I tried talking to a moderator on r/fasting and every question I asked was met with ‘go read the wiki’ or ‘’Im not debating this with you’. Quite a friendly gal that Gangrenous.
Anyways. Do we really know how much sodium we need? The studies linked in the wiki suggest that we expel anywhere from 3g-to 6+g of sodium each day is ideal for cardiovascular health. Yet there’s also studies stating that we only lose an average of 1200mg per day while fasting.
​
So my questions were.. Do we take in excess because it helps promote good cardiovascular health? Does the excess actually help, does anyone know why? And if so, why does nearly every government guide on salt intake suggest \~\~2200-2600mg and no more? Why do we only excrete 1200mg on average while fasting?
I know my salt intake is pretty varied. Some meals will be salt forward, and others will have barely any, but I can guarantee you that I rarely if ever take in more than 2000-2400mg of sodium a day. Is this somehow putting me at risk? This amount is just what I naturally like, anything saltier makes me cough. It’s not like I’m going out of my way to make sure I have that amount, as anything more usually makes my food too salty to enjoy.
This just all seems pretty confusing, the numbers don’t add up. The Zerofasting article states you lose 7500mg a week, 1200mg\~ a day, and is suggesting that you take in 3000+mg of sodium to compensate, yet if you do the math, 3g of salt at 40% sodium ends up being exactly 1200mg of sodium.. the exact amount that they’re claiming you lose on average each day. Is that 3000mg meant to be 3g of salt instead in this article?
​
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27216139/
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311889
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK545442/table/appJ_tab3/?report=objectonly
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22110105/
https://www.zerofasting.com/why-you-need-sodium-on-a-fast/
​
I don’t know, maybe someone can explain this one to me. Either I’m not getting it, or something is funky with the numbers. Seems excessive thinking about 3000+mg of salt intake each day to stay healthy. That’s 53g of salt a week, which is just.. a massive amount, if you’re taking in 106g, you’re still within the 3000-6000mg limit. Humans over much of our existence lived on far far less than that and did just fine. Salt was used as a trading currency, often traded 1:1 by weight for gold. There’s no way people of ancient times had access to even half as much salt as what was being recommended, yet the recorded instances of cardiovascular health over the years is that it’s gotten worse with time.
​
53g/106g of salt no matter how you look at it, your food would be so salty as to be unpalatable in most cases. I could maybe get by with like 35-40g in a week, but food would still be quite salty. How is it that an unpalatable amount of salt on food is the ‘recommended’ intake for fasting individuals?
We probably excrete less Na while fasting because we tend to eat less Na.
The low Na guidelines from governments are very out of date.
As you can see in the graphs of that NEJM paper, there’s a goldilocks zone, and too little is more dangerous than too much.
I just went in to the kitchen and weighed out 5g of salt. Didn’t look like that much to me.
Salt has only ever been worth it’s weight in gold in very very unusual circumstances. Like in Mali where gold was crazy cheap and there were no sources of salt. People in the past (especially the last 10K years) probably ate way more salt then we do today since is was such a common preservative.
If eating more salt feels like homework, I wouldn’t worry about it. If you get headaches or excessive hunger while fasting, you might be low. I think the main take away from a lot of this research for, “don’t worry about getting too much.”