High Salt Diets & Athletic Performance w/ Dr. James Dinicolantonio

Sol is the best substance to increase blood circulation and so it dilates the arteries as well so it's like the best vasodilator like it's funny how athletes are looking for them and on it exactly and if they look within yourself look what you're losing when you sweat out salt so replace that prior to actually exercising and you get the vasodilation properties which helps release heat and actually increase the sweat production so you can and that's how we cool off right is sweating so we get all these enhanced benefits I call Salt Lick that's six factor and fitness because it helps regulate your body temperature cools you off it reduces your heart rate so you can workout longer faster harder it increases blood circulation so decreases cramping muscle cramping and actually it gets rid of acid in the cell so there's a sodium hydrogen transporter and basically in order to excrete hydrogen in the cell you have to absorb sodium so if you're overtraining syndrome actually is a depletion of salt in your tissues and so that's what ends up happening is people who continuously exercise they're constantly sweating out salt never replacing it back and basically the tissues are just becoming depleted and salt and you get all these symptoms of cramping muscle spasms things like that and really salt is your gateway to to exercise and eating healthy [Music] hey friends it's Mike motility intensity health thanks for tuning back into another video very excited to be here with dr. James Dean Nichol Antonio we're going to talk all about salt minerals into the research that he's been doing dr. James you published over 200 papers it's really fantastic how they got where episode Oh close to hundred we have not met with anyone that's published as much research so congrats on that thanks so much I appreciate that so the talk about salt yeah what got you interested in learning and studying and sure yeah I've always been into fitness I wrestled in high school and ran cross-country so I always knew that my fitness suffered if I didn't have salt so to me it never made much sense to follow the dietary guidelines and just restrict your salt intake consciously go against what your body is telling you to consume so really that kind of started out the kick started me to research salt and I've always been interested in salt and so that was one of the first substances that I really studied a lot and been publishing on a lot so is salt kind of like fat where in the sense like we've been talking about but you know traditional mainstream medium and newer times in these articles that vilified fat and we've kind of vilified salt and there's some other researchers and as mentioning offline to David Brownstein he's been talking about all the minerals that are found in salt so what is it that we got wrong on the perception of salt that linking it with high blood pressure and that sort of thing and then what are some of the missing elements that are so nutritionally we have good for us insulted when I getting because Purdue yeah so I think we got one thing we got wrong about salt is that we forgot that it's an essential nutrient right it's actually the only essential nutrient we've ever demonized etc if that is not an essential nutrient cholesterol is not an essential nutrient but salt is and so we kind of took a definitely step too far with salt and so we forgot all the things that cause salt loss throughout the day so I know you were drinking your coffee just now caffeine is actually one of the biggest factors that causes actually a ton of salt loss in the urine so basically even more chloride loss than sodium so salt is made of sodium and chloride and when you consume four cups of coffee you actually lose an entire teaspoon of salt in your urine and yet we're told to only consume one teaspoon or less so you can just see from there that from that that well I mean 90% of Americans are consuming four cups of coffee or more and so you can see that you know this is affecting a lot of people and exercise we lose a ton of salt as well we can lose like a half a teaspoon to a teaspoon of salt and just one hour of exercise so for me I've just never made a lot of sense two cups all and then what's missing from salt table cell for example doesn't have any of the minerals iodine magnesium calcium things like that so we were talking about Celtic sea salt the gray salt is the highest in magnesium so that is missing from table salt there's other Celtic Redmond real salt which is my number one go-to salt and the reason is is because it's from an ancient dried up ocean and so the modern-day oceans actually are polluted and they can have a micro microplastics in that and actually study came out like about a week ago showing that it actually has like these micro plastics in there like and they're cleaner cepting chemicals basically pretty much yeah exactly like all the plastics that we're dumping into the ocean is actually getting into the salt that you're consuming so I always try to find like an ancient right of ocean and actually Redmond real salt is from one of those ancient dried-up ocean who is kind of cool and it has a stable amounts of iodine as well and we lose a ton of iodine and SWAT which is kind of when I was doing research for the book I didn't realize that you can lose up to 100 micrograms iodine per hour of exercise and was supposed to consume 150 micrograms every single day and so you can see that if you cut your salt out and you're losing that amount of iodine and you're not getting good sources of iodine kind of see how that can lead to issues where a hypothyroidism it affects your metabolism things like that you know it's so funny so I should do a lot of competitive bike racing that wouldn't notice that that people that would ramp up their training generally like gain weight which was really paradoxical and obviously they would increase carbohydrates and stuff because they were in that old paradigm that carbs are really good fuel for endurance exercise and whatnot but that connection between the iodine excretion and the hypothyroidism induced from like a nutritional deficiency through exercise that's huge oh my gosh it was talking about that yeah I mean we lose a bunch of minerals actually through sweat one of the biggest ones is copper we lose like 0.5 milligrams of copper per hour exercising basically no one's ingesting copper because I've heard of it there's a hundred percent and then a lot of the low carb too Yuni they're mainly focusing on animal foods and really coppers and mainly in plant foods and somehow yeah that's that's really incredible so going back there's a lot of benefits obviously to some of these minerals and so forth that are found in like the Redmond real salt that you talked about so we'll get you know magnesium sodium chloride obviously iodine other trace elements so when we talk about like salt repletion we're talking about like a whole broad spectrum of American nutrients 100% yeah that's right and so a lot of people don't think that like Himalayan salt it is the highest in potassium but if you actually look at the amounts that you would get and a normal daily intake of all your salt came from Himalayan salt like 10 grams of salt you'd still only get about 40 milligrams of potassium but really it comes down to the iodine the magnesium and actually the