Apparently we need only ~500mg to be healthy (most of the top results on google for me say this), but we need 25 grams of fiber a day, so shouldn’t fiber taste approximately 50 times better than salt? I know evolution is not that simple but I don’t see why our taste centers would evolve to find salt more desirable than other things we need in much larger quantities.
Other examples are calcium which we need ~1000mg of a day or phosphorus which we need 700mg per day. Why does salt taste so much better than these minerals which we need more of (and which have probably been less easily accessible in our evolutionary environment, e.g. calcium which is pretty much only obtainable from bones/bone marrow and possibly cruciferous vegetables, though those are not growable in many regions)
Notice that I haven’t compared to macronutrients which we need in much larger quantities like carbs because it is not an obviously true assertion that salt tastes better than carbs, though it is still strange that they are even comparable in taste when we need so much more carbs than salt.
TLDR: Why have we evolved to find salt so tasty and addictive compared to other nutrients which we need more of and/or which were much rarer? Shouldn’t the amount we like a food be proportional to how much of it we need and/or how rare it is?
I’m no expert, but the way I see it, the conditions in which we evolved our taste preference were vastly different to the conditions and foods we have available today. I would imagine that all that time ago we were eating mostly fruits, vegetables and meat, so fibre intake would be fairly high, but salt not so much so we would have a need to seek out salty foods to keep up sodium levels. On the other hand, most of our foods have most if not all the fibre stripped out and tons of added salt, so the need to seek out certain nutrients has kind of swapped around while our tastes haven’t
All foods used to be scarce. Same reason we find sugar delicious and it causes diabetes. We originally needed to eat as much as possible whenever we found it because we didn’t know when the next famine would be.
Salt (NaCl) is a rare ressource in the interior of continents but its an essential requirement for cell survival.
In the past acquring enough salt was an issue and you can see animals on the wild licking pools of water to acquire enough salt.
So, in nature, salt is an essential part of life, but its rare enough that recognizing it and acquiring it is essential, so evolution chose a mechanism where ingesting salt gives you a reward (pleasure).
Fibers, on the other hand, are plentfull and barely give you any calorie or extra ingredients. In fact its so plentifull that we eliminate most of it in our stool.
Most herbivores and onivores will get enough fiber without effort.
Easily digested sugar is also rare and that is why we have the ability to taste it.
We also taste bitter and other negative tastes to help identify rotten and poisonous foods.
Modern industry recognized the value of good tastes to sell food so they devised ways to use refined suggar and salt as extremely powerfull rewards.
So we have an excess of salt, which causes hypertension, excess of sugar, which causes diabetes, high influence to eat a lot of food we dont need to prepare, so we become sedentary and obese. The highest dangers for a modern man are the consequences of his own sucess. Salt was suposed to be a rare ressource. Nowadays its too cheap. You can understand why spices are so valuable when you remember that most globalized trade in the past involved food (such as coffee and tea) and spices (such as salt and pepper)
Probably because our tastebuds contain receptor cells specific to salt, bitterness, sweetness, and sourness. Food although fuel, was meant to be enjoyable and fiber is found in most complex grain carbohydrates and in the skin of fruits/veggies
Friendly reminder that evolution doesn’t have a plan.
Each new generation is an experiment with a bunch of random changes, most of which do nothing at all in the moment. Over time the most harmful random changes are made rarer (due to not contributing very well to more generations), and some of the neutral changes shift the standard for what will be considered neutral or bad changes. There is never a goal.
Since other mammals have taste for salt, and so do birds, and probably so do amphibians, we can infer that the capacity to taste and prefer salt is very old, at least as old as the common ancestor of landwalkers. The relative importance of saltiness to preferred food may shift a lot. Sounds like some ancestor of humans lived at a time when saltiness was something to optimize in a good diet. Who know when or where that animal lived, maybe far from the coast. It would appear that re-adjusting our flavour preferences to de-prioritize salt simply hasn’t been an important part of our recent survival.
Maybe it is not so important now because our decision making skills have gotten so advanced, that variations between people are much more impactful than small variations in how many salt receptors we have. We all know people who LOVE salty food, and others who prefer other kinds of flavours. With diversity like that, it’s unlikely that there is much leftover pressure on our whole population to shift what flavours our brains pay attention to.
Or, we simply haven’t had the right lucky “positive” mutation strike at the right place yet. It hasn’t been very long since people literally traded salt as a commodity to non-coast people.
Donuts taste good. Not healthy. At all.
As for salt, I would strongly recommend not eating less than 2000mg a day unless your doctor tells you to. The dangers of too little salt are far more deadly, far more quickly than the dangers of too much.
