Think of all the different tastes you enjoy in a day: tart orange juice at breakfast; your first coffee of the day; a Caesar salad at lunch; an apple during your break and oriental noodles in the evening. So many unique tastes, and each one of them delicious.
What’s very surprising is that, while you enjoy lots of different flavours on any given day, your tongue can only detect five basic tastes: bitterness, sweetness, sourness, umani and saltiness.
Some of those basic flavours you might not like so much, like sourness, which comes from acidity in food. Others you crave, like sweetness, which comes from the sugars in your food, and saltiness, which comes from the sodium chloride (salt) in your food.
The simplest of the five main “receptors” on your tongue is the one that detects salt. That makes it one of the most powerful.
Your Life Depends on Salt
Salt is an essential nutrient, which means your body doesn’t produce it and you must get it from the food you eat. And that’s why you like it so much.
Salt helps regulate your fluid levels and insures your muscles work properly. To underline how important salt is to your health, if you did not get salt from your diet, your heart would literally stop pumping.
We Eat Too Much Salt
While it is crucial to your existence, you don’t really need that much salt. Health Canada recommends that an “adequate intake” of salt is 1500mg per day, or about one teaspoon.
But, because of how much we crave it, and how much of it is in the processed foods we eat, Canadians consume an average of 3400mg of salt per day.
All that extra salt brings with it a number of health risks. Excess salt consumption is linked to:
● Dementia
● Strokes
● Heart failure
● Heart attacks
● High blood pressure
● Kidney disease
But there’s one more thing that too much salt plays havoc with in your body: your weight.
How Salt Affects Your Weight
As we mentioned, salt affects your body’s fluid levels. And the bulk of your body’s fluids are primarily made up of water.
Without trying to sound too cliché, your body is an amazing device. It knows what it needs and in what quantities. Your body works diligently to keep the right quantities, or balance of the nutrients it needs for optimum performance.
As with other essential nutrients, if your body detects that your salt levels are too low, it will retain whatever salt gets to make sure it can function normally. If your body gets too much salt, which is the most likely case, it uses water to dilute the salt until your body can get rid of it through sweat or urination. That way, your body protects itself from some of the nasty conditions listed above.
But as your body uses water to get rid of excess salt, it sends thirst signal to your brain so you consume more water to keep your body in good working order.
Your body can retain enough water to add up to three kilograms of body weight.
While that doesn’t sound like much, salt has another, more indirect effect on your weight.
Why You Should Lose Salt to Lose (More) Weight
There’s a simple two-step approach for you to avoid the bad effects salt can have on your body, and the water weight it produces.
1. Reduce the Amount of Processed Food in Your Diet
We get the bulk of the excess salt in our diets from processed foods. Food manufacturers add salt as a flavour enhancer to get you to buy more of their products. So if you avoided many or all of the processed foods in your diet, you would automatically lower your salt intake.
More Weight Loss Benefits – Those processed foods also happen to have other ingredients that contribute to weight gain, including high levels of sugar and fat. If you lower your consumption of processed foods to reduce salt, you’ll also lower how many fattening foods you eat.
2. Increase How Many Whole Foods You Eat
While many whole foods, which include whole vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes and fruit, contain small amounts of salt, they are nowhere near as high as the massive levels you get from processed foods. They also contain way more of the nutrients, vitamins and fibre your body needs.
More Weight Loss Benefits – Whole foods are less calorie dense than their processed counterparts. That means you can eat more whole foods but not necessarily get more calories. They also contain less fat and the fibre that many of them add to your body helps to reduce your food consumption and keeps your digestive system in peak condition.
You’ll read a lot about the negative effects of too much salt in your diet. But it is how you reduce that salt consumption that really delivers the weight loss benefits. To learn more, visit your nearest Herbal One Centre and talk to one of our nutritional consultants.