Dietary Salt
I know this sounds crazy with everything you have heard over the years.
Statements like, "Salt causes high blood pressure", "Salt retains water", "We don't need salt", etc
Let me tell you a story of discovery. For years I had wondered why some people responded really quickly to laser and others really slow. I would ask questions of the people that responded quickly. Questions like, “do you eat healthy?”. “Do you eat a lot of vegetables?” I never got a good answer that could tell me anything useful.
I treat a woman around 65 years old; an athlete in my opinion. She would bike for miles and miles, sweating up a storm, out there in the hot heat and loving every minute of it. She drank water all the time and always came in with a bottle of water and drank regularly. She had high blood pressure, and was quite nervous about it. So she avoided salt, yet she craved it at times and would put a little in her palm and then eat it straight.
I worked on her for several years. We made changes in her pains, but they were slow. Oh, so slow. It drove me a little crazy and her as well. She would hear others come up after treatment and rave about how much better they felt. She was happy for them, but she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t seeing changes like that.
Then, one day she started having muscle pain all over her body. She had been convinced that she needed statins for high cholesterol. She had been on a low dose statin for a few months without any issues, but then a few months later they switched her medication and gave a strong dose. About a month later she developed this muscle pain all over and the athlete that I once knew, now could hardly walk half a block.
She was now scared and angry. The doctors told her to take a two week ‘vacation’ from the medication, but after the two weeks, she didn’t feel any better so she went to urgent care.
Not sure what was going through the doctors mind at the urgent care, but the only thing they did for her was give her an IV bag of fluid.
The next, day at my office, she actually felt some better from the IV bag of fluid. But I noticed that she responded to the laser much faster than she usually did. What I mean, is that when I would shine the laser on a spot, I could actually tell the muscle was letting go as the minutes went by.
Then it dawned on me, IT’S THE SALT.
There is a lot of salt in those IV bags. It is salt that rehydrates you by allowing you to retain water which is true hydration.
Now I knew what question to ask of the people that responded fast and responded slow.
With the fast responders, when I asked if they ate a lot of salt, they would respond with statements like, “Oh, my family gives me such a hard time about how much salt I eat.”
And with the slow responders, they restricted their salt, or drank a lot of water or both.
Now I knew the extra component to helping people get out of pain and it was SALT.
How important is it? Very important. Can I still help people out of pain without salt? Yes, but it seems to take longer and doesn’t work as well.
Now, you are all probably asking how much salt? Which kind of salt? How often do I have to eat it? Let’s first cover the lies about salt and water:
Lie #1: If you feel thirsty, you’re already dehydrated. What a lie! True dehydration is dangerous. Being thirsty is not dangerous. It’s your body’s way of telling you to get some fluid in you.
Lie #2: You need to drink a lot of water every day. What a lie! What you don’t realize, is that every time you urinate you lose salt (sodium, potassium, and trace minerals). Our kidneys act ‘like’ filters, but they are not filters like you have in a car engine. The more you urinate, the more salts you lose in your urine.
Lie #3: Your urine should be clear. What a lie! If your urine is clear, you’re drinking way too much and losing a lot of good nutrients in your urine.
Lie #4: To stay hydrated you need to drink a lot of water. What a lie! Salt is what keeps you hydrated by keeping the fluid in you. Salt attracts water. Yes, if you have too much, you can get a little swollen.
People are drinking all this water thinking they’re hydrating themselves. Yes, they’re putting water in, but they’re urinating it all out along with the salts that are needed to keep the fluid in you.
What about high blood pressure? Let me tell you a story I have heard from other doctors and see if it makes sense to you. Then you can do with it what you and your doctor decide to do with it. Here’s the story. When a person doesn’t have enough salt in them, they cannot maintain their blood pressure. So the body has to do things. One of the things it does is the adrenal glands release a chemical called aldosterone which creates a hypertensive state to help maintain blood pressure so you don’t die. But your blood pressure can get too high, so that when you go to your doctor and they take your blood pressure, they freak and put you on blood pressure medications, most likely, for the rest of your life. Then they tell you to eat less salt and you hear everywhere drink more water which aggravates the salt deficiency.
