In our Power Supply gift card giveaway Liz K asked a great question about salt and balancing salt consumption for hydration but not consuming too much. Salt is an electrolyte and plays an extremely important role in hydration as well as other cellular functions in your body. So it’s kind of a big deal. Too much sodium isn’t a good thing and that also goes for not enough sodium, especially if you are active and sweating frequently. The reason why sodium gets a bad rap is because there is an abundance of sodium in processed foods. We want to eliminate processed foods from our diets as much as possible but in the case of salt we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater – meaning we don’t want to eliminate or restrict sodium consumption altogether in the absence of processed foods in the diet.
Whole foods have only small amounts of sodium naturally, which means that if you are eating whole, single ingredient foods as your primary food sources you won’t be getting much salt and you can and should add it to your food. Generally speaking, you can just add salt to taste in your food. Whatever salt you would add yourself is guaranteed to be way less than what a food manufacturer would add.
Not all salt is created equal. Raw, natural and unprocessed salt has major minerals and trace minerals (required in smaller amounts). White table salt does not have these same things. Himalayan salt, celtic sea salt (basically any salt that has a color other than pure white) will have minerals which are stripped out when the salt is processed.
In summary, on a whole foods diet, when you are eating the right type of salt and adding it yourself, add what tastes good!