The warriors serving the empire were actually paid with a handful of salt per day. But despite all its appeal going back millennia and its ubiquitous nature, we sure got a lot of things wrong about salt. A salty meal, be it fries and chicken or tortilla chips will warrant a drink or two to wash off all that saltiness.
According to American and German researchers, salt actually makes you less thirsty. Not immediately, but within 24 hours, the salt intake will cause our bodies to produce water, a process akin how the camel draws water from its hump! Jens Titze, now a kidney specialist at Vanderbilt University, has been studying human physiology in extreme environments for more than a quarter century. In , he was attending a European space program course when data from a simulated day mission caught his eye.
Sodium — which forms an irresistible pair with chlorine which we all know and love as salt — is an essential mineral in living things for a variety of functions. In the human body, sodium levels have to be maintained at a certain level otherwise all sort of health problems can happen. Drinking excessive amounts of water , for instance, can drastically lower blood sodium, leading to a condition called hyponatremia.
Many athletes have died from it. The consensus among doctors is that when we eat salt, we get thirsty, and the excess water dilutes the sodium in the blood to acceptable levels. This thinking is intuitive and simple to grasp. It might also be very much wrong. What should have happened was a predictable rise and fall of the sodium level in line with the volume of urine.
Instead, the sodium seemed to be retained in the body. A decade later, between and , his team studied four men during a day pre-flight phase and six others during the first days of a day phase that simulated a full-length manned mission to Mars and back. There was then a higher concentration of salt in the urine.
Salt is essential for bodily functions. Table salt, also known by its chemical name sodium chloride NaCl , is an important compound for our bodies. Sodium is not only involved in regulating blood pressure but also plays an important role in transmitting nerve impulses. Thus daily intake is absolutely essential. In our current understanding, overdoing it on salt is associated with high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. In order to maintain balanced sodium levels, the body naturally bonds excess salt with water and excretes it with urine.
Thus the logical conclusion: More salt means the body needs more water, so salty food makes you thirsty. According to Luft, reviewers at the Journal of Clinical Investigation JCI , the biomedical research publication where the study was published, had their doubts and follow-up studies on animal models were deemed necessary.
Urea is created in the liver and skeletal muscles of many organisms and is generally considered a breakdown product of metabolic processes. And to know more facts about salt, click here.
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