Our salty life...

How much salt do we need and when do we eat too much?

Vegan eating is famous for being very focused on nutrition in order to ensure that we are getting a healthy balance of nutrients. In our focus on what we may be missing, we may sometimes overlook what we are consuming too much of. In this case, we are referring to salt, and important risk factor in the emergence of various chronic illnesses.

If we think back to our highschool days (though while avoiding the embarrassing memories of the clothes your parents made you wear on school picture days) we can remember that the chemical composition of table salt is sodium chloride (NaCl). It consists of an ion (an element that has lost or gained an electron) of sodium, the Na portion, and an ion of chlorine, the Cl portion. These ions, however, are not equally heavy. In analysing the weight, we find that intakes of salt tend to be about 40% sodium ions and 60% chlorine ions. The biggest issue surrounding salt is the sodium component when we ingest too much. Sodium plays a vital role in the normal functioning of our bodies nerves and muscles, helping to regulate the flow of water and electrons through cell membranes and has important effects on our blood pressure. This also makes sense when you take into account that sodium is mostly found in your blood and intercellular fluid and less so within the cells themselves.

The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that the average person needs a minimum of 0.2-0.5g of sodium, which you can get from about 0.5-1,2g of salt. Their maximum suggested amount is 5g (or one teaspoon) of salt per day for an adult, 3g for children, and 1g for infants until the age of one. Lacking sodium in your diet is incredibly rare, as even a single piece of bread contains enough for your daily intake.

Even with modest application of salt to your favourite dish or in a sauce for some vegetables, you can quickly rack up a hefty amount of salt in a single day. As if this wasn't enough, salt also appears frequently in many foods that we consume every day without even thinking. A study conducted in part of Europe by the local health agency (http://www.nijz.si/en/sol-in-zdravlje, 2019), for example, found that bread, pastry, and vegetables were the main ways in which people consumed salt. When you consider how much salt you find on potato chips, French fries, and other forms of junk and fast food, this gets a little scary. However, people that are consuming animal products consume even larger amounts of salt from meat and dairy products. Next time your grandfather gives you a hard time about not wanting to eat cheeseburgers with him you can ask him how his blood pressure troubles have been lately, if you're feeling a bit sassy and he's already put the BBQ tools down down :-)

In healthy individuals, sodium concentration in your body is regulated by your kidneys by adjusting the amount of sodium excreted in your urine, and some is lost through sweat as well. Consuming more sodium naturally means that more will be eliminated from your body, but the increased content also raises your blood pressure and can thus cause damage to your blood vessels which can increase your risks for a range of problems down the road, such as heart disease, stroke, cardiac failure, and kidney diseases. Because of this, several health organisations have set guidelines to limit sodium intake. As we previously said, the WHO suggests limiting your salt to 5g per day (which equals 2g of sodium), and the American Heart Association is coming after your salty snacks even harder, suggesting 3.5g of salt as a daily maximum.

In the Western world today, we consume much more salt than is recommended. On average, we will each consume about 8.5g of salt per day, witch is more than double what the American Heart Association’s guideline suggests. People who especially need to be careful of their salt intake are those with high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and older individuals. It has also been shown that people of African origin are more sensitive to sodium and thus easily end up with higher blood pressure.

All that being said, people who have healthy blood pressure may not need to be quite as concerned about their salt intake. Some recent studies suggest that for people without blood pressure issues it may be beneficial to ingest more than 7.5g of salt (3g of sodium) per day. That points to a minimum requirement that is higher than the largely agreed upon maximum, and quite a large window of suggested consumption. However, even the healthiest of us should not ingest more than 15g of salt in the run of a day (O'Donnell et al 2014; Mente A et al., 2016). Sorry to get your hopes up about those yummy, salty chips just to disappoint in the end.

Which foods should we pay attention to?

The main sources of salt in foods involve prepare or semi-prepared meals, processed foods, bread and other pastries, and some pickled vegetables. To make things even more tricky, sometimes sodium is added to food in other substances used in processing rather than just salt, so you need to be careful when reading the nutrition labels. Some biggies to watch out for on this front are breads and bread-products (put down those tasty crackers! Just because they're not chips doesn't mean they're healthy), pickled vegetables, as well as processed meats and cheeses.

Ultimately, it's our own habits we need to watch out for. Are you eating out a lot, buying fast food, or consuming premade meals from the grocery store? How about those salty snack foods? At the end of the day, we need to be careful what we eat, and try to keep salty foods limited in our homes and on our tables. Remember when cooking, there are a wide range of spices that you can use to flavour your dishes; limiting salt doesn't mean eating bland food (we definitely don't advocate that one), but making informed and intelligent decisions about what you eat and how you prepare food.

Hope you aren't too salty with us for this little exposé (or for the bad pun...). See you next time for another healthy (and low sodium) vegan meal!

Keep those pumpkins hungry!

The Hungry Pumpkin Team.

Suggested reading:

1.) O'Donnell et al: Urinary sodium and potassium excretion, mortality, and cardiovascular events. N Engl J Med. 2014; 371(7):612-23. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1311889.

2.) Mente A et al: Associations of urinary sodium excretion with cardiovascular events in individuals with and without hypertension: a pooled analysis of data from four studies. Lancet. 2016; 388(10043): 465-75. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30467-6.

3.) https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/sodium-per-day, 2019