Don Wiss wrote:
>Adding salt is not Paleolithic, and all of these questions are off-topic to
>this list.
>
>Dietary sodium levels were extremely low in the past compared to modern
>diets and hence renal calcium excretion, despite high phosphorous intake,
>was still less than that for moderns. Some references can be found here:
>
>  http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?A2=ind9706&L=paleodiet&O=T&P=2282

Do any of these references say anything about the paleolithic diet?  They
seem to be modern studies which explain why salt is bad, but say nothing
about ancestral habits.  Are there any studies which prove that our
paleolithic ancestors consumed a low-sodium diet?

How serious is the calcium loss?  According to one study, women who consumed
3000 mg of sodium per day required 1700 mg of calcium to avoid a net calcium
loss.  Perhaps 1700 mg sounds like a lot to some people, but I don't think
it would be that hard to obtain from bones and bone marrow.  There are
studies which correlate calcium loss with protein intake (e.g., see
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/htbin-post/Entrez/query?uid=9497187&form=6&db=m&
Dopt=b), but most members of this list aren't afraid of eating animal
protein.

I think that increased salt consumption could be justified as a means of
compensating for the lack of blood in our diet.  Also, it's not as though
advanced technology were required to make salt.  For example, "Reports from
Onondaga, New York in 1654 indicated the Onondaga Indians made salt by
boiling brine from salt springs."  Even if boiling is considered un-paleo,
there is nothing to prevent even the most primitive human from drinking salt
water directly.  Dr. Weston Price reported that the Plains Indians would
send small parties up to 250 miles to harvest salt.

If you're interested in reading some pro-salt arguments, go to
http://salt.org.il/frame_phys.html. Yes, the website is extremely biased in
favour of salt, but its information may help to counterbalance the extreme
anti-salt bias of this mailing list. ;-)  Here are a couple of excerpts:

<<An unexpectedly high incidence of heart attacks was found in hypertensive
men with low amounts of salt in their urine, New York researchers reported
today. [...] Alderman and his colleagues at Albert Einstein and at Cornell
University Medical College in New York City studied a group of 1,900
hypertensive men for an average of almost four years. More than four times
as many heart attacks occurred in men with the lowest amounts of sodium in
their urine, compared to men with the highest levels of urinary sodium, the
scientists report in the June issue of Hypertension, an American Heart
Association scientific journal.>>

<<If a man eats too much salt he excretes what is not needed. If he takes in
too little the mechanism makes the body excrete more water in order to keep
the salinity constant. If this is taken to extremes the body is desiccated
and death results. The same control mechanism operates when a man takes in
tool little water, for he excretes more salt and less water.>>  I frequently
experience water loss due to sodium deficiency, so I can relate to the
second point.  The last point is interesting; it implies that high urinary
sodium levels could be caused by insufficient water consumption.

Cheers,
-- Aaron Wieland