calcium that can actually have some type of added benefit so for example the Celtic sea salt does have about 40 milligrams of Magnum on them no turn it down please let's go do not do that again we're recording so if we just go back scale back starts just repeat that yeah so so for example Celtic sea salt it has 40 milligrams of magnesium per 10 grams of salt and that's pretty good because most Americans only getting 200 milligrams of magnesium so that's literally 20% of your magnesium you can get if you consume Celtic sea salt and so some people like to mix and match because Celtic sea salt time magnesium whether it's Himalayan salt or Redmond real sell is going to give you good amount to iodine which is not found in Celtic sea salt or the Hawaiian sea salts so if you have like a really cool table the different nutrients that are in some of those come in most more common salts and you can kind of grab those and say okay I'm going to do Celtic because I don't get a lot of magnesium or someone's like someone can be like you know my diet is kind of lacking an iodine I really need Redmond real salt to pull that iodine back that's magic so what would be so someone was saying right now they think we'll gosh you know I haven't been supplementing with these really good salts have been kind of a winning exploiter said it was linked with hypertension what are some common symptoms we talked about the thyroid but what else would people experience yeah so first what happens when you cut your salt intake is your blood pressure goes down right everyone thinks that's great but actually what happened it's kind of like restricting your water and take your blood volume goes down and we know that that's happening because your heart rate gets elevated when you cut your cell intake and in fact that's actually one of the the main eye-opening things that I discuss in my book is no one's ever looked at anything really the blood pressure we've just hyper focused on blood pressure and actually if you look at heart rate the heart rate effects are actually stronger than the blood pressure reduction almost everybody so when you combine the blood pressure and heart rate almost everybody is going to actually have a worse effect when you combine those two when you cut your salt intake so the reason why your heart rate goes up when you cut your salt intake is when you go below 3,000 milligrams of sodium per day your stress hormones the noradrenaline and adrenaline which are only supposed to kick in when you're right biking and raising for a little bit they're just chronically elevated and seeing what the arteries stiffening hormones aldosterone renin-angiotensin that stiffen the arteries that we block with medications to literally reduce cardiovascular events those get jacked up when you cut your salt in tea and what's interesting is we were talking a little bit about adrenal fatigue you know adrenal insufficiency is the medical term but you know a lot of people use adrenal fatigue but it is a real condition and what happens is is if you cut your salt intake and your your adrenals are constantly pumping out aldosterone that can lead to adrenal hypertrophy and that's been shown in animal studies and so you can literally burn out your adrenals if you just are on a chronic low salt diet so that's a potential side effect - so those counter regulatory hormones are going to be upregulated because there's not enough blood volume and they're trying to there's incredible red heart rates going to go up so does it affect our rate variability to it does it affect our rate variability because the sympathetic nervous system really determines that and low-salt can actually look salt eyes can burn out your sympathetic nervous system because you're there just chronically elevated this is incredible and wow I'm so glad we're having this conversation it's like such a basic concept like but people get it wrong you notice I'm really really grateful for this conversation in your research well we were talking about how like salt is sort of like where we were ten years ago with low carb and ketogenic diets like it's like at day one that so many people don't really understand the benefits of salt and that's why this book is so important totally that's fantastic so we have credible herb related issues hello salt whatever symptoms may be fatigued and then what would it look like on bloodwork because we do see sodium potassium and calcium on the blood but does the body compensate to kind of okay yeah great question so what what you're normally going to see is if you're exercising you're fatigued or your heart rate goes up heart rate goes up or you're dizzy those are very common symptoms or when you rise from a seated to a standing position and you feel dizzy and lightheaded which is extremely common it that generally can indicate cell deficiency but there's something called pops I don't know if you've ever heard that postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome actually pretty common about three million Americans have this syndrome mainly and women when they go from a seated to a standing position their heart rate goes up over 30 beats per minute that's another symptom of self deficiency and we can treat pops with actually giving people more salt so those are some of the more common symptoms decreased capillary blood fill 2 when you pinch your fingernails and the blood flow doesn't come back within one or two seconds is the deficiency can be a deficiency deficiency in salt uric acid goes up and swung levels go up when you cut yourself in take us insulin helps the kidneys retain more salt so you can literally store more fat per calorie you consume when you're cutting your salt you can cure doing something healthy and you could be storing more fat because of that triglycerides go up HDL goes down when you cut your salt intake LDL goes up so when you when you start adding all these harmful effects it's kind of crazy that we add whatever even think that you know just because it might might lower blood pressure which we just covered might not even be a good thing right sure blood volume reduction it's crazy that they would the guidelines we try to say now you should go against your salt cravings we want you to consume no more than X amount she never made any sense but on lab work what generally what you'll see is everybody thinks that you're going to see low sodium levels in the blood now it is very common so most common electrolyte abnormality in both the inpatient and outpatient setting six over six million Americans actually have hyponatremia or low blood sodium levels every year and it's retro pretty prevalent in chronic kidney disease as well actually more than one in four patients with chronic kidney disease five year period left um at least one one episode of low sodium levels in the blood but what you can see on lab work is you got to get like a 24 hour urinalysis sometimes or fractional excretion of sodium so what ends up happening is if you have a really high fractional excretion you could be wasting salt because you have damage to the kidneys or if you have a low fractional excretion or a really low amount of sodium coming out in the 24-hour urine despite you eating a good amount that means your body's holding on to the salt and that's a good indication of salt deficiency they could also indicate that you're not absorbing salt well because you