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Salt a widely used condiment

Last year Americans ate over 275,000 tons of table salt, and on average each person in this country consumes five times as
much salt as other world citizens.

Many men, women and children in this country eat an average of 10 to 12 grams (almost one-half ounce) of salt every day.
America also has over 25 million people suffering from hypertension or high blood pressure, USAs third major cause of
death.

Here forth a connection gets explained.

Table salt exists as an inorganic mineral compound composed of sodium and chlorine. It has antibiotic and preservative
properties. Although not generally thought of as a poison, salt has deadly action upon living organisms. Four ounces of it
taken at one time makes up a fatal dose, eight times more than an average person eats over a day.

Salt found as probably a ubiquitous seasoning of world peoples. Youll find it in nearly each processed, prepared or
preserved food. We even put it in our pet food and baby food. Even if no extra salt gets added at our table, an average
American diet contains over six times what nutritionists consider safe levels of salt usage.

A safe level of salt use does not exist.

1.1 Salt Myth

If salt harms us, how come we use it? Does a need for salt in our diets exist?

Salt use has gotten defended on these four misconceptions:

1. Life needs salt.


2. Salt improves foods flavor.
3. Salt promotes digestion.
4. We find Salt in our bloodstream and conclude it an essential ingredient of our living organism.

Let us look at each of these beliefs and see if they have truthful basis.

1.2 You Dont Need Salt To live

One most common defense for salt states that our bodies have a certain sodium and chlorine mineral needs that sodium
chloride from table salt crystals fulfill. Sodium gets used by our bodies to maintain a water balance, to integrate nervous
functioning and to aid in forming digestive juices. Chlorine helps sustain normal heart activity, plays an important role in our
bodys acid-alkaline balance and aids digestion and elimination.

Salt (sodium chloride) cannot get used by our bodies to meet these mineral requirements. Salt exists as an inorganic mineral
that cannot get metabolized by our bodies. Salt enters our body as sodium chloride, it circulates in our body as sodium
chloride, and it leaves our body as sodium chloride. At no point does it break down into sodium and chlorine and get used by
our body.

Sodium chloride exists as a very strong and stable molecule. It cannot get broken down in a digestive tract or by our liver.
Bodies cannot use bonded sodium chloride molecules. Bodies use organic sodium and organic chlorine found in living food
(vegetables, fruits, etc.), but cannot use inorganic sodium chloride compounds.

So, if out body cannot break salt down, cannot use it, if it gets eliminated from our body in a form it entered, then how can
salt get termed necessary for life?
Moreover, salt eating has been around but for a few thousand years of mans millions of years of existence. Primitive man
did not eat salt. Indigenous people of America did not use salt until Europeans introduced it. Many cultures today have not
seen a salt shaker. Thousands of Hygienists and health-minded people in this country eat not one grain of salt.

Can one still say that salt seems essential for life?

1.3 Does Salt Make Food Taste Better?

Even if people feel convinced that salt contains no nutritional use, they may still defend it as a flavor enhancer. Salt makes
my food taste so much better, common gets heard as justification for injesting salt. But can salt add flavor to your food?

Taste a pinch of salt. What flavor does it have? Does it appetize or have a nice taste? No. Then how can it add flavor to food
if it has no flavor of its own?

Salt performs its flavoring by irritating taste buds on our tongue. By inflaming tongues, salt makes taste buds more
sensitive through chemical irritation.

It burns skin off your hands so you have more sensitive fingers. Ever notice how a sore and inflamed spot on our skin has
more sensitivity than surrounding areas? Salt does these things to our taste budsmaking them sore and sensitive.
Consequently, we notice taste stimulation more, but we do not experience actual flavors of food in greater amounts.

Salt cant add flavor to our foods as a chemical. Chemicals cant give us or our foods extra things, except irritating
stimulation that gets mistakenly identified as flavor.

1.4 Does Salt Help Digestion?

Salt has gets defended as an important aid in food digestion.

Consider this: our body digests food. Enzymes and gastric juices produced by our bodies interact chemically with food we
eat as a stage of digestion. Sprinkle some salt on a tomato slice. Does this salt digest that tomato? Does it do a thing? No.
Salt as an inert substancedoes not live, an inactive mineral. How could an inorganic crystal enter into such an organic
process as digestion?

Even traditional nutrition no longer believes that salt by itself aides digestion but they do state (as recently as 1980) that
chloride ions in salt help form hydrochloric acid in our stomach which gets used to digest food.

This, too, relies on faulty reasoning. Chlorine in salt cannot metabolize by bodies. It does not enter into bodily processes. It
remains bonded to a sodium atom. Now, organic chlorine as found in living foods can incorporate in a production of
hydrochloric acid, and improve digestion. Chlorine in salt, however, remains inorganic and cannot help digestive function.

Instead, what happens to our digestion process when eating salt:

1. absorption of food through intestinal membranes inhibits;


2. protein solubility increases and a considerable loss of tissue building material occurs in our urine, a pathological
condition known as albuminuria;
3. water balance in food digestion disturbs, thus slowing digestion.

