Recently, an article titled "The Dangers of Salt" appeared on my social media feed. It mentioned that when you consume a lot of salt, the osmotic pressure causes your body to expel more water, which is not conducive to skin hydration. This can lead to a dull, sallow complexion and may even cause freckles to appear on the cheeks.
This claim is absolutely ridiculous! If one must insist on a so-called "mechanism," it's surely borrowed from the principle that when people pickle vegetables, the vegetables become dry and yellow after being salted. However, the human body is a complex and precise dynamic organism. As long as a person is not gravely ill, their cells and the enzymes within them exist in a stable environment with stable osmotic pressure, which is sufficient to buffer against various external stimuli. Otherwise, humanity could not have survived and proliferated to this day. In other words, the body's fluids form a large buffering system specifically to cope with changes in osmotic pressure, as well as acid-base stimuli.
For instance, when you eat too much salt, you feel thirsty and instinctively drink more water. This is to maintain the body's normal osmotic pressure. The body cannot just passively wait for osmotic pressure to rise continuously, allowing subsequent problems to develop, unless it has lost its regulatory capacity. If that were truly the case, the problem would no longer be freckles; it would certainly have progressed to a serious state of fluid metabolic imbalance.
As for freckles, they are tan-colored pigmented spots, most commonly seen in young and middle-aged women. A long time ago, doctors noticed the familial clustering tendency of freckles, or that their occurrence largely depends on genetics. This means that if both parents have freckles, the child's probability of having them is significantly increased. Currently, it is believed that freckles are caused by abnormal melanocytes in the basal layer of the epidermis. While influenced by genetics, they are also related to sun exposure. To prevent freckles and other facial spots, the most effective method is sun protection, which has absolutely nothing to do with consuming salt or soy sauce. Although the harm of excessive salt intake is not limited to high blood pressure, it is truly unrelated to freckles.