Introduction: There is a folk saying, "The seven necessities of opening the door are firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, and tea." Whoever lives in this world cannot do without firewood, rice, oil, and salt. The daily toil of the common folk is probably mainly for these basic necessities.
Firewood has changed; now people burn coal, coal gas, or natural gas. Rice may not be a necessity either, as Westerners eat bread, and the Westernization of diet seems to have become a fashion in Eastern countries. Oil is now treated with caution because of the increasing prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, with high-fat diets being the main culprit. Only salt has remained consistently throughout a thousand years in our nation, which places great importance on dietary culture. Moreover, since "food is the paramount necessity of the people," salt is included in this "food."
Salt is indeed indispensable for the human body. Otherwise, why would sick people need to be given an "IV drip" in the hospital? When a person cannot eat normally, a lack of sugar intake can lead to "hypoglycemia": heart palpitations, hand tremors, cold sweats, and even starvation. Similarly, a lack of salt intake can lead to "hyponatremia," manifested as general weakness and abdominal discomfort. There is also "hypochloremic alkalosis," characterized by vomiting, shortness of breath, and even coma. Therefore, just like sugar intake, a certain amount of salt intake is necessary.
In China, people generally do not lack salt because our diet emphasizes flavor. "Salt brings out the umami" means that dishes only taste delicious with more salt. A local proverb in Qidong, Jiangsu says, "If you don't eat salted vegetable soup for three days, your legs will feel weak." "Salted vegetable base" is a type of pickled vegetable, and "weak legs" is a metaphor for feeling powerless. In fact, it's not just in Qidong; Chinese people generally have a preference for pickled vegetables, sauerkraut, dried radish, and pickled mustard tubers. Of course, eating a little less of these traditional foods is not a problem.
Excessive salt consumption is harmful to health!
>The evil landlord Huang Shiren snatched Xier, and Yang Bailao, overcome with grief and indignation, drank a bowl of brine—the brine used for pickling vegetables—and died. The high-concentration salt solution damages the gastrointestinal mucosa, leading to acute erosive hemorrhage. It causes dehydration of body tissues, and a sharp increase in blood circulation can lead to acute heart failure. How could it not be fatal? >To illustrate the effect of salt on health, let's conduct an experiment: Place brine inside a piece of sausage casing, tie both ends, and then put it in a glass of fresh water. Before long, the fresh water will also become salty. Eventually, the salt concentration inside and outside the casing will be the same. Conversely, if you place fresh water inside the casing and put it in a glass of salt water, the water inside will also become salty. It turns out that this casing is a "semi-permeable membrane." The meat inside, of course, cannot get out, but the salt inside can diffuse out. This is the principle of "osmotic pressure" in physics. When the concentration of a certain substance in the solutions on both sides of the membrane is different, the membrane's permeability opens until the concentration of that substance in both solutions is balanced.How much is just right?
>It is no longer debatable that eating too salty affects health. Salt is also one of the essential foods for the human body. So how much should we eat to meet health requirements? Nutritionists recommend an intake of 5 grams per person per day. For a family of three, that would be 15 grams a day, or 450 grams a month. However, one must not forget that soy sauce contains salt, pickled vegetables contain salt, and if you also ate a salted duck egg for breakfast, the salt in that counts too. Therefore, saying 5 grams of salt a day is really difficult for the average person to manage; even a nutritionologist probably cannot turn their kitchen into a chemistry lab to measure exactly how much salt can be eaten in a day. >However, the Chinese Nutrition Society has conducted surveys that are of reference value. According to the survey, residents in northern China consume about 15-18 grams of salt per person per day, while residents in southern China consume about 10-12 grams. This makes things easier. It seems that our friends in the north need to reduce their salt intake by two-thirds, and our compatriots in the south need to reduce it by half. Although it's not very precise, it gives us a general idea. >The next question is the return to the problem of "bland and tasteless." But I think that liking salty food and liking bland food is a matter of habit. For the sake of health, habits can be changed. For example, Cantonese cuisine is relatively lighter, and now it is popular all over the country, with people in the north also enjoying it very much. This shows that bland does not necessarily mean "tasteless"; one can still put in the effort in cooking.