However, how much salt does the human body need to consume every day? How much salt has an effect on human body? Obviously, long-term intake of too much salt is harmful to human health, which will lead to high blood pressure and osteoporosis. It is reported that the World Health Organization proposes to change the daily salt intake of adults from 6 grams to 5 grams. 3.5 grams of salt can fill a beer bottle cap. However, even if you know that it can be measured by beer bottle caps, few people can really do it. In this regard, Meng Xiangzhong, chief physician of the Department of Gastroenterology, Li Huili Hospital, specially reminded that a long-term high-salt diet is one of the inducing factors of diseases such as hypertension and gastric cancer. Try to use less salt in your life to make your taste fade.
How much salt does the human body need to consume every day? When reporters randomly surveyed dozens of citizens in supermarkets such as Tesco and Auchan in this city, only four or five elderly people were not sure whether to answer "6 grams to 8 grams" or "6 grams to 10 grams". After the two old people answered, they added a special sentence: "We have high blood pressure and know that it is not good to eat too much salt." But cooking with salt depends on experience. Who weighs a few grams and two ounces? "A young man from Wang Xing told reporters that he especially likes salty crabs and snails. Without these things, he feels that eating is tasteless.
"If you don't eat pickles soup for three days, your feet will feel sore." This is an old saying in Ningbo that most people in Ningbo are familiar with. During the interview, many citizens mentioned this "old saying" to reporters, and stressed that if you don't eat "salty rice" for three days, you will really feel powerless.
Indeed, salt is an indispensable substance for human metabolism. The main component of salt is sodium chloride, and chlorine, sodium and potassium are the main components of human electrolyte. Sodium is outside the cell and potassium is inside the cell. Both of them maintain the balance of osmotic pressure, moisture and pH value inside and outside the body cells. Once the balance is broken and the sodium content increases, it will do harm to the human body! In technical terms, the function of salt can not only regulate the balanced distribution of water in human body, maintain the osmotic pressure inside and outside cells, participate in the formation of gastric acid, promote the secretion of digestive juice and stimulate appetite, but also ensure the pH necessary for the action of pepsin, maintain the balance of pH in human body and maintain the normal circulation of body fluids.
In life, the most practical use of salt is seasoning. If you don't put some salt in the dish when you eat, no matter how precious it is, it will be tasteless. Too little salt intake will lead to too low sodium content in the body, and the most direct reflection is loss of appetite, weakness of limbs and dizziness. According to experts, long-term lack of necessary salt intake will lead to anorexia, nausea, vomiting, increased heart rate, weak pulse, muscle spasm, blurred vision, weakened reflex and other symptoms. Especially when the weather is hot, there is much physical activity and sweating, and the salt will increase correspondingly with sweating, so it is necessary to supplement salt appropriately. For example, if you drink 0.3% brackish water properly, it is generally estimated that you will sweat 1 liter and add 3 grams of salt.
However, the intake of any food in daily life has a "degree" problem. The World Health Organization's standard for salt is that everyone's daily salt intake is between 4 and 6 grams, but in our daily eating habits, we often unconsciously overdo it. Meng Xiangzhong, chief physician of the Department of Gastroenterology, Lihuili Hospital, told reporters that many families in this city are used to eating soaked rice or porridge for breakfast, and they also like to "eat" pickles, salted eggs and fermented bean curd. In fact, the salt content of breakfast alone is enough for a day's intake standard. If you order at noon and evening, the salt intake will probably exceed 10g. There are also some people who like to eat pickles, salted fish and bacon, which is definitely far beyond the standard. Dr. Meng said that if the daily salt intake of adults exceeds12g, many diseases will be induced if such excessive intake is maintained for a long time.
According to Dr. Meng, long-term excessive intake of salt has a subtle influence on human health. For example, the incidence of many patients with hypertension is related to long-term salt excess. It is understood that salt has a certain adsorption effect on water. There is more salt in the human body, so it is necessary to increase the water accordingly, so that too much water stays in the body, which leads to an increase in blood pressure and an increase in the burden on the heart. Some experts report that: 10% of people who usually consume a lot of salt suffer from hypertension; The incidence of hypertension in people with moderate salt intake is 7%; If the salt intake is very small, the incidence of hypertension is less than 1%.
According to a document at hand, some experts investigated the eating habits of residents in northern Tokyo, Japan. They consume an average of 25 grams of salt every day, and people with hypertension account for 30% ~ 40%. Eskimos living in the Arctic Circle eat less than 5 grams of salt every day, and almost no one suffers from high blood pressure. According to a study by the French National Institute of Health Medicine, at least 75,000 people in France suffer from cardiovascular diseases every year due to excessive salt consumption, of which 25,000 people die of serious illness, which is four times the death toll from traffic accidents in France.
Some experts believe that China's traditional "sweet in the south and salty in the north" diet has a certain relationship with the onset of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. Southerners love sweets, while northerners love salty ones. According to statistics, the prevalence rate of adult hypertension in China is about 5%, and there are significant differences between the north and the south: 65,438+00% in the north, 5% ~ 7% in Shanghai and Hangzhou in the south, and 3% ~ 5% in Guangzhou, Fuzhou and Zhanjiang. According to analysis, one of the important differences is that people consume different amounts of salt every day. The average daily salt intake of northerners is 15 ~ 20g, that of Shanghai is 10 ~ 12g, and that of Guangzhou is 7 ~ 8g.
Southerners are used to adding some sugar when cooking, and unconsciously ingesting more sugar than the body needs, which will cause chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, senile cataract, dental caries, myopia and rickets. Dr. Meng pointed out that being too salty or too sweet is an unscientific eating habit, which is one of the reasons for suffering from diseases such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, obesity and diabetes. People should change this eating habit.
