Essay On Salt

Sodium chloride also known as salt, is a very important nutrient to the body because it can help the body control blood pressure, it also helps the body with the proper functioning of the muscles, and it helps the body with the communication of the nerve impulses (1). Salt is also important because it is used in the daily diets. Salt doesn’t just help the body, but it also helps to bring out the flavors of the meals that people cook. Whenever people are sitting and watching television snacking on potato chips or eating pizza, salt is being consumed whether or not people are aware of it (1). Many persons don’t realize that salt needs to be consumed in small amounts each day. The average person consumes an average of 3,436 mg of salt (2). The American Heart Association recommends people to take in less than 3,000 mg of sodium per day (3). The average person eats around 436 mg more than the recommended salt based on these numbers. Salt is important to be consumed within these numbers because it gets absorbed like a sponge absorbs water by the gastrointestinal tract also known as the GI tract and that helps cover and protect the body’s cells (2). If a person doesn’t do the right thing and actually take in a healthy amount of salt and they take

Some of the consequences it can lead to is hypertension. Hypertension means that a person has a high blood pressure (3). If a person has high blood pressure it means his or her blood is having to pump blood through the body with a higher pressure than a person with a normal blood pressure (3). The reason why this happens, it’s because the water gets hold on in the body and it makes the amount of blood in the arteries to increase, also making the smaller arteries smaller in size and the blood flow needs a higher amount of pressure to pass through