Last Updated on November 9, 2023 by Fasting Planet
Even if you don’t necessarily taste it, most foods you eat every day tend to have a lot of salt. These include pizza, vegetable juice, cottage cheese, instant pudding, ham, soup, and shrimp, the worst offenders. If you’ll soon do an intermittent fast with more restrictive eating, you may wonder if you can continue to consume salt. Will it break your fast?
Whether salt will break your fast depends on the source of sodium. If you add salt to your water or sip on bone broth or Pedialyte during your fast to maintain electrolytes, that won’t break your fast. Noshing on a meal like pizza or chips can break your fast from a caloric perspective as well as the salt creating insulin resistance.
In this post, we’ll talk about how salt is beneficial to your health, especially when fasting, but why overdoing it on sodium is not recommended. You’re not going to want to miss it!
The Importance of Sodium Intake When Fasting
Salt is naturally within our bodies, comprising about 0.4 percent of a person’s average body weight. However, your body has no way of producing sodium on its own, so it must get it from the foods you consume. Given how salt is hidden in so many of today’s commercially produced foods, even sweet ones, this isn’t too hard to do.
The recommended guidelines of salt consumption from the CDC are 2,300 milligrams a day. The CDC also says that the average American ingests more like 3,400 milligrams of salt daily, if not more. Excess salt can put you at higher risk of kidney disease, stomach cancer, osteoporosis, heart failure, and stroke.
Yet surprisingly, salt is not all bad. Yes, overdoing it on the sodium isn’t great, but in moderation, salt is not only good for you, it’s crucial for your health.
Salt itself includes chlorine and sodium. These minerals allow electrical impulses to travel to your nerves and brain. Further, without at least some salt, your body couldn’t maintain its own blood pressure, nor could it manage its volume of fluids like water and blood.
During a fast, your kidneys release sodium-containing fluids, causing your sodium levels to deplete. In the meantime, your insulin is going down, your glucagon levels are increasing, and your ketone bodies are being expelled, helping you burn fat on a fast.
If you were to exercise in a fasted state, which many fasters do, your sodium loss continues. After all, sweat is mostly salt and water. Remember also that your body is not getting salt since you’re not eating. This sets you up for symptoms of low sodium or an electrolyte deficiency.
Let’s rewind a moment. What is an electrolyte? Electrolytes are minerals comprised of sodium and magnesium as well as calcium, potassium, and chloride. Through electrolytes, our muscles can contract when needed and our body has the energy to get us through our day.
When your electrolyte levels are normal, you may find it easier to fall asleep. You’ll also be less fatigued, you’ll have fewer headaches, and your muscles and nerves will stay healthy. With an electrolyte deficiency, you might have digestive issues, poor sleep, tiredness, and muscle cramps.
That’s why fasters especially must ensure they get at least some salt as part of their daily diet. We don’t really recommend eating table salt outright, as that’s not very tasty nor great for your health. You could always mix salt into your water, but if you want a drink that’s more palatable, bone broth is a good source of sodium that won’t break your fast, as is Pedialyte, at least in small doses.
When Does Salt Break Your Fast?
Okay, so your body definitely needs salt, especially when fasting, but the source you choose to get your salt from is important if you don’t want to break your fast.
Consuming too many calories or eating foods heavy in carbs and/or sugars are guaranteed ways to break your fast. What does this mean? When your fast is broken, the insulin response created in the body causes the liver to release glucose. You then begin using this glucose for energy again instead of fat.
That’s why we said Pedialyte is a good source of electrolytes, but only in limited doses. A liter of the stuff has 25 calories, 6 grams of sugar, and 6 grams of carbs. Once a day, that should be fine, but drinking Pedialyte all day would definitely break your fast.
The same is true of diving into very salty foods such as scrambled eggs or omelets, cheese, chicken, chips, pretzels, tacos or burritos, store-bought soups, cured meats, sandwiches, and pizza. These items are all very calorically heavy, not to mention full of carbs. Eating any of them will definitely break your fast.
According to a 2016 report in the journal Clinical Nutrition Research, “high sodium intake raises blood leptin levels which result in hypertrophy of abdominal fat cells, which in turn increase insulin resistance.”
In other words, your blood sugar goes up from too much salt because your body doesn’t react to insulin as it used to. Glucose gets stuck in the blood, putting you at a higher risk of type 2 diabetes. Fortunately, through exercise, diet, and losing weight, insulin resistance is often treatable, but it is something to be aware of if you like salty snacks and foods.
Conclusion
Sodium is a key mineral for life. Without it, our muscle fibers can’t contract and nerve impulses don’t happen. We’d also not be able to maintain our fluid levels, preventing the transfer of nutrients. To avoid breaking your fast, you should ingest salt through bone broth or Pedialyte, not pizza or cheeseburgers.
Fasters are especially likely to end up with electrolyte deficiencies, so make sure you prioritize getting your salt each day of your fast. Best of luck!