To prevent osteoporosis, it is generally believed that in addition to calcium supplementation, the factor affecting calcium absorption is the lack of vitamin D. In fact, we should pay attention to eating less salt and sugar while supplementing calcium. The more salt and sugar you eat, the worse the absorption of calcium. As we all know, the main component of salt is sodium, accounting for about 40%. Sodium itself is not useless. The human body needs this mineral for nerve information transmission and muscle contraction. If it is not properly supplemented, there will be some functional problems. But too much sodium is harmful. Generally speaking, human kidneys excrete used sodium with urine every day, but every time 1000 mg of sodium is excreted, about 26 mg of calcium will be consumed at the same time. It seems to have no effect, but the more sodium the human body needs to excrete, the greater the consumption of calcium, which will inevitably affect the calcium necessary for bone health. Nutritionists say that sodium usually causes women to lose about 1% of their bones every year, and women with hypertension lose their bones much faster than women with normal blood pressure.
Experts at home and abroad believe that eating too much high-salt food and drink can reduce saliva secretion and lysozyme in the oral cavity, make the oral mucosa edema, congestion and virus increase, easily cause upper respiratory tract infection, and eventually lead to a cold. At the same time, due to the increase of sodium chloride concentration in blood, the synthesis of interferon with antiviral effect in vivo can also be reduced.
Dr. Meng also introduced that the gastric mucosa secretes a layer of mucus to protect itself, but mucus is afraid of salt. Because of the high osmotic pressure of salt, excessive high-salt food will cause direct damage to gastric mucosa. Over time, the protective layer of gastric mucosa is greatly weakened. It has become an accepted fact that a high-salt diet increases the risk of gastric cancer. Animal experiments show that when rats are fed with high concentration physiological saline, their gastric mucosa is diffuse congestion, edema, erosion, bleeding and necrosis, which makes the gastric mucosa prone to gastritis or gastric ulcer.
It is found that the sodium content in food is directly related to the digestion and absorption speed of starch and the blood sugar reaction. Salt can accelerate the digestion of starch by stimulating the activity of amylase, or accelerate the absorption of glucose produced by starch digestion by small intestine, so that the blood sugar concentration of people who eat salty food is higher than that of people who eat salt-free food. Therefore, limiting salt intake should be taken as an auxiliary measure to prevent and treat diabetes.
In addition, patients with bronchial asthma have increased responsiveness to histamine after increasing salt intake, which is easy to induce bronchial asthma or aggravate the condition.
In addition to the above hazards, people with nephritis and cirrhosis will also aggravate edema or ascites due to excessive salt.
Most people don't know that sodium ion exists in many foods except that salt contains sodium ion. Therefore, it is best to eat unprocessed natural foods or foods with low sodium content, such as vegetables, fruits, grains and beans. Cold cuts, sausages, canned food and dried noodles are all foods with high sodium content. In addition, steamed bread, cakes, biscuits, dried noodles, oil cakes, fried dough sticks, etc. made of baking powder or alkali also contain a lot of salt, especially condiments that increase color, fragrance and taste. The salt content is surprisingly high! Even the "salt-free diet" defined in nutrition does not mean that there is no drop of salt, but that the sodium intake per person through food every day is about 1000 mg, which is equivalent to 3 grams of refined salt. According to the latest recommendations of WHO, this has reached more than half of the daily salt consumption per capita.
According to the amount of 4-6 grams of salt per person per day, a family of three generally uses up to 250 grams of salt per month, and 500 ml of soy sauce (about 70 grams) is enough. If we adhere to this standard, the incidence of chronic diseases such as hypertension will drop significantly. Generally, when cooking at home, it is roughly estimated that a beer bottle cap contains about 3.5 grams of salt.
People with heavy tastes have long been accustomed to the stimulating relationship between salt and taste buds, so reducing salt at once may cause discomfort to the taste. In order to avoid affecting appetite, you can use the oil flavor of onion, ginger and garlic fried in oil to increase the palatability of food.
Because the conduction of taste buds becomes lower, some elderly people will feel that their taste has changed, or they are less sensitive to taste stimuli. When the elderly complain that food has no taste, they can put less salt or sugar before cooking, and then pour more soup or thicken it; You can also soak the cooked food in the juice before entering. In this way, dispersing the sweetness and salty taste on the surface of food can satisfy the tongue without consuming too much sugar and salt.
People with heavy tastes might as well cook with low sodium salt. Low sodium salt mainly reduces the sodium ion in the salt by half and replaces it with potassium ion. There is not much difference in taste. Increasing potassium can lower blood pressure and protect blood vessel wall, and reduce the risk of stroke and heart disease. Only patients with poor renal function, uremia and using potassium-preserving diuretics must not eat low-sodium salt. Because of the high potassium content in low sodium salt, it will accumulate in patients and cannot be discharged smoothly, which is easy to cause hyperkalemia, arrhythmia and heart failure.
Most fruits are foods with high potassium and low sodium, such as bananas, grapes, oranges, apples, carambola, guava and dates. These foods rich in potassium ions can achieve the health care effect of controlling blood pressure.
When buying seasonings (sauces) such as monosodium glutamate, tomato sauce, garlic salt, sand tea sauce, oyster sauce, miso, mustard sauce, bean paste, sweet noodle sauce, lobster sauce and shrimp oil, you must first read the label on the outside of the jar and pay attention to the sodium content. In addition, we should try to avoid foods with high salt content, such as pickles, bacon, salted fish, bacon and canned food.
Dr. Meng specifically warned to eat less pickled products and instant noodles. It is understood that a 99-gram ordinary cup noodle contains 7.8 grams of salt, and a packet of hot sauce noodles contains more than 6 grams of salt (marked with a sodium content of 2500 mg). The salt content in one day is easy to exceed the standard.