You will be shocked at the amount of salt your body loses everyday in the form of sweat in India just by sitting. Yes, you heard me right. This is different from the workout sweat. We are talking about the tropical summer months in India – where most days feel like you are inside a sauna. Keeping yourself sufficiently hydrated with plenty of fluids and consuming adequate enough salt with our food is the only way to beat the summer heat. Dehydration gets worse with the consumption of sweetened drinks, fizzy drinks, foods with high sugar content and spices, all diuretics like alcohol, tea and coffee.
We often tend to miss out dehydration signs and symptoms like a dry mouth, concentrated urine, and a drop in blood pressure, dizziness and light-headedness, headache and fatigue, a sweaty feeling, difficulty in concentration and chances of constipation, fainting and black outs. Babies and older people are more prone to it.
The conventional notion among the health conscious is that salt is bad for you. The truth is in summer, deficiency in salt is just as bad and harmful for you as deficiency in water for those with normal vitals. Only high BP patients will have salt intolerance including those with a family history of hypertension despite a healthy lifestyle. The daily recommended allowance of salt is 2300mg. But those who are physically active definitely require more salt than the average sedentary person to replace what is lost through sweating and training in a hot environment. If not, they could suffer muscle cramps.
The question now comes how much salt is enough. The human body’s sensitivity to sodium increases with age. Complications around salt replenishment arise when salt comes in from processed and junk food like bread and soda; a better alternative is low-fat products, good home-cooked food or a sports drink. A high carb-diet and increased salt intake can cause water and salt retention, high BP and bloating around the ankles. A low carb diet can help fight bloating and water retention thereby ejecting more salt in urine.