have damage to the intestine like we were building Crohn's disease and silly acts and IBS and ulcerative colitis they don't those patients don't absorb salt very well I actually counsel those patients on a daily basis basis in your clinical setting that you'd go along with the reshare correct Wow yeah hard to note yeah and for just the average person what you're going to potentially see is if you're drinking a normal fluid intake per day bu n which is blood urea nitrogen can actually be elevated from a low salt intake because B UN will rise from a reduction in blood volume reducing blood flow to the kidneys causing urea which is supposed to be in the urine to elevate so if you have a if you have an elevated B um that is a potential indication of salt deficiency and everybody I mean when you get your general labs bu n is almost always down there like 24 it's high generally meditite and most contrary say oh we don't really know what to do with it yeah I'd be fine you ready hi you're a little dehydrated yeah it really is probably you're actually salt deficient wow this is really incredible so you know I guess I was trying to think you know back like historically you know if we look at the consumption of processed food which a lot of people are consuming a lot of that you know that is artificially there's a lot of just sodium chloride getting added to that so is that part of the problem where people would have excessive amounts of just an isolated the salt without all the accessory micronutrients so that's why the guidelines were maybe establish in that regard yeah I mean I think my mindset has always been don't blame salt for what the processed food and the sugar did the ganas honestly so I really don't think it's necessarily the salt and the reason is is because if you think about the last eight thousand years we've consumed an extremely high salt diet because we never had refrigerators so our main food preservative was salt and literally I was when I was looking at some of the research I was blown away about how much salt populations consumed like thousands of years ago so the Romans they consumed 25 grams of salt per day and it was known the Roman armies they had to consume more than twice what we eat this just a function while so salt has always been known to have extremely important effects on throughout history but when I was looking at the intake in Europe so in Sweden in the 1600s they ate up to 100 grams of salt which we would think is absolutely crazy right because we only consume like 10 grams of salt but your kidneys they can completely handle if you have normal kidneys they can flush out 100 grams of salt no problem that's how efficient because when when I was actually researching how saw works physiologically with the kidneys when blood is filtered in the kidneys the salt is actually lost in the tubules so it then the kidneys have to reabsorb all that salt that's actually 60% of the energy that the kidneys use every single day is reabsorbing the three and a half pounds of salt that they filter and so when I started realizing that wow we are basically essentially walking oceans right like we are so our blood is salty and actually that's something I discuss in the book is that our blood the salt the concentration of salt compared to other minerals in the blood is the exact same as the ocean it's 90 percent of all the minerals in our blood is sodium and chloride and that's the exact same percentages in the ocean which was kind of cool so we're constantly like filtering a salty blood in our body and if we lose it that's the problem and we're constantly our kidneys are constantly actively reabsorbing that salt and so if you have damage to the kidneys and you can't do that that's a big issue but if you eat a ton of salt it's actually a release on the kidneys they're let they say thank you I don't have to reabsorb and spend energy reabsorbing all the salt I can just let it freely pass so eating abnormally high amounts of salt like look like in processed foods generally is not even a big issue at all interesting okay what about like we can talk about MSG another bad thing later demo it's really fascinating so we're actually helping the kidneys out by having a higher salt diet and one of the right kind of salt like real food they felt like a mature murderer yeah really interesting and then so we're causing more issues that for having high blood blood sugar levels which standards the kidneys and so on so that's why the issue yeah what's cool is that salt and sugar look the same right these two way crystals they have literally the opposite effects in the body so sugar causes insulin resistance low salt causes insulin resistance it's so it's crazy so when I was doing a lot of my research in ancient Roman times they always actually put salt on their gums and teeth to prevent inflammation and dental caries and yes sugar we know is one of the most common causes of dental caries so I was like when I was researching it was almost like a yin and yang between the two like salt good sugar bad and um that was just something cool when I was in doing the research for the book play that's an awesome just curious how long did you do research for Joanna's topic yeah it would take me over two years to research and write this book I mean because no one's ever done a book about salt right so I literally had to write the book on it and I read like well over 500 studies to to write the book it was just an absolute enormous amount of work but I loved doing it thanks for doing it in a much conversation to be had in this whole ketogenic low-carb functional medicine space so when you do research and notes to kind of off topic but are you printing out the full study and going through everything like yeah it's a little bit about yeah I know I definitely don't just like read the abstract right and honestly a lot of the studies are from really really far back so I'm on that type of researcher that I want to know where it started so basically the book goes from 1904 like where the actual salt blood pressure hypothesis began so I kind of tell the story of these two French scientists named and Martin Bouchard and they just put six of their kind of sick patients on 20 grams of salt which is more than twice than what we consume and they saw the blood pressure count went up a little bit and then when they cut the salt and went down and then three years later another doctor said that didn't happen with his patient so there was like the start of the salt wars right away in 1904 and then it carried over and I go through some of some of the key players in the book and we can talk about that if you want to but it's kind of interesting I will say one thing about for some reason in the 1950s it was kind of common that patients and doctors would base a lot of the information on just like a single study and what I found was as guy named Louis Dahl who was a doctor he was pretty famous for genetically engineering the self sensitive rats because he knew that he could give normal rats like so much salt and it would never cause high blood pressure they'd give him the communi quit one of 100 grams of salt would do nothing so genetically engineered salt sensitive rats and even in those were apps he had to give them the the human equivalent of 40 grams of salt to even get an increase in blood pressure but most people don't know that they just know about