Salt Why must we bake with it anyway

I would think he meant for you to watch your sodium intake, unless he also told you to avoid bananas as well (seriously). buttuming you do not grab the salt shaker automatically every time you sit down and that is why he told you to cut back, I would call the doc and ask if he-she meant all salt, or if he-she meant just meant sodium chloride (table) salt. They'll appraciate that you are taking the advice seriously and acting on it.

If it is only the sodium in table salt that the doc wants to reduce, then you can use "Lite" salt, which is a mix with potbuttium chloride and costs just a few cents more, and works just as well. I have used it since the late 70s and never had a problem using it measure for measure. ---------- Background on table salt:

"Salt" is a name for a certain kinds of compounds using metals: copper salts, iron salts, aluminum salts, sodium salts, potbuttium salts, calcium salts, etc.

Common table salt is sodium chloride. Lite salt is potbuttium chloride and sodium chloride, and Salt subsbreastute is usually potbuttium chloride.

Sodium chloride (stuff in the shaker) is an ionizing agent, which means when it is added to water-based compounds, a few shared salt molecules makes many H2O water molecule break into the ionized H and OH, (that form of water, while still H2O, is known as hydrogen hydroxyl, the aggressive form of water). Salt is put in commercial soap to make the water more ionized and thus active (it is usually that infamous "ionizing agents"), it can remove certain other elements when water is hydroxyl like it does in water softeners, and it lets water and nutrients penetrate organic cell walls easier like when human cells and yeast cells get nutrients, etc.

You add salt to many recipes to butture that the water is as ionized as the water can get, and that in turn lets rise times be fairly reliable, since:

Water can have several levels of ionization, depending on the amount and type of contaminants. De-ionized water is at one end of the scale, and totally ionized water is at the other. The water we use is in between, depending on where we live and our water source. I understand that yeast will not grow hardly at all in deionized water, and it has best growth in completely ionized water, and it starts dropping off in growth again when the water starts getting way too much salt so that it binds with the water and interferes with the yeast growth.

There is city water and well water. Well water has a lot more variation in ionization than city water since not only can it have salts, it can have buffers to ionization. So while either is somewhat ionized, usually neither is fully ionized.

Bottom line is that one can do just fine without salt using some waters, especially those that are very slightly salt contaminated by seawater like many Florida city waters, while using some well waters will take three times as long to rise yeast if you don't add a little ionizer (e.g., salt).

But water doesn't care if it is sodium chloride that ionizes, or potbuttium chloride that ionizes. It ionizes for either. And its the excessive sodium that apparently causes humans problems. So apparently reasonable use of potbuttium salt is preferred.

Why avoid "salt"? In research, powers that be have found that as sodium (part of common table salt ) goes up in the blood, so does blood pressure. So if you lower sodium, blood pressure should then not rise. (I might add that that at least one pharmaceutical mfgs study submitted for their blood pressure pill also found that as calcium in the blood goes down, blood pressure and sodium both go up)

Since sodium also is one of the two elements in the blood that separates across a small membrane in the heart to synchronize beats, too much or too little sodium in the blood might interfere with that beat control especially if the mechanism for keeping the sodium balance in the blood, or the membrane, is weak or damaged. And just as too much salt interferes with growth in a brine, the replacement of kidney and bladder cells can be hampered from having to handle salt brine. Since they usually really can't see to check if an individual has any potential problem in those specific areas (they are not going to ask you to eat a cup of salt to see how well you get rid of it), they make a learned judgement on what they see and advise you to use caution and, because it can cause small problems to become bigger problems in the age group, etc., to limit salt.

fwiw