4 ms·

And a no sodium diet = death. It's a mineral required for human life, it's only in our decadent modern society that too much has ever been an issue. Too much

• qwytw 5y ago
  Before refrigeration salt was the most popular method of preserving food, so do we really consume that much more of it compared to people who lived in the past?
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    Much of the diet would've still been grains, tubers, dried beans, etc.
  • Mikeb85 5y ago
    Probably because it's in every processed food. Back then you wouldn't be directly salting every meal because salt was expensive, you'd add salted meat, a sauce that contains salt, etc... to a stew with vegetables...
    • robonerd 5y ago
      Salt was expensive.. but in the quantities we shake onto our food today, the price was pretty much negligible. Salt was considered expensive because they used a lot of salt when preserving food. For reference, US Army regulations during the American Civil War called for soldiers to be given 3 pounds 12 ounces (1.7 kg) of salt every 100 days. Sprinkling a little bit of that onto a meal would not exactly have been opulent. Of course, those ration regulations were aspirational and soldiers were lucky to get what they were owed, but it gives an idea of how much salt people considered reasonable.
  • robonerd 5y ago
    The first step in preparation of salt preserved foods was often to wash away as much salt as possible. For instance, by soaking your salted pork in fresh water to leach out as much of the salt as you could. Even so, they surely ate a lot of salt.
• jodrellblank 5y ago
  "Of course too much is bad, too much of anything is bad, that's what 'too much' means." - Fry and Laurie.