Rock Salt Lowers Blood Pressure?

Introduction: An email has been circulated lately suggesting that SALT can be used to normalize blood pressure and relieve headache. Among other things, it also points out the following:

1. What is bad for hypertension is iodized salt, which is a fake salt. It is made up of only 3 synthetic chemicals, sodium, chloride, iodine. It does not melt in water, does NOT melt in the body, does not melt in the kidneys, gives kidney stones, and raises blood pressure. The fake salt is man-made in a factory.

2. The true salt, which comes from the sea and dried under the sun and commonly called rock salt, has 72 natural minerals including natural sodium, chloride, iodine. It melts in water, melts in your body, melts in the kidneys, do not give kidney stones, and best of all brings down blood pressure and stops/prevents muscle cramps, numbness, tingling.

3. If you get muscle cramps in the lower legs at night, just take 1/2 teaspoon of rock salt and a glass of water, and the cramps with its horrific pain will be gone in 5 minutes.

4. Why salt? Because without salt the body cannot retain water no matter how much water is drunk. You will still be dehydrated because you will just keep urinating and sweating the water out.

5. When BP is rising high but there is little or no headache but there is stiffness of shoulder and neck muscles, all you need to normalize the BP and remove the stiffness and the pain in 5 minutes is 1/2 teaspoon of rock salt and 3 glasses of water. If there is crushing pain in the head, it means blood supply to the head is lacking, and you will need the sili (hot pepper), to normalize it and shoot blood to the head and remove the extreme pain.

Dr JB Lim refutes:

What sort of medical claim is that? I have never heard of ‘fake salt’? What is that chemical? The common salt we use for cooking is supposed to all come from sea water after evaporation or from salt mines.

Sodium Chloride Only:

The main ingredient rock salt or table salt is Sodium chloride, although salt from sea water may contain many other salts of other elements like iodides, chlorides of magnesium, potassium, calcium, and even gold salts. However during evaporation, the salt crystallizes out from other dissolved impurities. In basic inorganic chemistry, we know that in crystallization only the pure form of any chemical is obtained. So even if sea water contains many other dissolved substances, only pure sodium chloride is isolated from the rest.

Water Retention Effect:

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It is the sodium in common salt (Sodium chloride) that causes water retention in the body, thus increases the hydrostatic pressure within the blood vessels. Hence this increase in hydrostatic pressure causes the blood pressure to rise.

The analogy is like pumping excessive air (water) into your car tyre to cause the internal pressure inside the tube (blood vessels) to rise above normal. Potassium does the opposite. It throws out excessive fluid from the body. Thus it has a diuretic effect (pass out more urine).

That is why sometimes a doctor will prescribe a diuretic (example: furosemide (Lasix) together with a potassium salt, example: Potassium chloride (Slow K), thiazide diuretics as the first line management for those with hypertension instead of using the more aggressive antihypertensive drugs (the beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, calcium channel blockers, angiotensin II receptor antagonists, etc, etc).

Cut Down On Salt Intake:

In fact I always advise my patients with high blood pressure to reduce sodium (common salt, MSG, sauces) intake, and replace them with lot of fruits and vegetables which are all low in sodium, high in potassium, and magnesium. Magnesium in the diet is also known to reduce blood pressure.

Cellular Electrolytes:

Sodium is found outside the cell (extra-cellular), while potassium is found inside the cells (intra-cellar). Fluid and electrolytic exchanges are continuous going on across the cellular membranes. This causes minute electrical activity across cellular membranes to polarize and depolarize within the muscle fibres. In turn the electrical stimuli cause the muscles either to contract or relax. This induces either a vaso-dilating, or a vaso-constricting effect on the smooth muscle, which in turn determines if the blood volume will ‘increase’ within a varying volume (increases the hydrostatic pressure) or a decrease. It is as simple to understand as that.

Sodium Elevates Blood Pressure:

So we do not want too much sodium in the body. Please note I use the term ‘sodium’ and not ‘salt’ because it is unscientific to use the word ‘salt’ because chlorides of potassium, magnesium are also technically and chemically salts. As scientists, doctors, nutritionists and researchers we speak in scientific language, and not layman language which cause confusion.

Non-pharmacological Intervention:

Adjunct non-pharmacological treatment is stress management and meditation to relax the internal muscles of the blood vessels. Vaso-dilation causes blood pressure to drop. Regular steam baths will also accelerate the excretion of sodium and water in the sweat and urine, and physiologically this approach has the same hypotensive effect on the body. This is a much better approach than the daily dependence of anti-hypertensive agents to manage hypertension.

Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Stimulation:

So are acupressure applied on certain points of the ears, legs and arms. The stimulus cause nervous impulses to flow to the muscles and the nerve supply to the elastic muscular lining of the internal blood vessels (tunica media, tunica adventitia, and the internal elastic lamina). The electrical impulses from acupressure (pizzo-electrical effect) will force the muscles to relax (vasodilators effect). Deep and slow breathing exercises also has exactly the same physiological effects of lowering blood pressure. There are so many other approaches which we will not go into.

Nicotine Vaso-constricting Effect:

Smoking also causes blood pressure elevation. So I teach and rehabilitate my patients certain weaning off techniques to slowly adapt the body towards a nicotine-free life-style.

Ask Him:

But I am at a loss how rock salt which is chemically the same as any table salt (Sodium chloride) can reduce high blood pressure? It is the opposite of what I am trying to explain here – scientifically, medically, biochemically, and also from the nutrition view point.

You must ask that chap who wrote all those ‘rock salt claims’ to undergo a proper course in either medicine, physiology, biochemistry, nutrition or in pharmacology (not pharmacy) before he spreads rubbish through his e-mails.

Sorry for him!

Jb lim--------------------------------

The Blogger's note:

On behalf of all health-conscious readers of this blog, the Blogger wishes to thank Dr Lim for his kind and generous invitation to post the above so as to share his knowledge and advice with everyone free-of-charge, which he has been doing all this while anyway. Check this out with a click on the Topic of "The Thoughts of Dr JB Lim" on the SIDEBAR of this blog.

From: lim juboo
Date: Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 12:31 AM
Ir TO Lau may use my comment in his blog. No problem about intellectual property with me. I share knowledge freely without conditions or payment even though my total education cost me over RM 2 million.

jb