About healthy salt intake
How many recipes of sweet confections include salt to actually enhance the sweetness of the cookie, pie, or ice cream? The ancients knew the miracle of its preservative power: pack sliced meat in salt to draw out the moisture, concentrate the flavour and cure the meat against spoilage. Add salt to water and gargle to soothe a sore throat. Balance an egg, toss a pinch over the shoulder, hold a bird in place with grains shaken on its tail, soften household hard water and make perhaps the only exception to the old idiom that two wrongs do not make a right. All is accomplished with salt. This compound is so pervasive in use and health benefit in proper quantity, it is more common to kitchens than its partner, ground black pepper.
Salt is used in virtually every meal whether we are a king or a pauper. Thousands of ocean creatures depend on its dissolved solution in water to breathe and they will literally suffocate without a proper concentration. Its importance is so far-reaching, it occupies more than one column inches in the dictionary to define it and its uses. We call our oldest, wisest ones “Old Salt.” We say that one who has earned his pay is “worth his salt;” it was once used as currency. If we want to store something away for future use, we “salt it away.” We apply the descriptive term to an admired scoundrel; a “salty dog.”
If salt has its fine, beneficial edge, its consumptive use in excess is harmful in the extreme. Observe people in a restaurant or at home who, without ever tasting the food, begin the eating ritual by first shaking salt over the meal. It is the habit that must be shaken; leave the salt alone! If seasoning is needed, use its partner; pepper.
Virtually all recipes, whether prepared at home or in the restaurant, include salt in sufficient quantity to suit the body’s daily need of this mineral. Excess consumption of salt has several harmful results. First, osteoporosis. Excess sodium prevents the absorption of calcium, essential for continued bone fitness. Dehydration: salt draws water out of cells and tissue. And the big one: hypertension, the effect on the heart and arteries leading to chronic high blood pressure and heart disease. A little salt reaps health; a lot invites the grim reaper!
If you have questions about healthy eating contact your local doctor, who will arrange for you to see a dietitian. Contact us Today!