the salt sensitive rats that came about but Louis dollas kind of the answer keys of salt because he published a study I think it was like 1954 basically what he did was he picked just a few populations and showed pretty much like Ansel Keith did right he liked to selected a few populations that a salt intake goes up blood pressure goes up but of course when we look at inner salt which had 48 populations not counting the the four on a on acculturated populations blood pressure actually went down is salt intake increased and we kind of discussed how that could happen right is the artery stiffing hormones go down with more salt and noradrenaline and adrenaline gets lowered with more salt so it may actually which which is really crazy is that low salt may actually lead to the very disease state that we think it prevents hypertension totally well I was thinking about that when I was driving over here you know from Toronto is that you hit on it like historically we would use salt to preserve our food and so during the winter like we would ever kill animals and preserve them and so forth so how much like and if we talk about like ancestral humans and primal people Papua New Guinea you know stuff like that the Masai how much salt are they having roughly that's a great great question so one of the arguments is that I get is advocates of the low salt diet will be like well we never consumed a lot of salt during evolutionary times and actually it all stems from this one New England Journal of Medicine paper on en it was one of the authors it's like the one of the kind of Godfather's so to speak of the paleo movement very very smart guy yeah but he kind of got it wrong about salt intake so the New England Journal of Medicine paper actually the the sodium intake that they estimated during evolutionary times was no more like fourteen hundred milligrams if you consumed a straight meat diet and then like four hundred milligrams it was just vegetables but he got it wrong because we would consume the whole organism right we even add in the salty blood the salty interstitial fluid to salt the organs the skin onero all containing high salt and so when you actually think about if we were to kill a deer one year has 30 days worth of the normal cell diet nowadays so you can see how absolutely evolutionarily we could have gotten a ton of salt and another substance that has a lot of salt is Tiger nuts which were available during evolutionary times and they actually have 30 300 milligrams of sodium per like handful and and so it was shown and they something called nut cracker man he was like one of our ancestors and he had all these like basically dents in his molars from consuming these Tiger Nelson hit I was also hanging crickets which in fact are actually pretty high in salt hmm I mean we kind of neglect the insects that we would consume through evolutionary time like this all actually seems to make insects fly faster move faster and I kind of used salta to do that for myself for my workout i dosed myself us all and that's some of the benefits to that like pure work out pretty work out okay yeah I loved it going into it but that's really fascinating stuff I'm glad I'm kind of talked about with you right so I mean so humans now modern-day humans are just having like you have just read me you know just like ground beef and whatnot so it's deficient in the salt like so for eating organ meats meeting like our ancestors did you know making bone broth and so forth then you know if we're not doing that we're not getting the salt that we're talking about you got it if you're eating vegetables you're eating just dry hunks of muscle meat you got to add this all back you got it okay last thing all right let's talk about performance so one teaspoon per hour of exercise you said a lot oh yeah so basically on average we're going to lose about between a half a teaspoon to a teaspoon of salt per hour of exercise but if you are like a competitive soccer player you can lose up to 6,000 milligrams of sodium per hour of exercise which is like absolutely astronomical right we're only supposed to consume like 2,000 milligrams a day and you can lose more than three times that in just an hour of exercise so yeah like what what I do is I figure out what I'm going to work out like how long I'm going to work out and if it's going to be like running Plus lifting weights or if I'm just going to be lifting weights and I will go so myself assault depending on how hard and vigorous max shows is going to be normally what I do is half a teaspoon of red mineral salt I'll just take it straight out at least for me it obviously doesn't taste bad it's almost refreshing washing down with some water I'm good to go 20 minutes later hit the gym and it's so interesting like last year I had it was just the beginning of the summer and hadn't worked out for like six months join a gym ladies like don't you have to pay right now just going through your workout so hit the weights and then decided I was going to run a mile I'd literally like collapsed basically painted for three minutes and I didn't notice myself assault next day it was going to help assault hit the weights choices hard ran twice as hard asked him feel any type of faintness dizziness anything like that so and people tell me that when need went Aging that it dramatically improves their performance and the reason is is salt is the best substance to increase blood circulation and so it died late the arteries as well so it's like the best basil dilator like it's funny how athletes are looking for ladonna exactly and it's like look within yourself look what you're losing when you sweat out salt so replace that prior to actually exercising and you get the vasodilation properties which helps release heat and actually what's funny is if Ancel keys actually did contribute something really good to the scientific literature I found one of his studies I think it was like in the 1940s he actually showed that on when you exercising in the heat if you were on a low salt diet your body temperature was actually higher and the reason is is because salt helps vasodilators arteries helps release heat and your sweat actually increases sweat production so you can and that's how we cool off right is sweating so we get all these enhanced benefits I call salt like the six factor and fitness because it helps regulate your body temperature cools you off it reduces your heart rates you can work out longer faster harder it increases blood circulation so decreases cramping muscle cramping and actually it gets rid of acid and in the cell so there's a sodium hydrogen transporter and basically in order to excrete hydrogen in the cell you have to absorb sodium so if you're overtraining syndrome actually is a depletion of salt and your tissues and so that's what ends up happening is people who continuously exercise they're constantly sweating out so now we're replacing it back and basically the tissues are just becoming depleted and salt and you get all these symptoms of cramping muscle spasms things like that and really salt is your gateway to exercise and eating healthy that's brilliant and then you talked about earlier like when you start to over train you stand up real quick you get dizzy which I notice right when I started doing like competitive bike racing and things like that that was a first symptom and actually once I started you