Government is not reason, it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
-George Washington
George Washington could have said that about a lot of things. There are many things in this world that are fine in certain context, but when it gets out of control: look out.
I’m sure you’re thinking of some others right now…
And oftentimes, excusing of a fault
Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse,–
As patches, set upon a little breach,
Discredit more in hiding of the fault
Than did the fault before it was so patched.
–Shakespeare, King John Act IV, SC 2
Halloween is nearly upon us, and I think you all know what that means. It means enormous mounds of candy. It means sickly children who mysteriously get colds that won’t go away till sometime after New Year. It means gluttonous gorging on candy, all wrapped up in that flimsy excuse that everyone, from the President to the parent to your slimy local politician angling for higher taxes, knows how to use: For the children!
Can that which is tasteless be eaten without salt?
–Job 6:6
To end our three post series on salt, let’s consider why you need more salt if you aren’t eating carbohydrates and find out whether there is any danger of you overdosing on salt if you’re eating real food?
The answer to the first question is bound up in our old friend (or for some of you, nemesis) insulin. Insulin has many jobs in the body, one of the most important for your weight being to tell your fat cells to keep their stores locked up so that the toxic sugar in your bloodstream from your whole grain pasta meal with a brownie for dessert can get burnt off as soon as possible. But another function of insulin is to tell your kidneys to hold on to their sodium stores. Once you ditch the Special K and granola bars, your insulin levels plummet. This signals to your kidneys to dump the sodium, which they do. They then dump water as well, which ends bloating for most people and is the reason why low-carb diets usually produce significant weight loss in the first week. Of course, the poor deluded people at this website will tell you that all the weight loss in low carb diets is just water.
Funny. I never knew I was carrying around 145 pounds of water. Has anyone investigated a connection between humans and camels?
Anyway, this is the reason that people eating few carbs may feel lightheaded, dizzy, or lethargic, or get headaches. (It might also be the reason people who eat high carb also feel that way if they’re on an insanely restricted sodium diets.) It’s simple to fix this with some extra salt or bouillon.
So is it possible to be getting too much salt on a low carb diet?
Not if you’re doing it right.
If your idea of “low carb” is nothing but bacon, sausage, hot dogs, deli meats, processed cheese, and fast food burgers, you might be getting a lot of salt. But frankly that’s the least of your problems.
Let’s say you’re eating like me. So for breakfast you have some plain Greek yogurt, a cup of coffee with unsalted butter and coconut oil, and homemade breakfast sausage with a slice or two or cheddar cheese. Total sodium: 405mg
For lunch you eat three eggs, coconut milk, cacao powder, maple syrup, and another tablespoon of MCT oil. Total sodium: about 100mg
For a snack you have some peanut butter and cheese. Total sodium: 360mg
For dinner you have a salad, and some avocado, and a lovely little desert prairie chicken that is quite small, but quite tasty: 209mg
And then let’s be generous and say that I liberally salted my chicken, which I did. A quarter teaspoon would be a lot of salt to come out of a shaker, but let’s imagine it did and that’s another 500mg.
Total for the day: 1,574mg
Eating nothing but real food, and salting everything liberally, I still just barely made it to the USDA’s 1,500mg per day ideal target. Which is why I also took three salt tablets today (1,200mg more) and ate 1/8 teaspoon of salt directly from the container (another 250mg). If I don’t do that, I feel crappy and slow. And get nauseous. In fact, I’d probably feel even better if I took three more salt tablets, and I certainly would have if I’d gone outside to run around.
So the answer is: No. If you are eating good, real food you can’t possibly overdose on salt. So unplug the holes in that shaker, folks, get some real salt (not the junk table salt garbage) and start shaking. When people ask if you’re watching your salt, tell them Yes, I watch my salt. I watch it as it blows over my food like a Lilliputian blizzard. And then quote some of these proverbs, from every corner of the earth:
Plato says he’s hungry
Help us keep paying for this site and feeding the dogs.
$1.00
–Mao Zedong (Mount Liupan)
Over the last few years I have heard and read a lot of people who insist that exercise is dependent upon carbohydrates to some degree or another. Some of them will assert that this is the case for just about any exercise other than taking a leisurely stroll, such as these guys at the bodybuilders.com website:
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.
― Dale Carnegie
Every morning I get a slew of articles on health. I read them when I have time, which unfortunately is not often these days. But today there were several that were just too good to pass up. To start us off right, let’s read about this poor woman:
I am proud to be an American. Because an American can eat anything on the face of this earth as long as he has two pieces of bread.
-Bill Cosby
On my vacation in America, I have learned some very important things. This is my second time to really observe Americans in the wild since eating differently, and here’s some of what I gleaned:
Diet Coke with lemon…didn’t that used to be called Pledge?
–Jay Leno
Not long ago I was at a friend’s house. My friends are pretty typical Americans. They have a large kitchen with two long counters, a normal American-sized fridge and freezer, above- and below-counter cabinets, and a pantry. Here’s what was in them:
Thus it appears to be the necessary duty, and the interest of every person living, to improve his understanding, to inform his judgment, to treasure up useful knowledge, and to acquire the skill of good reasoning, as far as his station, capacity, and circumstances furnish him with proper means for it.
–Isaac Watts
There’s always things to read. Keeping up with it all is impossible, but keeping up with some of it is good for you! An educated mind is not easily coerced, enslaved, or deceive; and by “educated” I don’t mean “got a degree in business administration” or “went to plumbing school.” I mean a mind that seeks to know what it can about as much as it can. With these salutary thoughts in mind, let’s look at what’s going on in the world as you head into the weekend.
Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.
–Leonardo DaVinci
If you read any news from the low-carb/Paleo sort of world, you can’t help but have been assaulted recently by all the screaming about resistant starch. It’s the New Big Thing.
Now, don’t let my sarcasm fool you. There might really be something to it. The theory seems sound. It’s just that a lot of stuff remains unproven and is down to personal experience. That doesn’t mean everyone promoting it won’t be proven correct in the next few years. It just means a lot remains unknown. Plus, I’m always leery of the New Big Thing. So let’s talk very briefly about what it is and what’s going on. I’m just going to do a basic rundown because there are far better, in-depth analyses of this that have been done by others. If you want to really get into this, I recommend these:
The rate of cardiovascular disease suffered by both rural and urban Chinese males is almost indistinguishable from the rate experienced by American males, while the rates…for both rural and urban Chinese women is significantly higher than those suffered by American females….The notion that the Chinese don’t have disease of the heart…is what we like to call a vampire myth–it simply refuses to die.
–Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades
They go on to explain that part of the issue leading to confusion is that heart disease normally manifests as stroke in the Chinese, but as heart attack in Americans. A city-dwelling Chinese man only has half the heart attack risk of his American comrade–but six times the stroke risk. The underlying cause is exactly the same: coronary heart disease.
Ask Me How It Happened 