Andrea Bemis and Dave Asprey debate whether babies need salt in their diet. They discuss pediatric guidelines, how salt consumption has changed historically, and what effects it has on infant digestion and long-term health.
When kids are eight months and beyond, pediatricians say don't give salt to babies. But you talk about giving salt to babies. How dare you.
Yeah, I think that, you know, again, I wrote the book with, I want people to, to take, you know, what they're most comfortable with. So I use, I use salt sparingly in recipes for, for the minerals, and it can help with digestion and help increase the nutrients of, of, of the food.
Why would you use it sparingly?
That doesn't seem to make, Well, I mean, yeah, I use a cut of sparingly, but, but you would have a heavy hand, it sounds like. So I think go with whatever you're comfortable with. But yeah, but yeah, I use, I use salt in the, in the cookbook. And if you Google salt and baby, I mean it, that no, no one, you know, when I was starting to feed my children. Yeah, no salt. And anytime you have a recipe out there with salt, it's like, don't give this to babies under one. And, and just through my own kind of reading up on it, I, I, I, I just, you know, agreed to disagree.
What did you find in your research on salt and digestion in babies?
Well, I, I like the cookbook that I, that was the most inspiring to me or the book was Nourishing Traditions by Sally. And she, yeah, it really is. And I give her a lot of credit to making me feel more confident as a mom and the choices that I was making in, in the kitchen for my, for my children and, and she kind of gets into the talking about salt and children and, and you know, I kind of felt more comfortable than not.
Almost 20 years ago, when I was running Palo Alto's first anti aging nonprofit age education group, before I started the biology movement, I gave this really carefully researched talk on salt and the history of why we decided salt was bad for us. It's not. We used to eat about 20 grams of salt a day because we didn't have refrigerators and all of our meat and all of our fish was salted and it did not cause high blood pressure, did not cause problems. It gave us a ton of minerals. And so our salt consumption has dropped so much that if you were to follow the FDA's guidelines and why anyone would listen to them after the last three or four years, I don't know. But if you still followed their guidelines and had less than 2.4 grams of salt a day for an adult, that is so low that it increases your heart attack risk, because when sodium is too low, it increases stress, which increases a hormone in the blood called rennet, which increases heart attack risk. But if you were to instead have 4 grams, or when I do, 8 grams a day for my body weight and to keep my blood pressure where I want, completely changes your digestion, changes your life. And if you're on a keto or a carnivore diet, you need even more. So the idea that your baby is supposed to not have salt, even though salt helps with a stress response. No, you probably don't want to have a heavy hand of salt, but you do want a little bit of salt, because we're made out of salt water. And how's your baby supposed to hydrate if it doesn't have a little bit of salt? So that advice is absurd, it's wrongheaded, and it doesn't make any sense. So the idea that somehow babies are little aliens that don't need normal nutrients, a lot of that's overblown. But don't give your little babies honey, Right? That seems like that might be a problem, right?
