The great salt debate.

Salt and weight- loss?

The great salt debate. How much is too much?

The idea behind this newsletter is coming from concerned clients who ask me if they should drop salt from their diet to lose weight.

Now while salt itself will not help you drop extra bodyfat, dropping salt from your diet could actually be really dangerous.

Salt, in some amount, is essential for you to contract and relax muscles, conduct nerve impulses, and maintain proper balance of water and minerals.

Salt is also an essential source of iodine to the body. So if you cut down on iodized salt, you are not getting enough iodine through your food. This in turn leads to thyroid hormone imbalance, which will slow your metabolism down and lead to weight gain. Watch this to understand more:

A meal rich in salt can cause a larger blood volume to flow through your blood vessels and arteries. This may lead to a brief rise in blood pressure. Although this might not be the case for everyone, it is, however, useful to be careful with your daily salt intake.

High salt intake also puts extra pressure on the kidneys for most people. When sodium builds up, the body holds on to water to dilute the sodium. This increases the amount of fluid surrounding cells as well as the volume of blood in the bloodstream. The rise in blood volume means more work for the heart and more pressure on blood vessels. Over time, this can lead to chronic health conditions for such people.

So what to do?

The problem doesn’t arise from the salt added to food at home. None of us use more than a pinch of salt per meal. But processed foods and eating out meals contain salt in copious amounts and cause a problem.

Here is how much salt is in just one meal eaten at popular restaurant chains:

Salt is also a preservative, added to fast foods to increase the shelf life.

French fries are a problem then, not the salt in your aalo ke sabzi made at home.

Trust this helps,

Roshni Sanghvi.