Historically people consumed much more salt, and don't give me the "people used to die when they were 35" nonsense. There is a big difference between being kicked by a horse vs dying of a stroke.
Folks you need to replace your sodium when you sweat!
/soapbox
Older women who have taken blood pressure medication for many years, e.g. 10 to 20 years, have risks of losing the ability to control well the concentrations of sodium and potassium in the blood.
If they follow a low-sodium diet, they have a high risk of hyponatremia (too little sodium in the body). Depending on the diet, hypokalemia (too little potassium in the body) is also possible.
If these conditions are not diagnosed promptly, severe illness or even death are the consequence.
Unfortunately, I was not aware of these risks. My mother belonged to this risk group, but nobody knew this and her periodic blood tests were perfect, because they included many other tests, except the sodium and potassium concentrations in blood, which are mandatory to detect this problem.
My mother had very serious problems because hyponatremia was detected too late, so I believe that more people should become aware of this risk.
There are a lot of old women taking medication for high blood pressure, so all should know that a periodic cheap test for sodium in blood can easily prevent reaching a stage when complete recovery becomes difficult or impossible.
Also, any low-sodium diet should actually measure or compute how much salt you eat, because too low sodium is even more dangerous than too high sodium.
Bacteria landing on salt will quickly find all of their water exiting their insides towards the salt. Life ceases to function sans water.
Nowadays I believe it's simply lightly coated in salt to only maximize flavor since we have fridges.
As far as I understand, the health risk associated with excess sodium intake is high blood pressure, i.e. more stress on your cardiovascular system.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/kidneys-salt-and-blood-pr...
Don't worry about sodium unless you've been diagnosed with a metabolic problem.
I do feel kind of bloaty when I eat wretched excesses of sodium all at once, usually ramen, but it passes.
Generally eat a high salt diet, add other minerals (mostly potassium) to drinking water, and take magnesium glycinate before bed. Minerals are easy to eliminate and if I'm not getting enough there's no alternative.
You're probably experiencing a sugar crash.
I suspect you don't experience the same after eating a bag of Doritos but they're absolutely loaded with MSG.. plus in all likelihood also sodium inosinate, sodium guanylate and who knows what else.
In fact, the fears around MSG seem to have some overlap with negative racial stereotypes:
Though to be fair it's a form of arms race, most US restaurants overdo it if the regional palette has become desensitized. It's not strictly a Chinese restaurant issue.
But many Chinese dishes on the menus are defined by their sweet and salty axis, and being in this environment they're pushed to the extreme.
Apparently lots of people disagree with something that seems obvious? Source?
Here's a source for you: https://www.nature.com/articles/jhh2008144
Strawman argument.
So stomach cancer is currently 10% of cancer deaths, and cancer is currently the second leading cause of death at all ages. One can't extrapolate that back historically safely because cancer primarily affects the old and people didn't live long enough back then. But even if we just single out stomach cancer and assume incorrectly that 100% is attributed to salt, when frankly that would be a minority of stomach cancers, then it still wouldn't even make the top ten causes of mortality today. Never mind historically when people commonly died from lots of things we no longer worry about, like simple bacterial infections, childbirth, or poor dental hygiene.
The OPs argument is ridiculous and I'm surprised how many people can't see that.
Everything old is new again.
People also had harsher lives and were exposed to a wide variety of stressors, diseases, malnutrition, etc.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/when-did-humans-star...