#181 How Much Salt and Magnesium You Really Need with Dr James DiNicolantonio

Dr. James DiNicolantonio (0:00)

If you don't consume at least 180 milligrams, you will slowly start losing magnesium in the body, and you will eventually die of magnesium depletion.

And the restriction studies are pretty clear about that. But that's for a healthy person who isn't insulin resistant, and there's so many factors that will increase that. So 180 is your bottom line, just to maintain balance. And high calcium, high phosphate, insulin resistance will slowly start, you know, the notches go up, right? And so we're only at around 250 That's not a huge gap from the absolute minimum. That's where people start getting themselves into trouble.

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Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment.

I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Dr. James DiNicolantonio. James is a cardiovascular researcher, scientist and doctor of pharmacy. He's written or co-authored over 200 publications in medical literature and is the associate editor of nutrition and British Medical Journal Open Heart. James was first on the podcast last year in episode 109 where we talked about his latest book, The Longevity Solution with Dr. Jason Fung. But he's also written many other great books like The Salt Fix and Super Fuel. In this episode we're going to focus on salt, why it's so misunderstood, why it's essential and how to balance it with other electrolytes like magnesium and potassium. This episode is brought to you by Lets Get Checked. Lets Get Checked offers different at-home blood tests for various biomarkers like testosterone, thyroid, vitamin D, cholesterol, hormones and others. First you collect the sample by using a finger prick, then you send it back and you can get the results within 2-5 days. Knowledge is power especially when it comes to your health and biology. You can get a 20% discount of all their blood tests with the code SIIMLAND at letsgetchecked.com. Use the code SIIMLAND for a 20% discount at letsgetchecked.com.

I want to backtrack a little bit and talk like why would, why do people think that salt causes like hypertension in the first place and why is like associated with like negative health outcomes?

Dr. James DiNicolantonio (2:23)

So salt kind of has a story similar to saturated fat. So most people know about Ancel Keys with saturated fat and how he came up with, well there was the seven country study, but prior to that was actually a six country study and he showed like with there were six countries and there was a linear line. If you countries that had higher amounts of saturated fat intake had an increased risk of dying from coronary heart disease. But then when you added in all 23 countries, the line was more like this. So there was no association. Same thing with salt. So Louis Dahl was sort of like the Ancel Keys for salt and he did the same thing. He published a study with six countries showing that as salt intake increases, the risk of high blood pressure increased. But then you had Interstol, which combined 48 countries. There was 52 and then they took out the indigenous populations that were consuming extremely low amounts. And you were left with 48 populations that would more match our intake. And they were from like 1500 milligrams of sodium all the way up to 4000

And the line was actually like this. Blood pressure actually went down slightly with a higher intake of sodium from around 1500 to 2000 to 4000 There was actually a line like this.

So again, extrapolating off of poor epidemiology back 40, 50 years ago was primarily the reason why. And that data was set forth to the 1977 Senate Committee, as well as Manili and Baderby's review paper was also presented in front of the Senate Committee.

And that convinced the goals to add in low sodium for the entire population.

Siim Land (4:12)

And what's the situation right now in terms of like, has the blood pressure of the population decreased in response to this lower sodium intake?

Dr. James DiNicolantonio (4:24)

Yeah, I mean, as you know, right, like our health is suffering worse than ever. So, you know, a third of us have fatty liver disease.

At least a third of adults have high blood pressure.

You know, two out of three people have insulin resistance. Two out of three people have obesity. So obviously our health isn't better from 1977 It's much worse. And, you know, in the book, I kind of go over why it's sugar and not salt. And, you know, primarily, if you have functioning kidneys, the kidneys, they will filter a full teaspoon of salt every five minutes. So eating a teaspoon of salt is like a joke for the kidneys. Because they're filtering our salty blood constantly. So we filter around three to four pounds of salt every single day. And we are basically walking bags of salt water. We're like walking oceans. And so we need to view salt as something that we use to cool off.