“Salt and Bread Make the Cheeks Red”

Salt is the key of life. Salt has been the important ingredient in any food from time since. Now with the growing health consciousness, people have come under the impression that salt is bad for health. The truth what people forget is that adding salt to the food has a lot of benefits for the health and also improves the health in many ways.

Salt is the important electrolyte that our body needs. We tend to loose water from our body in many ways such as sweat, urine etc. What we tend to forget is that, this loss needs to be replaced the failure of which can lead to serious health issues or may even end in death.

There are a lot of reasons on why one should consume salt in moderation. Researches have proven that salt has helped to retain water in the body; it stimulates muscle contraction; has nutrients needed for the digestive system to work efficiently.

Salt contains sodium. Sodium deficiency can become extremely prevalent in extreme temperatures, which cause the body to perspire heavily, which leads to dehydration. Even shock can set in if sodium is lost in high quantity. Thus it is needed to add salt in moderation to the diet. Use of iodized salt is important as it helps to prevent goiter.

Salt is also vital to maintain the tissue-water and acid-base balance in the body. It also helps to stimulate the enzyme Salivary Amylase in the mouth, which helps to breakdown the food into smaller particles and aid in digestion. Salt helps to keep calcium and other minerals in the bloodstream.

Too much of anything is dangerous. Similarly, adding too much of salt to the diet also results in health issues mainly hypertension. Too much salt doesn’t mean just adding an extra spoonful of salt to the rice that you cook or the curry that is boiling. Extra salt means munching of those packed chips, tasting those packed pickles, eating those processed foods, relying on the fast food for the entire diet and the list goes on.

Keeping a check on these is important to cut down on the salt intake. This turns to be more dangerous to health than just adding an extra spoon of salt to the normal cooking process. So lets not cut the vital electrolyte abruptly, lest we land in dehydration and death.

Last needed point to remember not just as a health tip but as a daily use salt has a lot of antiseptic properties and also cleansing ability. That is the reason many house wife use salt to remove dirt from the kitchen and make the working environment look clean and polished.

Help spread the awareness and remove the myth that salt causes bad health. Add salt to your food and relish your life to the fullest.