Salt is important to the body. It helps to regulate your nervous system and ensure that all your nerves are working perfectly. It also helps to ensure that your body has the needed amount of water and minerals it needs to function.
But, too much salt is bad for the body. There must be a balance in the quantity of salt you eat everyday to avoid health issues. The medically approved and recommended quantity of salt that adults need to eat everyday is between 1,500 to 2,300 milligrams, which is between three-quarter teaspoon to half teaspoon.
Eating too much salt affects the body in different ways. When you newly start eating lots of salty food, your body will first give you initial signs like minor health issues, trying to warn you that it cannot handle the quantity of salt you are eating, these initial signs are called short term effects of too much salt.
If you are wise, you will stop immediately and make adjustments on your salt intake, but some people will remain stubborn and keep eating salt. Before long, other more severe health issues will surface like high blood pressure, stomach cancer, heart diseases, stroke etc which are called long term effects.
This article will educate you on some of the minor or short term effects of eating too much salt, so that you will know when your body is trying to talk to you.
1. Swollen body. This is one major sign that there is too much salt in your body. If you wake up one morning and observe that your body, especially your face, feet, hands etc are swollen, you need to start slowing down on your salt intake.
2. Bloated body. There are times when hours after eating you still feel heavy, there is this feeling of heaviness in you. You just feel like you added extra 5 kilograms to your weight.
This feeling is as a result of eating too much salt. You may even notice that your stomach looks bigger than normal.
3. Always feeling thirsty. This is another sign of having too much salt in your system. This happens to some people immediately after eating noodles (noodles and its ingredients contain lots of sodium which is bad for you).
You start feeling thirsty few minutes after eating it, and keep drinking water till the food digests. This happens because your body contains more salt than it can handle, so it pulls water from your cells to dilute the excess sodium/salt which makes you keep feeling thirsty.
4. You are always feeling weak. It is not just malaria or typhoid that causes body weakness, having too much salt in your body can cause body weakness too.
It makes your body work too hard to dilute and eliminate the salt/sodium from your body, thereby making you feel weak.
In conclusion, there are ways to cut down on too much salt intake. First, you need to decide to treat your body better by eating less salt.
Then, stop buying processed food from eateries, mama put, and roadside food sellers. Cook your food yourself. Use a pinch of salt to cook, then add spices like thyme, rosemary and cummin to your stews, sauces and barbecue as they contain natural sodium which is not harmful.
I hope you are reading this article and learned something from it. Please, share this article so that others can learn from it. Also, share your thoughts and questions in the comment section.
9Naija 