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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

Salt is another big one - if you go on a low-sodium diet for a while, many "normal" (American, at least) foods start to taste super salty.

My wife and I cook quite a lot at home, and tend to under-sweeten and under-salt things compared to the status quo, and my perception is that we're both much more sensitive to salt and sugar levels in foods we don't prepare as a result.

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Unless your home cooking involves processed foods or you get your sodium elsewhere, you would need to add salt to what you cook, otherwise you're going to harm yourself.

Sodium is essential to being healthy; the reason it's made out to be a big deal is due to how much processed food the average person eats. It's almost as though it's assumed that people are going to eat processed food regularly.

We add salt, we just don't add as much as "normal". We generally cut salt from a recipe about in half, or skip it if we're adding another salted component (ie, salted butter, bullion, etc). Salt is generally added as a finisher to the recipe to enhance the flavor profile, rather than just throwing a bunch of it in to start out with. We're definitely aware of the value of electrolytes.

We're not anti-salt or anything, we just tend to use less of it than recipes call for, and the effects has been that we notice oversalting more in other foods.

This sounds like a bad way to salt, depending on what you're cooking. I think it's better to salt parts of the dish independently during cooking. That brings out flavors individually like the dish intends. Salting at the end tends to make something taste salty rather than just enhance flavor.

Apparent saltiness increases when you use it to finish because it's usually consumed before it's dissolved into or been absorbed by the media. If you salt very much at the end of cooking, especially for liquids, use less than you think is needed, and give it good time to mingle and meld.

We still use salt in the cooking process, just less than usually indicated. It's easy to make something saltier, but it's pretty hard to take it out once it's in there. :)

Exactly, its very important to get enough sodium. Cook your own meals and add salt.

For anyone who works out or is starting to its good to remember you lose salts while you sweat as well.

I throw a pinch of salt into my post-workout protein shakes exactly for that reason - replenishing lost electrolytes is really important for recovery.

Sodium is normally in protein shake, and certainly in sports drinks.

The body needs around 1/4 of a teaspoon of salt every day. Most people get that without adding any salt to their food.

Y'know, I wish one of these personalised biometrics startups would come up with a good way of telling me whether I'm getting enough X or too much Y personally, rather than just as a statistical artefact. Because I have a "salt tooth" and occasionally wonder if this represents some mineral deficiency.

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