allow the transport of specific nutrients and compounds (such as amino acids, glucose, vitamins, etc.) into the cells. Sodium is also important to help our muscles and heart contract and to allow our nerve cells to carry messages (nerve impulses) between the brain and the body. If you eat too much sodium that can cause several problems, but a lot of people are mistaken when saying that overconsumption of salt can be mitigated by water, no. What everyone is missing is a potassium, sodium balance, read about sodium-potassiun pump it is a really interesting thing to read about. The high POTASSIUM diet is more important than a low sodium diet, sodium is not bad for you, it just cannot act by itself, it needs potassium to function normally. Same thing magnesium works synergistically with calcium (magnesium relaxes, calcium strains)