How Does Sodium Affect Your Body?

How Sodium Affects the Body One of main reasons people visit the Benson’s Gourmet Seasonings website is because they’re looking to enhance the flavor of their food without salt, aka sodium. Usually, they’ve been told by their doctor that they MUST cut down on their salt/sodium intake because it’s causing all sorts of health problems.

The Effects of Sodium on the Body

How does sodium affect the body? Basically, it makes your body hold on to water. The more water you’ve got stored in you, the higher your blood pressure rises. This puts a strain on various body parts, including your kidneys, arteries, heart, and even your brain.

Normally, your kidneys use osmosis to draw “extra water” out of your blood, helping you urinate out fluid your body doesn’t need. When a person consumes too much sodium, though, kidneys can’t function well– instead, they’re not able to remove the water/fluid like you’d hope they would. If kidneys act as filters– and they do– what happens when the filters don’t work as well as they should? You get a build-up of unwanted/toxic waste products in the body. The worst result? You could get kidney disease/kidney failure. Your body could end up poisoning itself to death. Yikes!

Arteries get strained by extra blood pressure caused by too much sodium. Muscles in the artery walls get stronger and thicker to deal with the strain, but then they have less space for blood flow and blood pressure rises. Over time, arteries could either clog up or burst. If this happens, organs might not get the oxygen and nutrients they need– leading to organ failure, stroke and/or death. Again, yikes.

Sodium can also mess with the amount of blood reaching the heart, leading to angina and/or a heart attack. It can also increase the blood pressure in the arteries leading to the brain. If and when less blood gets to the brain, you could get vascular dementia and/or a stroke.

In order to avoid all the aforementioned health problems, ideally a person should lessen their intake of sodium. Easier said than done, right? Well, Benson’s Gourmet Seasonings is a good place to start– our salt-free seasonings will help enhance the flavor of foods you love to eat, so try some and enjoy!