Sometime during the “fat is bad” craze, we started demonizing salt, too and suddenly foods labeled “low sodium” were all over your local supermarket. One valid reason is that highly processed foods are also often high in sodium, and so, the thinking went, that if a food was salty it was automatically “bad.” So many people started religiously reading nutrition labels and ditching anything that had more than a touch of sodium, scared that they were going to drive up their blood pressure and increase the risk of heart disease that a high fat diet supposedly (see: doesn’t) caused.
Around the same time, people started preaching about the need to drink more water. This is not wrong in and of itself, as a large percentage of the population was and is chronically dehydrated. But as the amount of water consumed per day went up and daily sodium intake went down, people started flushing out all the electrolytes their body needs during and after exercise, and in daily life in general. Drinking your eight glasses a day, peeing a lot and still feeling dehydrated? That’s likely your issue.
If the fluids you’re taking in don’t have a certain osmolality, they’re not absorbed properly and if you go too far down the “loads of water, no sodium” route you can get severe hyponatremia – essentially drowning yourself internally – which can be fatal. At the least extreme end, you can feel weak, cramp often during exertion, and become confused and irritable. So a low sodium diet can actually be very bad for you.
Clearly, we need to recognize that our bodies require a certain level of sodium to not only help us absorb water but also to balance the potassium and other essential minerals our bodies need to function optimally (if you have high blood pressure already, your needs may differ). Here are a few tips for getting enough sodium without going too far:
Drink Water with a Pinch of Sea Salt
One quick way to help your body make use of all that water you’re quaffing is to simply add a pinch of sea salt to every 12 ounces. This will put the osmolality in the ideal range for rapid absorption, helping you stay hydrated before, during and after exercise. Want to make your beverage even better? Try adding a splash of apple cider vinegar and lemon juice. You can read about the health benefits of the former here, while the latter aids digestion, helps your body flush out toxins and boosts your immune system.
Combine Salt with Juicy Fruits and Vegetables after Exercise
After you’re done with your workout, it’s important to start the rebuilding process with 20 to 30 grams of high quality protein within 20 minutes. If you’re going the whole foods approach rather than a whey protein smoothie, you could meet this protein requirement with eggs, dairy or lean meat if you’re not a vegetarian/vegan, and quinoa if you are. To help rehydrate, add some watery/juicy fruits and vegetables, and put a couple of pinches of sea salt to help shuttle fluids to your muscles working to repair themselves.
Avoid Salt-Laden, Highly Processed Foods
One thing the anti-salt brigade got right (arguably the only thing) was that highly processed foods with enough sodium per serving to kill a small horse are terrible for you. It’s not the sodium itself, per se, that makes such things bad, but adding more than the RDA to the artificial ingredients, massive amounts of sugar and made-in-a-lab Frankenfood elements that go into many snack foods does not a healthy combination make.