Honestly, I don’t really buy into salt intake being a big contributor to heart disease. Prior to WW2 and the mass use of refrigeration, salt was the primary form of food preservation with cured meats and pickled food.
2 dill pickles worth of pickled food and 2 slices of ham is 2000mg. Pretty sure people ate more than that in a day and that assumes they didn’t add salt to anything else.
Would you say you actually enjoy the flavour of salt in particular? I think its got a lot more to do with how it enhances other flavours in our food. I’m no scientist but I’m sure someone could explain the chemical process.
But to humour your way of thinking, through evolution, we could have evolved to enjoy salt because of how much food we proserved with it in the past.
Fatty stuff and high sugar stuff we love because it was harder to get when we were hunter/gatherers.
So our bodies were built to binge it because we got it infrequently. Which is fine when you’re living in a 1000 square mile “range” where you learn the different migration habits of animals and reproduction cycles of plants.
It’s less fine when you have access to unlimited sugary stuff and fatty stuff.
Sodium is necessary.
It is estimated that the minimum amount of sodium needed to reach equilibrium is about 500 mg per day. But that’s not the healthier level you would need. The same way, you could live with only 800 calories, but your body would prefer at around 1800 to 2500, depending on who you are.
It’s truth that a sudden increase in dietary salt can cause a redistribution of fluid from the intracellular to the extracellular space. But after a few days, the kidney can compensate with additional sodium excretion to equalize dietary intake. Therefore, people with normal kidney function can usually adapt to a wide range of salt intakes without a significant change in blood pressure.
When sodium levels are too low, like 500 mg per day, or for example because sodium is lost through sweating and drinking too much water during exercise, blood sodium levels dissolve, leading to hyponatremia, stress on the kidneys trying to retain sodium, and hypertension due to aldosterone.
Low levels of sodium are unhealthy in non-hypertense persons. The current dogma says sodium is bad for everyone, even if you don’t have high blood presure.
There is a book called “The Salt Fix” that shows lots of proves that the body passes less stress when the sodium intake is between 3000-5000 mg per day, in normal people, with normal kidney function and with no hypertension.
People with hypertension of course should stay near 2000 mg, or lower than that, depending on the person and actual blood pressure levels.
My guess would be history. When we starting curing meat to make it last longer we used salt so we’d become used to it and when you’re used to it one way then normal stuff could taste weird or even bad. For example if someone eats tons of cakes, candy, processed food and sugar fruit isn’t going to taste as sweet as it actually is and even can seem sour or bland
You know how athleates drink electrolyte drinks and what not due to intense sweating and breathing during exercise? Pre-historic ancestors were much closer to that than what most people do nowadays and even post-agricultural revolution in fact, so the nutritional needs were different + the natural scarcity vs plenifulness of various nutrients like the fiber you mentioned
Salt cravings are oftentimes a good indicator as sodium levels fluctuate depending on many factors. Some people naturally need more, while others less. Truth is, salt has been used as a natural flavoring for thousands of years, and it’s so vital to our existence that a portion of our tongues is even designated to taste saltiness. High-quality sea salts typically contain upwards of 60 trace minerals and for specific types like Himalayan sea salt, that number is said to be closer to 84. Either way, sea salts are a great source of micronutrients. It’s become harder and harder to obtain trace minerals from the foods we eat due to the lack of nutrient-rich soil. However, trace minerals are still abundant in our planet’s seas and oceans, from which we get a variety of sea salts. One of the most important properties of salt is that it prevents dehydration and balances fluids in the body. Water always follows salt, which means if you increase your sodium intake too much, water retention can occur. At the same time, the opposite is also true: a loss in sodium results in a loss in water, potentially causing symptoms like dehydration, extreme thirst, low blood pressure and blood volume.
The reason we like salt is because it taste like seaweed, which is arguably the best herb to put in your body. Think about it.. we come from the ocean, after all.
So when you get sodium alone, it causes issues.
However, consume seaweed powder, and it has a 6 to 1 ratio of potassium to sodium.. the ideal ratio for absorption of sodium in the body, and also the same ratios as the ocean. Seaweed absorbs that salty brine, and reps it in its leaves. It also has a diverse mineral profile, iodine, and unique fucoidans (complex polysaccharides) that are gel-like, and dont exist in anything else.
If we consume sodium without potassium, it can easily cause imbalance in the body. Perhaps the never-ending craving for salt is actually a call your bodies making for seaweed; tho considering 6 potassium to 1 sodium seaweed powders hits the same mouthfeel, most folks will never know the difference.
My whole family eats LOTS of salt.
We eat LOTS of butter.
I personally eat tons of red meat. It’s most of my diet.
We are all healthy and my body actually degrades fast when I eat more vegetables and less salt.
The key to health is simply listening to your body, and doing what it tells you.