Why do we crave salt?

cause it is so good.
food is bland without it. it is in salad dressings and sauces and marinades. it’s there because it enhances the flavor. without it, you might as well eat hospital food.

but salt intake is in the mind. start out with stuff like “mrs. dash” seasoning and you will not crave salt.

sorry, mrs dash. i like you, but i love this chick named NaCl more.

I know that having a salt imbalance can lead to problems. For example, when I was down on the ice, we drank distilled sea water. So, it basically went right through you and took everything with it. I had terrible nocturnal leg cramps down there, but when I would replenish the salts in my body (either by adding some salt to the food I was eating, or drinking something like Gatorade), I would have no problems. As far as I know, this phenomena is a theory (no one has proven that salt imbalance causes nocturnal leg cramps), but from my experience, it helped immensely to maintain some salt levels in my body.

Body needs salt to survive !

We’ve evolved to crave lots of things that were harder to find when we were swinging from the trees :>) Salt is one of these things, along with highly-concentrated sweets and fats. When we were living on the African plains, we needed to take those things whenever and wherever we could find them- and we still crave them today, only they are much too easily available now!

Sodium is one of the most important things in your body. It forms ions that are used to transmit messages along neurons.

It’s a very critical component to have in our bodies. Up until very recently, salt was pretty hard to find, hence the strong desire is your body’s way of saying “hey I really need some NaCl, please go find it…”

It’s the same as fatty foods, chocolate, etc. Our bodies recognize them as being rare valuable dense energy sources, so when we see them, we are conditioned to eat eat eat, as our bodies still think act as if food is rare and thus whenever we encounter such things we should stockpile (storing the energy as fat).

Our bodies are simply not made for this modern world where “food” (food like products really) can be bought in so many ways. Back in the past, you would never eat all of the components inside one processed McDonald’s meal in one sitting, let alone one lifetime. And I’m not just picking on McDicks here, TONS of “food” today is processed beyond belief, containing far more than it really should. People consume so much sodium nowadays because people eat so much processed foods where it is added. It’s the same as high fructose corn syrup – it’s not that it itself is bad for you (a molecule is a molecule), it’s that it’s EVERYWHERE, it’s in so many products, and it adds up especially when people are eating more food in general.

We evolved from organisms that lived in salt water. The first cells emerged in salt water. So it’s not really that surprising that we still need salt.

What I don’t get is how land vertebrates evolved to depend on non-salty water.

Clever marketing by global salt conglomerates.

And/or what others have said.

@Qingu
“What I don’t get is how land vertebrates evolved to depend on non-salty water.”
The salinity of the blood of all vertebrates is approximately the same- about 1/4 that of salt water, meaning that saltwater fish evolved when the oceans were a lot less salty than they are today. Vertebrates outside of the saltwater environment developed homeostasis through regulating freshwater and salt intake, saltwater fish had to evolve, as the oceans grew saltier, to eliminate the excess salt.

I’m sure I’m an outlier, but I don’t crave salt. In fact, there are many foods that are too salty for my tastes (e.g. I prefer salt-free potato chips over regular chips). I attribute it to what I became accustomed while growing up. My dad has problems with high blood pressure, so my mom cooked food with as little salt as she could get away with and we never had a salt shaker on the table.

So the reason we can’t drink ocean water is because it would be 300% too salty for us?

@Qingu
Pretty much. It actually would draw water out of your cells through osmosis. That’s why drinking salt water only makes you thirstier.