Salt: Are you getting enough? | Video by What I’ve Learned

Take a trip to the supermarket and you’re likely to see foods that are advertised as being low in salt. It’s pretty widely accepted that having too much salt in your diet is bad for you… but what about if you don’t get enough?

Like other What I’ve Learned videos, this video digs into the science and explains things fully. Using various studies as references, it explains how exactly our bodies react to high or low levels of sodium (salt is sodium chloride).

The really interesting part comes towards the end, when it explains how our bodies self-regulate our levels of sodium and other necessary minerals. If we need them, we crave them; if we don’t need them, we don’t crave them so much (if at all). Can we just go out and eat as much salt as we want, only stopping when we stop feeling like we want it? Probably ill-advised — I guess we can compulsively eat things and override the body’s self-regulation — but still… we gotta trust ourselves a little bit.