know per David brown seeds recommendation adding more septic sea salt some of those symptoms generally went away so let's talk about you know some of the applications of like dosing salt we talked about like pre-workout should people be having like 5 grams with each meal like you know some general recommendations for cuisine in the hip-stir yeah so um well what's interesting is we we kind of talked about caffeine so if someone's drinking a lot of coffee they're going to need more salt and so some is working out really hard they're going to they're going to need more salt into my house but what I like to do is in the morning like if I have some pastured eggs I'll put some Redmond real salt on there and some little a little bit of pepper and you know I don't just put like a little bit of salt like you know I do a nice coating and basically you salt to taste right so salt is our gateway to eating healthy and really you know it's just it comes down to if you overdo it your body is going to compensate and what's cool about salt is that you have a built-in safety mechanism the the taste receptors and your tongue will actually flip if you get too much and provide you an aversion signal which we know doesn't happen with sugar right sugar that sweet tooth doesn't go away it actually gets stronger the more you consume of that so what's what's cool is if you overdo it in one dish you're not going to overdo it you're going to your body is going to send you a signal and you might not salt your next dish so really it's almost like listening to your internal cell thermostat which I kind of go over like how the brain controls salt intake and things like that and what's what's actually interesting to we're talking earlier about how salt deficiency can potentially lead to sugar and addiction and one one reason how it does that is when an animal animal becomes depleted install they know it is somehow seek out like a salt leg and so that we've always known that that salt intake and drive to get salt is controlled by the body but for some reason we knew that about animals we forgot that it actually applies to humans as well you know with the guidelines telling us you know don't consciously restrict your salt intake which i think is honestly like the the worst thing you could ever do for your health because two of my family members actually we're told by their doctors to cut the salt they despite their bodies completely craving it and they both wound up in the hospital with low sodium levels in the blood and like severe dehydration there just goes to show you like listen to your bodies your body is way smarter than any type of guideline or you know Health Agency's recommendation but that to house-elf deficiency can lead to and drug addiction how an animal how are you man knows to get more salt when it's depleted is the body actually activates the reward system in the brain so that way you are driven via this type of internal craving to find salt in the diet and when you do you get it literally you get a greater high from the salt it tastes better and some people have even told me when they're deficient in salt they can it tastes like sweet like salt almost case sweet and the reason is is because that activated reward system is going to save your life when you are deficient so before we had salt all around us if we were just an animal that type of reward activation in the brain is literally going to save you from salt efficiency same thing happens in humans reward system gets activated and now unfortunately sugar and things like drugs substances of abuse can actually hijack that activated sensitized dopamine reward system and so that's how salt low salt diet can contribute to salt efficiency potentially lead to sugar and drug addiction which is crazy thing right so that's just one of the kind of mind-blowing side effects that I found about what happens when our bodies become deficient in salt and there's always all these effects that that happen to if you cut yourself and take one study showed and people who exercise an hour a day which I try to do basically if you're following the low-salt advice consuming about twenty to twenty three hundred milligrams so right at the top of what we're supposed to be eating if you work out an hour a day these people in a study actually became deficient and salt and so what the body ended up doing is is what they hypothesized was that the body was pulling sodium from the bone to maintain normal sodium levels in the blood and at the same time your osteoclast they're not like smart enough to just strip the bone and just only take sodium they'll pull calcium and magnesium at the same time and so they measured the calcium magnesium in the urine on the low self diet and was just spitting it out because it's probably being pulled from the bone so just so it's crazy how osteoporosis which we've always blamed that a high-salt diet because salt can potentially increase calcium excretion in the urine we blamed on osteoporosis on a high salt i and in fact salt actually increases the absorption of calcium no one ever kind of looked at that and we lose like there's few doctors who've kind of just solely focused on salt pushing on calcium out in the urine but what's interesting is that you absorb one so kind of counterbalances itself and if you're pulling those minerals from your bones to maintain a normal sodium level you can see that that can potentially lead to things like weaker bones osteopenia osteoporosis and we've also blamed high salt intake on kidney stones because of the enhanced calcium in the urine but what's crazy is is the studies in humans show that giving more salt actually supplementing people with 3,000 milligrams of sodium reduces the risk of kidney stones and the reason is is because you drink more in your urine volume increases and the actual concentration of calcium oxalate and things like that in the iron the concentration of that goes down so it's kind of crazy how we blame salt and it's literally potentially a solution for the disease state that we've been blaming it for so wild gosh it sounds just like fat in this in fact you're making a lot of the different parallels for me so you know twenty going back to the exercise because the recommendations are like 45 minutes of activity to an hour and people are exercising during weight-bearing exercises like running walking resistance training for their bones yet if they're not supplementing with salt they could be except rating osteopenia osteoporosis crazy but let's just talk about other recommendations like okay so if you're going to go to the gym you talked about like salting out beforehand which is really awesome tip what about like people are drinking a lot of water throughout the day should we always either have mineral water like I have here we were talking about our favorite yeah drill Steiner Steiner really good stuff gets talked about wide row Center is good and then if people don't they would have their own filtered water at home can they add the Redman salt and sure they always salt the water it's a great question so living coastally you're always going to get extra salt in your rainwater because it's going to come from the ocean but as you said tap water you know it literally has no salt in it and yet you're saying you're most athletes are just replacing either with water or even Gatorade which we think it's high in salt but