What if, someday, they find out that we’ve all been lied to and that salt is the answer for high blood pressure. Sounds crazy right? Let’s see.
As for the type of salt you should eat choose a complete salt like sea salt, himalayan salt, or any salt that isn’t just sodium chloride like in Mortan’s Salt.
In my office I have the LMNT product packs. These are one serving powder packets with sodium, potassium and a little magnesium and are flavored quite nicely. I have them there for the people that need some extra salt before I laser them. It seems to help, but what I really prefer is that they start salting their meals. One dose of salt a few times a week won’t do much for you. It has to be consistent and for a long period of time.
For example, I just had a 25 year woman in my office with a lot of right shoulder pain. It had been developing for a year and a half and had gotten quite bad for her. As I was lasering her, we both felt things just letting go. I worked on her for over an hour and had her doing pushups with her knees on the ground –> No pain. Her and her husband were freaking out. He said, “There’s no way she could have done that before.” BUT, she loved salt. Probably most of her life. She had a lot of salt in her body (bones, muscles, etc) so she responded really quickly to laser. Plus she was young and fit.
So what’s the answer? SALT and LIGHT. But a special type of laser is needed to get deep into the tissues.
Why does salt help?
I wondered why salt helped. I knew sodium and potassium were +1 charged ions, just like lithium. In fact, in the first column of the periodic table are hydrogen, lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium and cesium.
Have you heard of lithium ion batteries? Of course you have. They’re in your cellphone and almost all electronic devices. If you have a Tesla vehicle you have lithium ion batteries powering it.
Have you heard of sodium ion batteries? Probably not, but this is the new technology that’s replacing lithium ion batteries. And this isn’t in a lab, but are being used commercially right now.
Have you heard of potassium ion batteries? Probably not as well, but this is a newer technology as well.
We are more like batteries than we care to admit. So why, Oh why are we depriving ourselves of lithium, sodium and potassium. It’s the dumbest thing.
Did you know that lithium, sodium and potassium are metals? Yes. You can get a sample on Amazon, but the sample comes in a little glass container filled with oil so they don’t react with the water or oxygen or whatever they react with.
You don’t think of salt as being metal, but it is. These salts are a form of metal we can, and do, use in our bodies.
What do you think of when I say lithium in health care? You probably think major psychiatric problems because they use lithium drugs to help these people.
Because of this people are scared to take natural forms of lithium. This is too bad, because Lithium Orotate (the natural form of lithium) is incredible for a number of things. In this context, I’m thinking energy production, but it helps with a whole host of other things. I’ve seen articles on depression and dementia being helped with Lithium Orotate. I personally saw my mom’s memory and function improve dramatically just by taking 10mg of lithium (as lithium orotate) one time per day. But because it’s a natural product, it cannot be patented, so you never hear about it.
Sodium and potassium are very important for energy production, nerve function, water retention in a good way and for keeping water where it should be in the body. Yet people deprive themselves of these critical elements.
Why salts help with energy production I don’t completely understand more than I can say in this one sentence. Salt increases the voltage along the inner mitochondrial membrane in the mitochondria of all our cells. All this means is that we can make more cellular energy by having adequate quantities of salt versus insufficient quantities of salt. This is a branch of BioPhysics which I didn’t even realize existed until recently.
I’ve gone way overboard talking about salt, but I don’t hear anyone talking about this… Anywhere!!! Yet it is a missing element that other laser providers most likely are completely unaware of. This page will hopefully help other healthcare providers have a different perspective on salt.
I’ll make the page look better another day. At least I have the information down.
Dietary Salt is of the upmost importance in health care, yet it has been demonized. as being bad for your health.
I hope you've enjoyed this brief presentation on salt.
Jeff Aberle, D.C.