Salt

Apparently salt is addictive. Make of that what you will.

Salt isn’t “bad for us”. ](*,)

I love salt - i’m a bona fide junkie for the stuff. It doesn’t surprise me at all that it’s addictive.

That depends. A little wine is good for us. On the other hand it can be addictive.

Exactly.

Ah, like that. OK.

I am always wary of lay articles on findings like this. They tend to misrepresent the data and its implications. On the one hand, it is something that we already knew – that salt is a flavor enhancer. Add to that the fact that we derive great enjoyment from good flavors. Likewise, eating lifeless dishes is not pleasant.

Compare that blurb with how the lab actually describes itself:

What they did was notice that salt specifically triggers certain reward centers in the brain (which get triggered by a lot of things, including drugs – why do them if they aren’t fun) and then examined how that relates to maintaining homeostasis in the body. Neat stuff.

Addiction is such a strange, ill-defined, normative term.

This has been noted before right? That people are adapted to low salt environments so they will over-eat on salt when available. Nice to see its ‘addictive’ isn’t that kind of implied someway?

Depends on what you mean by ‘noticed’. I don’t think it has been formally investigated before.

The fact that people over consume salt at detriment to their own health has never been studied or the exact neurocognitive processes which cement the behavior?

I’d be interested in seeing whatever processes makes people want it or like it to begin with. Animals seem to go out of their way for it too.

The pathways involving the latter, would be my guess. I haven’t pubmedded it. Especially as how those processes relate to things like hypertension.

I’m not sure what you mean “to begin with”. Sodium and chloride (potassium is another important one) ions play a critical role in maintaining a cell’s potential, which is important for a wide variety of processes. Somewhere along the line, they were probably limiting for land animals (makes sense, we don’t have access to salt the way ocean creatures do).

I mean the neurocognitive programming to make people or mammals crave salt in the first place, probably is a fairly ancient adaptation. Like Tinman, though probably not that old. I feel a bit foggy today so bear with me if my wording is a bit ambiguous or poorly worded.

I think that we are evolutionary better at keeping our salt levels in check than we are with our sugar levels - perhaps because salt is more detrimental to our health than sugar is…

There is also a hyper-abundant source of it: the ocean. We don’t have an equivalent for sugar. So selecting against too much salt makes sense in a way selecting against too much sugar doesn’t. Well, until recently, that is.

High fructose corn syrup? Or is that ruled-out as an equivalent because of the glucose content?

HFCS is a rather recent invention, or were you being facetious?

As I always say, anything is capable of being addictive; it simply takes the right mind and body to be addicted to it.

Many would say that music is extremely healthy and only a positive, yet I dropped out of high school once back in my senior year for no other reason than to sit around and play guitar for 15 hours a day.
For me, at that time, playing music was addictive.

I used to be addicted to salt myself.
I put it on pretty much anything that I ate.

As a result, I no longer craved sweet foods.
Ice cream became bland, cold, and annoying sticky milk; candy simply became pointless; and items such as mayonnaise became more and more included with more and more foods that I was eating (for instance, in pasta).

The only type of “sweet” food that I continued to enjoy were any foods that were strongly tart or sour.

It took my wife a few years to move me off of salt so heavily.
It used to be that I didn’t eat without having a salt shaker near me because after eating some of the food, I would need to re-salt it.
Now, however, we don’t even own a salt shaker.

My wife learned that what my pallet was craving was extremely flavor filled foods, especially with a strong zest to them, and foods very high in protein.

Once she started cooking with this angle, I slowly stopped needing the salt because the natural tastes of the foods were high enough in what my body was craving that I didn’t need to add pounds of salt to trick my body into thinking the food I was eating was the high protein or zest foods that it was needing.

Anything resulting in positive stimuli is potentially addictive. An overuse of salt would definitely not be positive as far as stimuli is concerned which only makes it sorta addictive. But that’s life, you can get addicted to anything that feels good, even masturbation.