it's not even close to how much salt is coming out in your sweat so you actually do need to at least I need to dose myself a salt and because you're you're not replacing what's being lost and yeah Gerald Steiner is great because it has one of the highest magnesium contents of all waters so I think it's got 100 milligrams per litre of water of magnesium which is great because most Americans are only getting like 200 milligrams so literally one and a half bottles of Gerald Steiner and you're getting half of what most people could swim in an entire day and so most water doesn't have that Gerald Steiner is really cool too because it has sodium bicarbonate and so a lot of people aren't getting enough vegetables and getting bicarbonate and so you know people are talking about latent metabolic acidosis which I personally believe is a true thing especially if you're just if you have kidney disease and you can't excrete acid very well if you if you're lacking in vegetables in it bicarbonate that Cyril Steiner is going to give you a lot of the bicarbonate you're not getting through fruits and vegetables cool good to know and then salting water like so if you're just walking around you're one of these people how's it get a lot of bodybuilders and fitness people have like a gallon jug of water they care throughout the day to get their water in and whatnot should they add salt to it yeah so in my book I say no don't because it's gonna taste like sweat yeah either take it dry or what you can do is you can put it in like lemonade or lime juice or lemon juice take it like a shot but I honestly just take it dry and then wash it down with water mmm because it will taste kinda yucky drinking salt water exactly thinking SWAT yeah so just like bolus it yeah yeah I mean for coffee though I do a little pinch of like mineral salt and it takes away the bitterness um but even up to like 1/8 to the teaspoon of salt in like three cups of coffee I'll do and that works good for me and some other people have said that's like perfect for them like 1/8 of a teaspoon and about three cups of coffee it's awesome really good tips you have so much more in the book excited to dive deeper into that I just got my coffee today guys so it's a really fantastic book so James you study a lot of other areas we're talking about like the ketogenic diet and how a lot of people think the ketogenic Tides bacon and butter and lard and all that but we're kind of forgetting if we if we follow that approach we're forgetting about this ecosystem called our microbiome that turns out to be very metabolically active so what you do a lot of research talk to us about like where people might go wrong on a low-carb style diet yeah that's a great question so I were I went wrong with with the low-carb diet 100% it worked for me for two years because if you're going to eliminate refined carbs and sugar of course you're going to see benefits and then people stall and then people start gaining lay back and they and that happened to me what end up happening is my waist circumference actually started growing like 2-3 inches I was it what is going on so I started restricting my carb intake even more and it got even worse so that's where I learned about right fiber basically more more lots of resistant starch starts the you e that hits the colon feeds the good gut bacteria produces all these short chain fatty acids that improve insulin resistance and release glp-1 which I published a paper and open-heart BMJ about about how that works so yeah fiber is a really big deal and a lot of people shun it and some people honestly they they can't tolerate fiber if you can't tolerate high-fiber foods you know do what works for you but honestly it dramatically improved my health when I started eating things like aims and it zekiel bread which is on like a sprouted grain it's one of the few grains that I will eat and like uh basically cooked and cooled potatoes to just like double triple quadruple the fiber if you if you cook a potato and then you cool it you just like quadruple the resistant starch so just on that something that I've done for a while now and it works out really well for me so by actually going against like kind of your intuition and said we're following your intuition but going against a doctrine of a low-carb diet you actually improved your way yeah no us 100% and that don't get me wrong I'm still overall low-carb I'm still probably only getting maybe 120 grams of carbs so compared to like the standard American is getting 400 grams of carbs right that's pretty low and I'm dead by no means am I even a moderate or high carb intake but I'm getting way more than what I used to I thought 20 to 40 was was what I should be doing right and it didn't work for me after a couple years and when I when I increased my carb intake via beans I wasn't probably getting a lot of magnesium and I was probably eating way too much meat I was probably eating like 220 pounds of meat a day and that's just like way too much iron for a male female not menopausal they need 18 milligrams iron so they need a lot more iron than a man in the human body actually is doesn't really have a good way to excrete iron so you can accumulate a lot of iron if you overdo it especially if you're a man yeah really good tip by to mention something about your paper with glp-1 so we talked about hormones and the accreting is quite a bit I haven't read a particular paper but let's dive into that yes so basically your intestinal cells will produce um top-1 when you feed them that basically that resistant starch which is really cool no glp-1 there's medications that are glp-1 analogues and basically that proves insulin resistance reduces blood pressure helps you get rid of extra salt if you need to which is kind of cool if you're someone that has high insulin levels you could be retaining more salt and really it's again you're blaming sulphur what the sugar dead right a lot of times people if they're sensitive you should you should not be sensitive to salt if you consume salt in your leg swallow that is not normal what's happening is your blood vessels there they're leaky insult is going from the blood into the interstitial fluid so it's not don't blame salt for what your underlying disease state is causing and generally that's to do a diet high in sugar and refined carbs causing insulin resistance and high insulin levels and causing you to overeat but back to glp-1 helps lower blood pressure helps cardiovascular health insulin resistance as we just discussed kidney health so yeah when you start putting back on some of this resistance starch and feeding your gut bacteria producing short chain fatty acids you can get incredible benefits yeah that's so powerful I mean if people I often like do seminars for doctors on this topic and ask the crowd to buy kados gastric bypass for Patrick surgery cause weight loss what's the mechanism and a lot of people say well it's really about nutrient restriction and stuff like that but if you look at the end creams and the changes in the microbiome there's endotoxin levels and things so it's really cool that these got hormones just hours after the shows we are dramatically increase so powerful stuff and I like that tip on the fiber other things like phytonutrients you like to leave those in yeah no I definitely think phytonutrients are important to consume and you know especially spinach