Jonathan Steedman (00:01.206)
If you've ever wondered what salt you should be having, whether you need the pretty pink salt, whether you need the expensive Celtic sea salt, or whether the boring regular table salt is okay, then this is the podcast for you. If you've also been wondering about how much salt should I be eating, this is the podcast for you because there is a lot of noise out there about salt. and the goal

of this podcast is yes, technically my mouth will be making noise about salt, but it will be helpful and accurate noise. Right, that's what I that's what I aim to do. Helpful and accurate noise. So look let's lay the get the lay of the land set up a few ground rules, I guess. Sodium versus salt. Now a lot of people, myself included sometimes we slip into the trap of almost using those two things interchangeably, but they're different in that salt is sodium.

Chloride. And so that means sodium, sorry, salt is about 40% sodium, 60% chloride. Technically, when we're talking about salt's impact on your health, we're actually referring to sodium's impact on your health, which is why when you look at your packets of food, they don't actually list how much salt is in the food, they list how much sodium is in the food. Okay. And so

That's the first thing. It is sodium intake that we do need to be mindful of, but we can kind of obviously use salt intake as a bit of a a proxy for that. As a rough guide, sodium sorry, I told you I was gonna mess those up. Salt, normal salt, normal sodium chloride is about 40% salt. Damn it, 40% sodium and 60% chloride. Whew. so that means in one

Sort of level teaspoon of salt. We're looking at about six grams of salt, but we're only looking at it at about 2.3, 2.4 grams, or usually we talk about it in milligrams, so like 2300, 2400 milligrams of sodium. Okay? Hopefully that made sense, and hopefully me mixing up salt and sodium didn't mess you up too much. so the reason where

Jonathan Steedman (02:19.638)
interested and mindful of your sodium intake is largely due to your blood pressure. So the good old biology thing, the chemistry thing I like to remember is where sodium flows, water goes. And so basically our body is trying to keep its concentrations of water and salt, water and sodium, the same. And so if you eat

more salt, you have more salt in you and in your cells. Your body then wants to bring more water into that cell, into your body to level out that concentration. So the more salt you eat, the more water your body will try and hold on to. If you don't believe me, go and eat a packet of chips and then don't drink water for an hour. You will be you'll struggle, right? Because you eat salty foods, you get thirsty. That's why they put nuts out at a bar. You eat nuts, you get thirsty, you buy more beer.

Right, or you buy more drinks. And so that's fine in like a small amount, but the reality is high sodium intakes often lead to high blood pressure because if you think about it, you've got more sodium in your blood, so you're or in your body rather and and in your blood. So your body gets you to drink more water, it holds more water, your blood volume, literally the amount of blood you have in your body, increases. And

as you can imagine, pushing more blood around your body makes your heart have to work harder, right? And this can relate to your cholesterol and a whole host of other things and they can all kind of stack to cause a pretty horrible storm, which can significantly increase your risk of a number of different h like heart disease, stroke, those sorts of things, right? And that's a podcast kind of for a a different time. But that is the major way in which a high sodium intake

can s significantly increase your risk of certain heart diseases. There's also quite a strong link between high salt intakes and stomach cancer, high sodium intakes and stomach cancer. So also just another reason to not eat heaps of salt. A few important caveats as always. The first thing is yes, you lose sodium when you sweat. So if you sweat more, particularly if you are an active individual in

Jonathan Steedman (04:35.762)
humid conditions, you may need a little bit more salt. In fact you probably do need a little bit more salt. This is not me saying you need an electrolyte supplement. You probably don't. You're probably almost certainly getting enough sodium slash salt from your food just from eating a normal diet. Okay? But yes, putting a bit of extra salt on your foods if you are a quite an active person, particularly if you're quite a sweating sweater, then that's going to be fine.

Okay. But you also probably don't need to go and get an an electrolyte supplement that is gonna provide you with half the recommended daily intake of sodium. Element I'm looking r squarely at you. I think sodium is similar as well. They give you bonkers amounts. So anyway, again, conversation for another time. I just wanted to flag that. And the other thing I would say is don't do the other end of the spectrum and get really scared of salt. go low salt everything.

Don't salt your food, don't cook with salt. now if you've got certain renal conditions or certain heart conditions, then yeah, that might be what has been recommended to you. If your medical professional has recommended something to you, don't ignore them and listen to a podcast instead. Right? but for the the people who aren't managing those conditions, your biggest intake of salt is going to be from packaged foods in particular, packaged snack foods, packaged meals, and takeaway.

like r you know, restaurant meals, fast food, those sorts of things. If you're not eating much of those and you're largely cooking your own foods, you're eating like not zero processed foods, but like minimally processed foods. Like if you're getting a package snack, you're getting a a nut muesli bar, you're getting popcorn. Like yes, those are processed, but obviously there's levels of processing. If that's the majority of your diet

Adding some salt to your dinner or cooking with some salt is still going to bring you well under the sodium intake that you need for the day. Okay, so I I don't want you to the messaging out there that the amount just have as much salt as you want, it's it's safe, not great, but also I don't want you to be afraid and cut it all because you don't really need to do that either. Okay, caveats hopefully done. There are four major types of salt that I've seen. There's definitely more, of course, but these are the the four major ones.

Jonathan Steedman (06:57.056)
the first and most common one is like your table salt. You know, that's your standard, very, very cheap stuff that you get from any kind of supermarket. so it's usually mined or or, you know, made from I don't know how they they do it. however they make salt. and then it's like refined right down to pure sodium chloride, right? Like I was saying before. And so they they strip out any of what we would call trace minerals. We'll talk about them in a second. so sometimes it also has anti caking agent in just to help it

pour a little bit more freely and it's often iodized. Okay. Now the reason for that is iodine deficiency can be a very real thing and it's not so much just the salt like adding salt to your food that does that but it's the fact that people use salt in bread and baking and in cooking and you know in your pasta and stuff like that. So by adding iodine to table salt they've also got iodine into your pasta and into your breads and those foods that you buy as well, which is which is a good thing, by the way.

