Is salt really bad for high blood pressure?

Hi, this is Dr. Mercola helping you take control of your health.

And today we are joined by an expert, Dr. James D. Nickel Antonio, who wrote an entire book about this,

the Salt Fix, and it's going to answer not only that question, but many more and provides you with a wealth of information you probably weren't aware of about this issue of salt being healthy or not.

So welcome and thank you for joining us today.

Thanks for having me on.

So you are actually a Farm-D and I'm wondering if you could share your personal history and what inspired

and catalyzed your journey to write this book and

help us understand better about the proper perspective of salt in our diet.

Yeah so really what sparked my interest in salt was actually being a community pharmacist.

I was having patients coming up to me and they were put on this low salt diet and they were saying they were having all these symptoms of like muscle fatigue and muscle spasms and cramps and heart palpitations and they said they you know their doctors you know order them to not add salt to their food because they had high blood pressure. But yet they were suffering all these new symptoms. And so really, you know, I kept seeing these patients over and over, put on these low salt diets

for high blood pressure and complaining

of all these symptoms of salt deficiency.

And so what I ended doing is kind of pushing back

and telling my patients, you know, you really need to go to your doctor's office,

tell them these symptoms that you're having, and even get your blood sodium

levels drawn because you might be deficient in salt. And sure enough, these people were severely dehydrated.

They had low sodium levels in the blood.

And within a few days of just upping their salt intake,

all of these symptoms went away.

And so right there I knew that this low salt advice it just wasn't panning out in the real world.

Excellent and were you challenged by some of the other practitioners that were you seem to appear to be going

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