Curious Case of the Salt-aholic who is Sodium Deficient
Woman Eats Ridiculous Amounts of Salt Daily Yet Has a Sodium Deficiency
After my first recent email on the salt topic, I got this fascinating reply from one of my customers. First, I'll share her reply and then give you what I think is actually going on.
Interestingly enough her grandmother had the same exact problem.
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Re: Is Salt Particularly Damaging to the Kidneys?
Hi Roger,
I can’t imagine how busy you are with replies and questions after posting content like this - I don’t usually reply, but this time I had to.
The information you shared is phenomenal. Thank you. As I was reading it, it’s like a switch clicked in my brain. OBVIOUSLY salt is one of the main reasons I can’t achieve kidney filtration and always feel like crap. And always desperately crave salty food.
Even naturopathic doctors have told me I’m very deficient in sodium. I always internally scoffed at that because I eat loads of salt. Like ridiculous amounts. It’s nothing short of an addiction.
I crave salt constantly. Rarely if ever do I crave sweet foods, so that made me think I was doing at least something right. I’m still not 100% raw, and I crave the most horrible foods imaginable all the time - bread sprinkled with salt, chips, processed cheese, cheesy chips, tacos, pickles, olives, fried junk…the list unfortunately goes on. No, I don’t always indulge. But it’s very hard to resist at times.
So, hearing I was sodium deficient made sense. Why would I be craving this crap if I was eating enough salt? The whole maximum recommended allowance of salt had to be bogus because I had long surpassed that and still wanted/needed more.
But if salt doesn’t break down into sodium, then it all makes sense. I am actually quite deficient and doing nothing at all to fix it. I’m craving food loaded with sodium because my body doesn’t know where else to get it from. The smidges of celery I eat here and there aren’t enough. It’s very hard for me to eat enough fruit to be raw - after a few pieces of fruit I’m sick of it and desperately wanting salt. This explains why.
Before my grandmother passed, she started having these episodes where she’d reach a delirious state. She’d focus on something nobody could see, raise one arm or both, fall over and fail to respond to anybody. Every time she went to a doctor for this (many times, sometimes the ER), they told her it was a sodium deficiency and she needed to consume more salt. Well, unsurprisingly, eating more salt never cured these episodes. They continued until she passed from pneumonia and congestive heart failure at 91 years old - yes, mainstream doctors told a congestive heart failure patient to eat more salt. I wonder if she would have lived better and longer if she had upped her actual sodium levels and learned to excrete the salt build up in her body.
Anyway, thank you for this information. It seems so obvious now yet I’d never managed to piece it together until reading your take on it. I will change my salt intake immediately and see if that helps.
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So it seems I wasn't completely wrong after all about humans not being able to absorb the sodium from salt. Yes it turns out that most people can but not everyone seems to be able to do this.
Based on her story it's pretty obvious that at least she and her grandmother were unable to convert salt or NaCl into sodium. Or at least not enough of it to make a difference in their health.
And this would very much explain her constant craving for salt. If you can't get enough sodium in your diet, yet you are constantly eating salt, your body is going to crave salt like crazy. Especially if like her, you paid lip service to plant based sodium rich foods.
Salt is highly addictive. So when someone is consuming a lot of it, it becomes even more addictive while it is coursing through the body like a drug. Combine that highly addictive quality of salt with the extreme lack of sodium in her body and of course she is going to crave salt like crazy.
But what her body really needs is organic or plant food based sodium not salt.
The reason I believe this happened to them is not purely due to genetics. Though they likely had a genetic weakness that predisposed them to eventually developing this problem later in life.
I believe they sustained damage to their livers from eating a typical cooked food diet. And hence are and were unable to chemically convert salt NaCl into separate sodium and chloride which I suspect would normally be done in the liver.
And guess what. This causes even more problems.
Salt is known to be damaging not just to the kidneys but to the liver as well. So the more salt she consumes, the more she is damaging her liver and making things even worse.
Hence, the real solution is to eat sodium rich plant foods like celery. And to start eating a Raw Complete diet that I teach my LEN members and taking herbs that heal the liver.
NOTE: No salt is needed by the human body whatsoever. I have gone years without eating any salt and yet showed ZERO symptoms of sodium deficiency.
Remember salt and sodium are different things. Too many people confuse the two.
We need sodium but salt or the molecule NaCL is a corrosive cellular poison as I have adequately proven in this post:
My suggestion to her would be to make a large celery juice every morning or before her first meal. Just juicing a large head of celery should give her enough sodium for her daily needs.
I would also suggest making savory raw dinner recipes with sodium rich foods every night. This is the healthiest way to get proper levels of sodium because this sodium comes from highly absorbable plant sources.
In fact, celery and celery juice are known to lower blood pressure whereas salt is known to raise it.
Check this post below for a list of 9 sodium rich and savory flavored raw foods.
“How to Beat Salt Addiction the Fun Way”
https://a.superbeing.com/raw-mentor-mistake-s
And a particularly salty flavored recipe is my Salty Zucchini Addiction recipe.
It is a variation of my original Savory Zucchini Addiction dish which is already savory and oh so addictive. But this SALTY version is particularly salty without adding a single grain of salt to it.
Here is what two of my customers had to say about the Savory Zucchini Addiction recipe.
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Definitely my kind of meal: 3 simple ingredients
Totally delicious. Very filling, too.
Fantastic! Thanks, Roger!
Deb Hart
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This simple recipe is addictively delicious! It tasted better on every spoonful. Next thing I know, my mixer was completely cleaned out, and I was full. It's tasty, cheap, nutritious, and filling. I'm excited to play around with the possible variants of this recipe. Thanks Roger!
Jake Wall
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You can get both recipes and loads of herbal healing info here by joining my Substack premium membership for a mere 7 smackeroonies.
https://a.superbeing.com/savory-zuke-addiction
Your Radiant Health, Fitness and Infinite Potential Coach,
Roger David Haeske
Raw Medicine Man
Divinity Enforcer
The Youth Guru & 56-Year Old Teanajer - Siempre Joven
The Raj of Raw and Sultan of Savory - Over 22-Years 100% Raw
"World leader in 100% Live Food Diet, Youth-Restoration and No-Equipment Fitness Training"
P.S. To see a list of all the goodies you get in my premium Substack content just go this page: