When it comes to eating healthy and cutting down on oil and salt, many people think it’s a cliché.

The young people who are more concerned about reducing oil are also slightly more, because they know that frying oil is 99.9% pure fat, more oil is more fat, more calories, may make their body grow fat.

As for eating more salt, many people do not care much. Eat more salt is to make people thirsty, raise blood pressure, their blood pressure is normal, it’s fine.

In fact, even if three meals a day to eat in the calories did not increase, eat more salt itself, will increase weight, but also will actually promote fat – this is really not a rumor!

First of all, salt adds weight quickly through the effect of osmotic pressure.

Many girls who care about the body, daily diet is very moderate, pay attention to control the three meals calories. However, as long as one day gathering meal big eat heavy food, the next day will grow two or three pounds of weight, they also feel that the body becomes bloated and not refreshing.

This is because, as soon as salt (sodium chloride) is dissolved in water, it attracts water molecules super strongly.

With more salt in the blood, the blood osmotic pressure is high and it attracts water from the tissues into the blood vessels. This thing promotes high blood pressure on the one hand, and dehydrates the tissues and deprives the skin and mucous membranes of moisturization on the other. Then the body feels thirsty and wants to drink water especially.

However, the water that is drunk is not expelled as easily as before, because the water is ‘bound’ by salt and the kidneys are slow to remove salt. So, over the course of a day or two or even a few days, the body accumulates excess water, leading to mild edema.

So, the increase in water after a rise in salt content in the body can lead to weight gain. For people who don’t eat too much salt on a daily basis, eating more salt on the first night will result in a significant weight gain the next day, and the effect will be visible on the scale.

Of course, this weight gain from eating more salt is reversible in the short term. If you eat too much one day, you can return to normal as long as you eat less salty food for the next two or three days.

Some diets that only eat vegetables and fruits utilize the method of ‘no salt’ so that the salt content in your body drops and more water is excreted. Although it is only a few days of work and not much body fat is lost, the person appears to be several pounds lighter.

Second, experiments in humans and animals have found that long-term high-salt diets really promote weight gain.

Epidemiological investigations have repeatedly found that there is an inexplicable link between eating salty food and gaining weight, and it’s not just a simple matter of adding water. But the principle is not clear enough.

A study published in 2018 (Lanaspa MA, PNAS, 2018) explored the mechanisms by which salty diets promote weight gain using experiments in mice.

In animal experiments, the researchers found that high salt promotes the aldehyde reductase-fructose kinase metabolic pathway, increases endogenous fructose production in the liver and hypothalamus, enhances appetite, and promotes obesity, fatty liver, and insulin resistance. If the gene for the endogenous fructose synthesis pathway is knocked out, mice are less likely to gain weight on a high-salt diet.

In a sense, the fat-promoting of eating more salt and the fat-promoting of drinking more sweetened beverages share some common physiological mechanisms. It’s just that people already know that drinking more sweet drinks promotes weight gain, while eating more salt promotes weight gain, which many people still don’t know.

Although this article is just a mechanism study done in animals, but in epidemiological investigations, it has also been repeatedly found that, compared with people with light tastes, people who eat more salt have a higher risk of developing obesity, fatty liver and metabolic syndrome. It is hypothesized that it is possible that this mechanism by which more salt grows fat also exists in humans.

There may be some people here who raise the bar: my grandfather also ate quite salty, why he is not fat?

That’s right, 50 years ago, working people ate salt without getting fat. Some people are genetically not easy to get fat, let’s not talk about it. When life was hard, they ate less and worked more, and there were not too many calories to store fat, and that’s not saying much. Only from the perspective of eating salt, there is also a lot of truth.

First of all, they had too much physical labor. Physical labor causes sweating, and sweating expels a lot of salt. Nowadays, people sit in air-conditioned rooms with so little physical activity that there is no chance of sweating a little bit in a day, and a little more salt is too much.

Secondly, in the past, people lived a harder life, although the food was salty, but usually more food, less food, the total amount of salt is limited. Nowadays it seems that the food is not too salty, but with less food and more rice, the amount of salt eaten is much more.

Besides, the daily sources of sodium are now far more than just limited to dishes.

For example, salty potato chips, potpourri, puffed food, soda crackers, such as beef jerky, spicy strips, strange beans, plums and other snacks, such as a variety of melon peanuts fried …… Which is not a large sodium content?

Instant noodles, noodles, ramen, udon noodles, dumpling skin wonton skin, most of them contain a lot of sodium chloride and sodium carbonate.

Even bread, snacks, date cakes and other baked goods, are to add a small amount of sodium chloride or sodium bicarbonate.