is really good to to get the lutein so lutein is actually important for preventing LDL from oxidizing and for eye health it's incredibly important and not a lot of people eat spinach and I hate spinach so what I do is I'll cook some pork chops salt them really nice get it and then I'll let just those salty juices flow into a bowl and I get this nice salty broth and I'll just I'll be able to eat so much spinach I'm getting all the good magnesium and potassium and that I would never would have gotten so you salt to kind of flavor your food and eat those bitter healthy foods high in magnesium and potassium that you never would have had you not added the salt and my kids won't eat vegetables or nuts or seeds or anything like that and once they put salt on ibly but people are so scared of salt they'd rather have their kids eat junk food as long as it's like low salt it's labeled low salt so it must be healthy right it's crazy like we're scared of the most natural antimicrobial and preservative we would rather have our kids have like artificial preservatives rather than salt because we're so scared of it for some reason you hit on something that brought up sparked a little thought in my head so you mention antimicrobial so what is salt doing to the microbiome yes oh well one thing self does is that it brings chloride and your stomach acid is hydrochloric acid so you literally your stomach acid will go down if you don't have enough salt in your body and so you won't be able to basically digest your food and absorb nutrients and you can have bacterial overgrowth because you are literally having a reduction and hydrochloric acid production from restricting your salt intake it's crazy right so when you start understanding the benefits of sodium and chloride and the body and how it's an essential nutrient your body controls it you can start to appreciate the benefits of that Wow people need to go Imam I want to go get some more so we're having a little mineral water here but that's amazing okay so we can have reduction in hydrochloric acid production which can like lead to small intestine but you're overgrowth like you talked about motility issues and can get reductions and bile flow because it's all based upon HCl kind of sets the stage for the downstream digestive iterative processes yes Wow amazing yeah you know so much about all these different micronutrients and macronutrients it's really thanking that precious that's one of my own passions is micronutrients for sure and love it you know I think I think we you were kind of touching on it we simply focus on macronutrients so much and it's like the Holy Grail is micronutrients like because E we can get macros wherever we want but the micros are so important for so many things and I think a lot of disease states are actually caused by these subclinical micronutrient deficiencies mainly magnesium is a really big one and I think manganese and copper is also a really big micronutrients that we're lacking because we're not eating a lot of plant foods so interesting so we went all over the place which was awesome anything of major highlights for the book that we didn't get to talk about or something that you really want people to share before we go into our four final questions I would just say you know the salt is the gateway to eating healthy and exercising and what's better than that right so don't fear salt it is the natural substance your body controls its intake it's an essential mineral and and listen to your body when it comes to your cravings for salt brilliant love it so the book is available pretty much anywhere books are sold Amazon or Noble or we've got a yepit's nationwide Barnes Noble you can go on my website to self XCOM and get it for there's a few other links it people can purchase the book at home you can follow me on twitter to dr. james doneck di and i see you're pretty active on twitter i am Priya always sharing at deaf which is awesome cool alright so we have four final questions a little bit more personal kind of short format there was just one herb nutrient or botanical James you just could not live without I have a suspicion of what it may be or mica nutrient what would that be and why got it I would price aid for micronutrient magnesium and the reason is is you literally your energy ATP isn't activated without magnesium so ATP is actually magnesium ATP and so people that are fatigued all the time they don't have any energy they're always looking for caffeine or something like that and literally they might just be deficient in magnesium and magnesium controls sodium potassium and calcium in the body because it controls the sodium potassium pump and so it is really really important and that's probably one thing that if I would have to say is one of the most important micronutrients it would be magnesium any of them and so we talked about in the mineral water Gerald Steiner so tire and magnesium yeah what are your favorite foods that are high in magnesium so beans and nuts so nuts are really high in magnesium and it's a lot of people just don't like the flavor of nuts because they're bitter so add some salt right yeah and get your mag so come here so what we do at home is so come overnight to like get the anti-nutrients phytates lectins and so forth the pasta nuts then put them in a dehydrator at like 99 degrees or around there so we don't like oxides of fat but put them put a little salt garlic on different things in there and they taste like really well it's just like they're roasted but they're totally raw which is really cool that's awesome that's fantastic so uh there's just one exercise you could only do one because it's really good for your hormones good for longevity for the rest of your life what exercise or movement would that be and why I said well it's a great question I never even thought about that honestly I think wilfer for muscular strength I think push-ups are huge and really underappreciated but I think Ted Damon would say that that's probably one of his go-to because it just it just hit so many things and if you do like a really really crack push up like slowly and do it right you're hitting a lot your shoulders and your back and your chest and your biceps core so that's definitely when it comes to like muscular strength I try to do that but high-intensity exercise is really important too to get the cardio just like you know suicide Sprint's for a little bit to hit the cardio really quick but I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily recommend over exercising I think that's a big issue especially for not getting with some of the salt yeah brilliant so you've read a lot of research on exercise and movement I would garner so the traditional model is like oh yeah I just get your cardio in 300 minutes or something plus or minus per week and there's a lot of good research when the max resistance training can be stronger offset diabetes and disease so if you had to pick cardio or wear resistance training we're used to tell I mean hands down resistance training guys hands down and like you said it's because resistance training you're building muscle and muscle is metabolically active and so your basal metabolic rate goes up and you're growing new mitochondria so people who are suffering from fatigue and things like that like obese people they literally have lost mitochondria in their muscle and so growing muscle