Not a bad thing at all. That's your regular table salt. Then we've got Celtic sea salt. You know, this is the hand harvested, bespoke, no, not bespoke, but you this is the fancy one, right? very traditional, all of that kind of stuff. And so you'll see a lot of the marketing will talk about that. so it is l much less refined and you know, closer to what we'd say, quote unquote, natural salt.

The last was sorry, the other one is then Himalayan pink salt. I remember when this kind of exploded, you know, it's becoming the healthy salt. and so yeah, it's got that beautiful little pink color, and largely it's got that pink color because it's retains some of these trace minerals, particularly iron, right? iron is like that rusty pink red color. so it's got some iron in there and that is what gives it that kind of color, right? And then finally, actually I'll talk about diet salt at the end, okay.

'Cause the big three normal salts would be table salt, Celtic sea salt, and Himalayan pink salt. Now, which would I recommend you have? Whichever one you feel like, to be perfectly honest, because salt is salt is salt. Remember that what we're mostly interested in is the amount of sodium in your salt, because sodium is the thing that sorry for I'm being very that sounded very patronizing. I'm sodium is the thing that can impact your health.

Jonathan Steedman (09:24.632)
Which is why really when it comes to your salt, all I care about is the sodium content. And table salt, Celtic sea salt, and Himalayan pink salt all have roughly forty percent sodium and roughly sixty percent chloride. All right. After that it's largely just marketing. Celtic sea salt, bec because it's less processed and everyone in their brain likes to think less processed, more natural, is better. When it comes to salt in particular, absolutely not the case. All right. So

If you like your Celtic sea salt, go for it. But it's actually probably the least helpful of the three, to be honest. Not helpful, the least useful of the three. It is still just salt, right? Himalayan pink salt arguably has some trace minerals. It has some iron in it. And a lot of people push don't use normal salt, use Himalayan pink salt because it's got the trace minerals in it. Yeah, it's got more minerals in it than regular table salt, but it is still I should have looked this up before I

I'm pretty sure it's point three milligrams of iron per teaspoon it gives you. And just for context, men need about eight milligrams a day, women need about eighteen milligrams of salt of salt. Eighteen milligrams of iron a day. So this salt giving you point three of that's not very helpful. Okay. So I don't think paying extra to get such a minimal impact.

is worth it and you pay quite a lot extra for it. Now if you like the look of it, because yeah it is pretty and it looks really nice in a salt cracker on the table, hell's yeah, go for it. Just let's remember that's why you're doing it, because it looks pretty, not because it's somehow superior for your health. And so that is why my number one recommendation for salt actually comes back to regular table salt. Try and get something without anti-caking agent in it if you can.

You know, it's an easy win. easy thing to do there is just look at the ingredients list. But again, you get salt, you get the same amount of sodium as all of the other options, except you get the added iodine, which is actually really helpful. Okay. iodine is important. Iodine's very useful for hair, skin, and nail development in particular. I have a bit of a theory that

Jonathan Steedman (11:36.896)
All of these hair, skin and nail supplements became really useful after everyone got afraid of regular table salt and switched to Himalayan pink salt and actually probably tanked their iodine intake accidentally. That's just a theory. No science or proof whatsoever to back that up. Don't hold me to that. But again, that's why when someone says what salt should I buy? Table salt wins. It's cheap. It gives you iodine and and that's kinda it, right? And it's not less sodium than the other options, so it's s same impact on all of those other things, right?

now if you want to get like is it Maldon? Like the you know the for the really good for meats and if you want s see flakes for like for culinary purposes, knock yourself out, but nutritionally table salt is the winner. The last thing that you could look at look at if you do have a lot of salt, A I would encourage you to kind of dial it back a little bit, your taste buds will adjust. Or you know, you do have or someone in your family has a history of heart conditions and you kinda wanna lower that a little bit.

You can get some diet salts or Diet Right R I T E is the most common brand that I've seen in Australia. There's definitely a few others. But what it is is rather than a sodium chloride, forty percent sodium, sixty percent chloride, it's a blend of sodium chloride and potassium chloride. And so for the same you know, six gram teaspoon of regular salt versus

Diet salt, you're actually getting fifty, you're getting half the sodium, right? So same amount of salt, half the sodium, and sodium being the thing that can have that impact on your health, right? On your heart. So if you're really nervous or if you're looking to reduce your sodium intake, but you quite like the salt, diet salt is actually a good option. It's a funny name for it. I wouldn't have called it diet salt, but anyway, that's what they've gone with. it's definitely

A really good option as well. you need to check the pack. I don't think diet right is iodide iodized, so that's something to consider as well. are you having s you know breads and pastas and things that have iodized salt in them? Do you have some seaweed occasionally? Are you eating much fish or meat? If you are, you're probably getting enough iodine anyway. But if you're not eating those foods, then iodized salt is probably even more important for you. but

Jonathan Steedman (13:56.236)
Yeah, diet right salt is a great alternative if you are trying to manage your sodium intake. There are certain health conditions, particularly kidney related and things where potassium intake is really critical. So you wouldn't if if that's you, don't just suddenly jump to diet salt. but for people who aren't managing that condition, yeah, my number one recommended recommendation is still regular iodized table salt and then

with a great alternative of the diet right salt, if you want to mix it up a little bit and get a little bit more potassium and a little less sodium in your life.

Alright, that's it for me when it comes to salt. I didn't even make one salt related pun or the fact that I'm salty or anything like that. Good job me. Alright, that's enough now. Chat to you next time.