In the poor life of the past, when you could not afford snacks and only ate some pastries on New Year’s Day, there were not so many sources of dietary sodium.

Third, foods that are high in salt and sodium tend to be particularly appetite-boosting as well, and people are prone to eating more of them.

Does food really taste good when you just add a ton of salt?

I am afraid that it has to be accompanied by a lot of oil to add flavor, which increases the fat content of the food and raises the calorie value.

Often times, MSG, chicken extract and meat flavoring are added as well. (For more on the fat-promoting effects of too much MSG, see the previously posted article on the subject: Nutrition News: Does MSG Make You Fat?) These freshness and flavor-enhancing ingredients are good for promoting appetite, at least for this short-term effect.

Foods with strong flavors are often seasoned with sugar, because cooking with sugar promotes the Meladic reaction, increases the aroma, and makes the salty flavor seem “rich and mellow” and less salty. However, sugar is also a source of calories. The aroma produced by the Meladic reaction also strongly stimulates the appetite.

With all of these tools in place, diners will find the flavors of strongly flavored dishes particularly “addictive”. Especially for those restaurants that do not have high quality ingredients themselves, it is likely that such heavy flavors are used to cover up the problem of low cost and low quality of ingredients.

But such a tune out of the “heavy taste”, itself high calorie, sugar, salt and MSG, and let you appetite, eat up can not stop, if it will not promote fertilization, that the opposite strange ……

So, in the same genetic inheritance, the same level of physical activity to compare, long-term heavy diet people will be more likely to fat, this is nothing surprising.

So what should we do in the face of the brutal fact that heavy food fattens us up? How can we live in harmony with all kinds of savory cuisine?

Here are a few salt control tips for you:

1 Try not to eat salty foods other than dishes.

– Cut out salty snacks for a while, or eat them as little as possible. Only eat occasional snacks that contain a lot of sodium when your meals are very light.

–Minimize entrees that have a salty taste.

–Try not to drink soups with salty flavors and replace them with plain water, tea, black coffee, lemonade, barley tea, rice soup, or whatever.

If you can do all three of the above, and use your limited amount of salt as much as possible in enjoying your dishes, you will have already reduced your salt by at least a third.

2 Use light-flavored foods to match strong-flavored foods, and control the total amount.

– When you go to restaurants and make family dinners, use light dishes to match strong-flavored dishes. For example, if there is a shredded pork with Beijing sauce that is already very salty (sweet and salty dishes usually contain more salt than unsweet ones), pair it with a large, unsalted mixed vegetable.

–For salty sauces, pickles, dried plums, squash, etc., pair it with an original unsalted dish. For example, if your family likes shiitake mushroom sauce or chili sauce to accompany their meals, make a watery oil casserole of bok choy leaves with no salt at all, and let them dip themselves in the sauce to avoid over-salting.

— When eating meat, try to stay away from sausages and ham. This is because they are exceptionally salty and have far more sodium than the stew at home. If you must, use lettuce with no salt or salad dressing to go with it.

3 Use fresh, tangy, and sour flavors to reduce saltiness.

-If you think it’s tasteless with less salt, add more vinegar, pepper, paprika, and cayenne pepper to make it seem tastier. Dietitians are against heavy flavors and do not include vinegar and all kinds of spices, only too much oil, salt and sugar.

–If you are going to add fresh-flavored condiments, add them first, then add salt in half the amount, or only one-third. You’ll find that dishes with less salt are tasty enough because of the help of MSG chicken seasoning.

4 When buying foods, look carefully at the sodium data and choose those with lower sodium.

Sodium content data are available in the Nutrition Facts Table on food packages. Remember that 1,000 mg of sodium ≈ 2.5 g of salt, which is not very troublesome to calculate. Even if you don’t want to do the math, just compare the data and make sure you don’t choose any similar product that has the highest sodium content.

5 Reduce the amount of savory seasonings.

When eating hot pot, don’t use too much dipping sauce. Whether it’s when eating instant noodles, tossing a salad, or mixing pot rice, etc., use only half or even a third of the dressing.

6 After you’ve become too salty, give yourself a break with a light meal.

After an occasional heavily salted meal, give your tongue and kidneys a break by eating less salty and lighter foods for the second meal and even the next day and the third day. Especially for breakfast, you can eat no salty foods with it at all.

Don’t eat big, heavy meals in a row to give your body a chance to get rid of excess sodium in a timely manner. This will not cause an increase in fat synthesis.

7 Regular exercise, sweating to reduce salt.

As long as you do these, you can live in harmony with heavy food. Occasionally eat an overly large dish, but also one of the joys of life, healthy life, obesity prevention, and do not have to be as bitter as a meal of boiled cabbage in water!