In short, salt does not enhance digestion; its presence in our body retards digestion.

In Japan where salted and pickled foods get found as a dietary mainstay, stomach cancer incidence remains higher than other
places else on earth. A link between high salt use and stomach cancer occurs.

Does a cancerous stomach sound like improved digestion?

1.5 Dos Salt Play An Essential Role in our Blood?


Since we find salt in our blood, people conclude that we must consume it build healthy blood. Salts do get found in our
blood, sodium chloride among other mineral salts. But does this prove that table salt exists as an essential ingredient of our
bloodstream?

Most people have eaten so much salt thru their lives that they have a continual circulation of sodium chloride throughout
their bloodstream. Salt get found in our blood because our body constantly tries to eliminate it from our system.

A typical eater of salt has so much salt in their body that their body can not catch up on its elimination. We seem capable of
excreting around 200 milligrams of salt a day through our kidneys, about as much salt as fits on a sharp-pointed knifes tip.
Most eat fifty times that much. So where does this extra salt go? It stores in layers beneath our skin to eliminate by
perspiration, and also continually circulates in our bloodstream, waiting for processing by our overworked kidneys.

Of course we find salt in our bloodstream. We also find pesticide compounds, drug poisons and environmental toxins as well.
Does this mean that these also seem an essential part of our blood? Our bloodstream circulates wastes and poisons for
elimination that we put into our body. Salt remains just another one of these toxins that we have introduced into our body.

Organic mineral salts also get found in our bloodstream, used by bodies for a number of functions. Inorganic salt, table,
Himalayan, etc, however, exists but a poison that our bodies try to eliminate.

1.6 And Take This With a Grain of Salt

Amazingly enough, many nutritionists today still recommend that everyone consume a minimum daily requirement (MDR)
of salt. A frequently estimated MDR for salt sits at about 200 milligrams. Most Americans consume fifty to seventy-five
times that much each day. In fact, no national diet anywhere in on earth contains less than this MDR for salt.

Consider this: if our bodies cannot use salt, if it poisons, gets implicated in a wide variety of diseases and disorders, then how
come we should consume a minimum required amount each day? Conventional nutritionists also state that infants salt
needs remain relatively greater than an adults needs! Does a person need a poisonous substance, especially a child, no matter
how small an amount?

For an even more surprising twist of logic, consider these actions by a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human
Needs regarding salt use by Americas public.

In 1977, this committee recommended a salt consumption reduction to 3 grams a day, still 15 times more than official MDR
levels. In response, a task force of 14 scientists representing various food processing industries issued a statement that read in
part only 3 grams of salt per day would provide an unpalatable therapeutic-type diet that would require exceedingly careful
selection of foods from a limited list. After this statement, The Senate committee decided to revise its official
recommendation to 3 grams per day.

Still later, upon inquiry from a president of The Salt Institute, that government committee stated that a 5 more grams could
get recommended for additional salting above 3 grams of salt presently recommended in a typical American diet. So now
their recommendation for daily salt intake sits at 8 grams per day (or about 1/3 ounce).

Perhaps you can see how such figures such as MDRs and government recommendations can get taken with a grain of
salt.

An important thing to remember: if we would eliminate inorganic salt from our diet and consume 0 grams a day, we
experience higher levels of health and add years to our lives.

1.7 Salt As Antibiotic

Salt originally got used as our first food preservative. A discovery got made that when meats and vegetables were salted,
decay was decreased.

Food often spoils depending on its water activity level. We can either dry food to reduce its water activity or salt it. Salt
affects water activity in food to prevent bacterial growth. In other words, salt acts as an antibiotic.
Antibiotic means anti-life. Salt does precisely that; it destroys bacteria and it will destroy living cells in your body as well.

If you cannot attain fresh foods, a better ways to preserve food exist than to add salt. Drying food and storing it at low
temperatures prevents bacterial growth. No reason exists to add salt to food preserved in other ways, such as canned or
frozen foods, since this salting gets done but for flavoring.

1.8 Final Thoughts about Salt

Hypertension, high-blood pressure, exists as most common among illnesses today. It accompanies coronary heart disease,
stroke, congestive heart failure and kidney disease.

A 35-year-old man with blood pressure 14% above normal has lost 9 years of his life expectancy. A 45-year-old man whose
pressure sits at 17% above normal runs twice in risk of a heart attack and four times in risk of a stroke as a healthy
individual.

When a diet consists of 2.8% salt, as found typically in Americans, it gets described as frankly hypertensigenic and life-
shortening.

Salt acts as a strong diuretic and causes water use from our blood and lymph to excrete it through our kidneys. For this
reason salt makes us thirstyour bodies call upon more water in order to flush irritating substances from its tissues.

The continued use of salt causes a severe affliction of our kidneys called nephritis.

Salt causes inflammatory swelling of our glands.

It contributes to constipation and indigestion.

It factors into many skin diseases.

It deposits throughout bodily fluids, which causes extreme irritation, injury and death to billions of cells.

It cannot get used by our body as we cannot use it and thus it remains toxic and poisonous.

Dont limit your salt useeliminate its use.

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