Question: Why is too little salt as bad for you as too much salt?

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 17 Nov 2014:

You need salt to live! Well, you need sodium, anyway, and the easiest way to get that is in salt, which is made of sodium and chlorine to make sodium chloride.

Sodium is a very important part of your body. It’s the main substance your brain measures to see if it should add or remove water in the blood, which is how your blood pressure is regulated. While too much salt will give you high blood pressure, too little salt will mean your blood pressure gets too low, and that’s just as bad.

Sodium is also very important in your nervous system. Sodium is a good carrier of electrical charge, and that makes it very useful for the nerves that carry electrical impulses to and from your brain. If you’re not eating enough salt, then the nerves in your body won’t be able to transmit signals to and from your brain properly, and that can lead to all sorts of nasty problems. Imagine if the signals from your brain to your heart couldn’t get through, your heartbeat would get erratic or even stop!

You don’t need much salt to be healthy, so no need to worry about that. Just make sure you’re not eating too much, there’s a lot of it in processed foods that you might not know about! You can talk to your doctor some time, they’ll be able to tell you how much salt you should be eating. 🙂