7 Warning Signs of a SALT Deficiency ~ Dr. Eric Berg

Why would someone be deficient in salt? Well, they don't eat salty foods, right? They're told they're salt sensitive or they have high blood pressure, so they don't consume much salt.

Maybe they're going through a lot of stress.

The more stress you go through, the more salt you actually need.

Let's say it's hot out, right, or you're sweating.

You're gonna lose salt.

Now, some professional athletes that are working out hardcore in the summer can lose up to six grams of sodium just in one hour.

So when we're exercising, sweating, we can lose a ton of sodium as well as chloride, right? Uh, there's some reports that show that we lose even more chlorides than we do sodium.

Okay, here's another one.

High amounts of potassium.

Let's say you start taking a potassium electrolyte powder and you just neglect to take sodium or salt, right? Well, that's gonna throw you off, because anytime you look at salt, or especially sodium, you wanna look at it in a balanced state, okay? Not as an individual mineral, because when you increase the opposing mineral that's usually connected with it, like potassium, you can actually increase it or decrease it depending on what you do to potassium.

For example, if someone is salt sensitive, what that really means is they're low in potassium.

So here's the problem.

If someone doesn't know that, they're gonna start reducing their sodium more and more and more, and generate all these side effects that I'm gonna talk about.

What they should do instead is just beef up the other mineral.

It's much better to have sufficient amounts of both minerals, but in the right ratio.

But any time we go up with potassium, we need more salt.

Any time we go up with salt, we need more potassium.

Okay, you started the ketogenic diet.

Ketones are like diuretics, okay? You're gonna lose a lot of water, and when you lose the water, you're gonna lose your salt and you're gonna lose your potassium.

So you need both of these things to be put back into the body.

Now, what about fasting? Yeah.

[laughs] Well, you're not eating anything.

You're drinking a lot of water.

You shouldn't be drinking anything when you're fasting, but you should be consuming sea salt for sure if you are fasting, simply because our bodies require, as an essential nutrient, sodium and chloride, or are you gonna have these symptoms which I am getting to shortly.

Now, if you drink coffee, let's say you drink four cups of coffee in a day, uh, you'll lose a half a teaspoon of salt, because caffeine depletes sodium, which is interesting.