Implication of Cooking Food With Too Much Salt

Cooking with too much table salt (also known as Sodium chloride) has some side effects on your health. If you do not know this before coming across this article, now you do. I don’t want you to get me wrong, table salt has a lot of benefits it does to our body – from supplying electrolyte sodium to maintaining fluid balance within your cells. Salts are often fortified with Iodine these days in order to prevent Goitre.

How Much Salt Is Good For The Body?

Up to 1,500 milligrams of Sodium is needed by our body each day. This can be supplied by the amount contained in 3,800 milligrams of salt, according to the Linus Pauling Institute. But many people consume more than this amount each day without noting the adverse effects it has on their body system. So what are these side effects?

Swelling In Parts Of The body

Sometimes you wake up to see your eyes puffy or swollen. This may be due to water retention around your eyes caused by too much Sodium in your body cells. The amount of sodium in the extracellular fluid helps to determine the amount of water your body retains. If you have too much salt in the body, the Kidney would normally reduce the amount of water passed out through urine in order to balance the salt level in the body. The effect you see is swellings in parts of your body, like the eye example given above, hands and feet. The skin around the eyes are so thin, so the effect is pronounced there. This effect may also vary with age.

Dehydration Of The Body

This can be very obvious when you start getting thirsty frequently. You may be wondering how this could possibly happen when I just said that too much salt retains water in the body. Yes, water retention happens when you consume enough water. What happens when you don’t? Salt in your body needs water to balance it out, but when you don’t have enough without water in your diet, your body may pull water from within your cells. At this point, you would normally start seeing symptoms such as nausea, dizziness, stomach cramps and thirst.

Too Much Salt Causes High Blood Pressure

As explained above, too much Sodium and chloride in the body can make the body retain more water than necessary. The extra fluids that build up in body tissues in turn increases volume of the blood. The increased volume of the blood causes it to push against blood vessel walls — and the result is high blood pressure, or what we call hypertension.
Since symptoms of high blood pressure are not usually very obvious at the initial stages, damages to blood vessels, as well as the heart and kidneys would have happened. The most common noticeable effects of high blood pressure are usually stroke or heart attack.
Like it was pointed out in the first paragraph of this article, cooking salt or table salt has a lot benefits in the body but this should not exceed the recommended daily intake.