American Heart Association and Canadian Food Guide recommend an ideal limit of at most 1,500 mg sodium daily. On a Whole Food Plant-Based diet, we can get approximately 400 mg sodium from the food itself, and 1,100 mg sodium with 1/2 tsp salt. Can we lower our sodium intake further? Yes! Many WFPB luminaries recommend going salt-free!

Yes, salt is addictive. Salt, fats and refined sugars are three key ingredients in Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs), making them "hyper-palatable" — foods that trigger the brain's reward system, making them highly pleasurable and often leading to excessive consumption.

Dr Fuhrman explains that if we adopt Whole Food Plant-Based guidelines but don't cut down our total salt intake, then our risk for ischemic strokes ("heart attacks in the brain") is likely to go down but our risk for hemorrhagic strokes may go up! … unless we cut down our sodium intake too!

Whole Food Plant-Based luminaries like Dr Greger, Dr Goldhamer, Dr Peter Rogers, Dr Michael Klaper and Dr Fuhrman encourage leaving out table salt completely! They encourage adoption of an SOS-Free Diet, without Salt, Oil and Sugar. Among Whole Food Plant-Based luminaries, Dr McDougall is an exception; he encourages us to add a small quantity of salt to our meals.

Adopting low sodium meals and salt-free meals can be challenging. Our taste buds may find such meals insipid. However, if we taper down our sodium intake over time, our body and taste buds are likely to adapt to such meals and relish them!

In 2019, when I adopted an SOS-Free diet, I was worried about iodine intake. So I started collecting information on how to make sure that I have enough iodine in my body. Dr Greger recommends iodine supplement and sea vegetables like nori, dulse, arame and seaweed salad.

Salt has a fascinating history! So many words in English are derived from "sal": salary, salami, salad, salsa, sausage and souse, for example. But salt has entered the human diet only recently!

"For the first 90 percent of human evolution, we likely ate diets containing less than the equivalent of a quarter teaspoon of salt’s worth of sodium a day. We went millions of years without saltshakers, so our bodies evolved into sodium-conserving machines.", says Dr Greger