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salt and calcium loss?
Browsing the internet I ran across this MSN/NBC article (yeah, yeah I know) that was interesting to me. It is about sodium intake, which normally is a pet subject of mine. Salty things are really salty to me and tend to make me flush. According to Fitday, even with all of the crap and processed food I am eating out here, I am still only averaging ~1800 mg a day. Although supposedly you should stay under 2300 mg, most americans get 4-6000mg a day.
Ok so none of that is new. But what was particularly interesting to me, and I hadn't thought about before, was that calcium and sodium are very similar chemically. After all they are right beneath the other in the periodic table, so they are sort of like chemical siblings. One effect of that is that when you increase sodium (in this case from salt) then when your body flushes it out, it also can flush significant amounts of calcium.
With all of the people worried about their bone density, why isn't this expressed more? Heart health is important, but unless your blood pressure is high, most people don't really worry about salt intake. This seems like something that would make more people think about it.
Ok so none of that is new. But what was particularly interesting to me, and I hadn't thought about before, was that calcium and sodium are very similar chemically. After all they are right beneath the other in the periodic table, so they are sort of like chemical siblings. One effect of that is that when you increase sodium (in this case from salt) then when your body flushes it out, it also can flush significant amounts of calcium.
With all of the people worried about their bone density, why isn't this expressed more? Heart health is important, but unless your blood pressure is high, most people don't really worry about salt intake. This seems like something that would make more people think about it.