Name: What Happens When You Quit Salt?
Uploaded: 2025-07-18T18:04:18.000Z
Duration: 6 min 26 s
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Salt consumption has increased by 50% over the last 40 years in the US, with the average American consuming 3,400 milligrams of salt a day, which is nearly double the amount of salt that's recommended.

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But given that high salt intake is associated with high blood pressure, kidney disease, stroke, and heart disease, what actually happens if you quit salt?

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To tackle this question, we're first gonna start with what happens when you decrease your salt, and then we'll move into what would happen if you completely cut salt out of your diet, because, spoiler alert, the results are very different.

First up, a low salt diet, which could range from around 1,500 milligrams to around 2,300 milligrams per day.

After one week, you might not physically feel the difference, but your body has already lowered its blood pressure.

Your kidney is responsible for this by regulating what's inside your blood vessels.

When you're well hydrated and drinking fluids, it tells your body to excrete any extra water, and if you're dehydrated, it sends a signal to not only increase thirst, but to cause reabsorption of your fluids in the kidney, making your body hold onto more water.

This is all in an effort to keep the perfect balance of water and salt between your blood and cells.

But consuming lots of salt can sometimes get in the way of this process.

Since your body can't produce its own, we consume salt through the diet, where it's eventually absorbed into your blood.

Normally, your kidney would eliminate any excess salt that your body doesn't need, similar to how it regulates excess water, but over time, with high salt intake, your kidney can't exactly keep up with filtering it all out, which means your blood stays more concentrated with sodium.

This extra sodium in your blood ends up pulling water from your cells into your blood through osmosis, because the water wants to be where the sodium is, and that ideal concentration gradient between them is thrown off.

This ultimately leads to an increase in your blood volume, which increases blood pressure.

And years of research has shown increased blood pressure over long periods of time is associated with many health conditions.

So by consuming a low-sodium diet, you minimize the risks of having chronic high blood pressure.

A few weeks into low sodium, and you may be feeling less stressed.

Recent studies have shown that high levels of salt not only increases stress hormones in the body, but that when you're challenged with a stressful situation, the hormonal response to it is much more amplified.

While these early studies have been done on mice, further research aims to look directly at stress hormones in humans, and also examine salt's role in anxiety and aggression.

After four weeks, you might start feeling lighter because reducing sodium in your diet can reduce bloating.

The DASH sodium trial, one of the biggest trials looking at blood pressure and diet, showed that high sodium increased bloating in a dose-dependent manner, regardless of the type of diet.

In other words, as you decrease salt, you're likely to decrease bloating proportionately.

Now, the short-term benefits of a low-sodium diet are great, but the real benefits are long-term.

A recent study completed in 600 villages in rural China had individuals with a history of stroke, or those over the age of 60 with hypertension, consume low-salt diets.

They found that reducing salt in the diet reduced strokes, major cardiovascular events, and death within five years.

So how did they actually cut their salt intake?

They simply substituted 30% of sodium chloride, typical table salt, with potassium chloride salt.

While it doesn't taste the exact same, it's actually a really clever way to make something a little more salty without having to add sodium, which is the main culprit in health issues because it's so often over-consumed.

Potassium consumption, on the other hand, is typically under-consumed, and adequate potassium intake can help improve blood pressure regulation.

So there's benefits of reducing salt for many people, particularly those who have hypertension, but what would happen if you completely cut sodium out of your diet?

It would be pretty hard since nearly everything you consume has some level of salt in it, but let's play it out.

Your nerves signal what the use of salts are, muscles contract and relax thanks to salts.

It's also involved with helping transport nutrients throughout the body.

So when you don't have enough, your body enters a state known as hyponatremia.

Just like too much salt, not enough can cause problems between the blood and cells, but this time, in an attempt to get the salt concentration and gradient back to normal, your body starts excreting water.

By getting rid of water, it hopes to solve one problem, but this can lead to severe dehydration.

Within one week, you might begin to feel nauseous and start vomiting.

Of course, vomiting can also reduce any sodium, left in our body, which would make the condition worse.

After two weeks, you may start to get random muscle twitching because our muscles require sodium for contracting and relaxing.

And after three weeks, it's likely that the brain would begin to increase in size because the vessels surrounding the brain have less salt compared to the tissue.

So the water moves into the cells through osmosis, resulting in swelling.

This will first lead to confusion and can eventually cause seizures and bring you into a coma.

And I know what you're thinking, just add some salt back into the diet and you're back to normal, but there's a catch.

We actually can't correct our blood sodium too fast or we can cause osmotic demyelination because the brain gets dehydrated.

This is why going too extreme on salt reduction can be risky, particularly for people who are not at risk for hypertension in the first place.

Some data suggests that low sodium diets can not only impact your mental clarity and focus, but taking too far can actually increase the risk of cardiovascular disease as well.

While many people do eat too much salt, if you're a healthy person eating mainly whole foods or low carbs, which hold onto water for your body, or doing a lot of exercise, it's important to maintain or ingest salt into your system.

And if you don't have hypertension or a risk for high blood pressure, studies generally show it's not something you need to overthink.

It's really about finding that Goldilocks range, not too high and not too low, which guidelines typically say is around 2,300 milligrams per day for most people.

For many people, your body will tell you what you need.

If you're craving it or feeling grossed out by salt, you just listen to your body.

But of course, as always, talk to your healthcare professional to figure out whether you're on either end of the extreme spectrum.

After all, some individuals are more sensitive to salt than others.

For example, women of all ethnicities and age groups have been shown to fall into this category.

So higher salt diets may be a bigger risk.

Like everything in life, the dose is the poison.

And in this case, too much or too little can hurt you.

Should you be thinking about them when you're exercising?

We actually have an entire podcast about electrolytes you can check out here on our podcast channel or anywhere else that you'd normally listen to a podcast like Spotify or iTunes.

Hopefully this has been useful and educational for you.

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