Salt Reduction, Insulin Resistance and Blood Pressure

If you have humans cut back their salt considerably, they become insulin resistant.

So take a healthy group of humans, say you need to eat less salt, and they do so. If you measure them a week later while they're adhering to this, they will be significantly more insulin resistant than before they ever cut back their salt.

It's one of the ironies of the whole scenario where a physician may be telling a patient with high blood pressure, "You need to cut back your salt," and they end up eating less salt and yet their blood pressure gets worse.

It's because the main contributor to high blood pressure is insulin resistance, and by telling them to cut back on their salt, you made them more insulin resistant.

And that whole mechanism is because one of insulin's many, many effects is to want the body to hold onto salt and water.

And so if you start cutting your salt, all of a sudden insulin says, "Well, there's little salt coming in. I need to do what I can to retain whatever salt we do have."

And so it starts retaining salt and water more in order to try to offset the lack of salt coming in. And while insulin's going higher and higher, the body's becoming more and more insulin resistant.