Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Shaking off the salt habit
By Henrylito D. Tacio
Health 101
HAVE you ever observed how people smother their French fries and popcorn with salt? And how Filipinos, particularly those from the North, reach for salted fish even if their viand had already been cooked with a dash of salt? Or do you have this habit of dipping that pre-salted fried or grilled meat in soy sauce or kalamansi or Philippine lime with (again!) salt? If you do, hold it! You may be salting your life away.
Actually, our body requires a little salt. Nutritionists say that the amount of salt needed to sustain life is 220 milligrams a day--the amount in one-tenth of a teaspoon. But taking too much is another story. Medical researches in recent years have linked the "king of seasonings" to high blood pressure--hypertension, in medical parlance--and its potentially fatal consequences: heart and kidney diseases and stroke.
According to nutritionist-writer Jane Brody, the trouble with salt is in the mineral called sodium, which is 40 percent of the salt molecule by weight.
"Of course, sodium is a vital constituent of the human body," writes Brody in her bestseller, Jane Brody's Nutrition Book. "Our tissues swim in a salty sea The more salt in that sea, the more water is needed to dilute it, to maintain the proper concentration of sodium."
At the risk of oversimplifying things, here is how salt affects our body and how it will lead to hypertension and its consequent health dangers: It is the kidneys which maintain the normal level of sodium in the body," says Dr. Marcelo Agana, Jr., a Filipino physician who has a long and varied experiences as consultant of some prestigious companies in the Philippines.
"Where there is too much sodium, the kidneys excrete it. Conversely, when the body needs sodium, the kidneys maintain it them pump it back to the blood. "But when the kidneys fail to excrete enough sodium, the retained sodium hold water, raising the volume of blood, and because more blood now has to pass through channels which are now narrower, the blood pressure increases and the heart has to work overtime pumping more blood; hence, the heart rate also increases."
Aside from increasing the volume of blood, Dr. Agana says, the extra sodium also increases the amount of water in and around body tissues, resulting in swelling or a fluid overload, which can cause congestive heart failure.
Dr. Agana continues: "When one considers that the minimum requirement of the human body is about 220 milligrams, then the danger becomes clear. And when one realizes that Asians are growing more and more dependent on factory and/or processed foods, then the danger becomes alarming, all the more since such foods do not indicate to the consumers the amount of salt they contain."
Here's a very interesting finding. Hypertension is reportedly non-existent in cultures where little or no salt is added to foods. American researchers in Harvard University examined the health data of people living n the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific.
Those who lived in the hills and who didn't have any sense of salting their food did not have any case of hypertension. Residents of a village near a lagoon who boiled their vegetables in the salty water had a lot of hypertensive natives.
A similar study was made of people living in the Akita region of Northern Japan. These people preserved much of their food in salt, consuming three-and-a-half to six teaspoonfuls a day. The leading cause of death in the area was stroke. Here are more bad news. In a study conducted at the Department of Community Medicine of St. Thomas Hospital in London, researchers discovered that table salt could have life-threatening effect on asthma.
"A strong correlation was found between table salt purchases and asthma mortality in both men and children," reported the researchers. Buying the salt wasn't killing people; eating it was. Salt can also make your hemorrhoids worse.
"Excess salt retains fluids in the circulatory system that can cause bulging of the veins in the anus and elsewhere," explains Dr. John Lawder, a family practitioner specializing in nutrition and preventive medicine in Torrance, California.
Taking too much salt is not also advisable for people suffering from headaches.
"High salt intake can trigger migraines," points out The Doctors Book of Home Remedies.
If you're suffering from breast pain, cut back on salt, advises Dr. Norman Schulman, an obstetrician/gynecologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Cyclical breast pain, he says, is associated with fluid retention.
"Reducing your sodium intake is particularly important a week or so before your period," he says.
What about those having premenstrual syndrome? "Go on a low-sodium diet for seven to ten days before the onset of your period to offset water retention," advises Dr. Penny Wise Budoff, director of the Women's Medical Center in Bethpage, New York. "This means no restaurants, processed foods, Chinese food, commercial soup, or bottled salad dressing."
For comments, write me at tasyo2002@yahoo.com.
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