is when your bus ways to produce mitochondria mitochondrial biogenesis so I think you know lifting weights is extremely important yeah it has more carryover right is what exactly and muscle fatigue happens as we age so it's like if you're not working out and offsetting the the opposite of hypertrophy right and I'm also break down each catabolism kind of thing exactly on a percent yeah brilliant okay so James you got two kids you got the clinical practice you're doing a lot of research got the grade book doing a lot of things what is your morning routine look like you know a lot of successful people can't have a set of values rituals things they do first thing in the morning what do you do yeah that's a great question so what I normally do in the morning is I will have three pastured eggs with some redmond real salt and I will also have a piece of Ezekiel bread with some sesame seeds around the sesame Ezekiel bread so sesame seeds are like honestly you want like a micronutrient like bolus dose seeds seeds and knots are like just so great and so I'll do is I'll have like a handful of almonds - sometimes in the morning with some dark chocolate and sesame seeds are pretty bitter though so I'll either do salt or I'll do some dark chocolate and combine them and that way it doesn't taste really you know too bad yeah so scrambled eggs I don't scramble them because I get a little word on that type a personality kind of like what you were describing with the nuts that seems a little type-a to me too because when we want to do something right we want to do it 100% and so when you scramble an egg you can potentially oxidize the cholesterol in the egg and you can oxidize the the yolk actually contains a good amount of omega-6 so you can oxidize that if you scramble them so what I do is I just cook them over easy so I'm not oxidizing the cholesterol and the the linoleic acid in there in the looting that you mentioned earlier so looting in the eggs and that can yep interesting yeah yeah that's a it's a great source of lutein pestered eggs and so over you so that's almost getting a little bit of the raw the okra yeah yeah exactly yeah that's awesome okay really a good tip I love that the seeds and then you mentioned chocolate I know chocolate why I've read how decent amount of magnesium to it does yeah like dark chocolate is is another just micronutrient powerhouse that if you just add some seeds and nuts and dark chocolate to your diet you'd be you'd be really surprised at how how enhance enhancing that is to your overall micro nutrient density of your diet it really it can make a huge difference and the almonds bring omega-3s which so many people are just completely deficient in and I think that we need to be eating a lot more seafood or supplementing with an omega-3 supplement I absolutely think that's extremely important I supplement with so mega threes because I don't probably eat enough seafood as much as I should because I just don't like the taste I mean who would honestly choose like wild salmon over like a juicy like prime rib like like you know what I mean I would flavor just out there so sometimes that you know I might only eat seafood once a month and it's just a great way to just maintain a higher level of omega-3s which is so important on so many levels yeah I agree hundred percent I personally take around two to three grams a day yeah clear depends on what I've been doing out in flames I am etc etcetera so this final question here kind to see how we can have affect the health of communities in larger groups of people so if you were to bump shoulders for the politician president someone from the World Health Organization in an elevator and eternity and said James you know you're doing a lot of research you're working with clients working with patients what's one healthy lifestyle tip or just tip soundbite that I should know about to maybe kind of influence some policy around what would you say to them yeah it's a great question it's deep too but honestly I think from the ground up we need to completely dissolve like how guidelines are written and how these committees are assembled and it's like a closed-door right it's like we are fighting it's like underground nutrition we're trying to get the word out and we can't because these committees hold the key and it's up to them if they decide that saturated fat is bad they don't want to look at some of the evidence they're allowed to not look at some of the meta analyses that show that swapping out saturated fat replacing saturated fat with like vegetable oils actually increase in mortality they're allowed to like just selectively not even look at that and just say oh no we're still going to say saturated fat is bad if I could have one thing happen it would be to just like dissolve that type of closed-door policy and allow more open-door talk and and be way more evidence-based when it comes to our nutritional recommendations I think we if we don't if we don't fix that we're never going to fix population nutritional advice and it's a one by core way to do that would be removing industry influence and research without the one element yeah a hundred percent and so it's like it's kind of the bad nutritional advice seats farm on right because if it makes you sick then you can then you can take five pills because you have all these disease states and it's just how right now nutrition policy is in the United States is that vicious cycle of feeding one industry the sickness and the illness it's really we're not healthcare mayor or sick care and the big issue yeah so with a basic scientist and researcher yourself were you kind of concerned to launch like a book like this it's a little going away because it's the - diet low sodium and all that stuff are you kind of putting yourself out there and maybe taking the chin a little bit when it comes to like publishing and high-end journal to convention vmj and so for sure sure yeah there's always going to be nutrition it's almost become more politics than science right so it you know definitely there are a lot of bullying going around if you go against what some of the guidelines are saying and so yeah that definitely can happen but I honestly feel that I have so much research poured into this book and make such a compelling case I stand by everything that is in the book and I honestly have no reservations about it because there's just so much information and references in there yeah so if people overlook the title and actually dive into it there's not much they can really access to actually say yeah to kind of relate yeah really James really appreciate you come on the show we learned a ton from from you you're very active on Twitter like you mentioned but so if there's one resource online where people if they want to connect to follow you and see what you have to in the future where would that be yeah that would definitely be Twitter at dr. James doneck I'm pretty good at if someone has a question kind of giving them some good general information to set them on the path to healthier life appreciate coming take like as we sure AM and a lot of good times awesome

Channel: High Intensity Health

Views: 119,087

Rating: 4.928493 out of 5

Keywords: low-salt diets, sodium, low-sodium, high-salt diet, ketogenic diet, keto diet

Id: eTr3S2Bqlow

Length: 52min 52sec (3172 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 12 2017