Salt And Hypertension Peer-review Journals

 For millions of years, human beings ate very small amounts of salt (0.1-0.5 g/day). Among the food that humans ingest, meat has the highest salt content (about 0.6 g of salt per pound). During the hunter-gathering period, the main food for human being was meat. Their diet consisted of 50% meat and 50% plants. So the intake of salt in paleolithic times was less than 1 g/day. In the mean times, population growth led to the introduction of agriculture, and during the first few thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the intake of meat declined and the intake of vegetables increased up to 90%. In the agricultural period, human beings consumed about the same amount of salt as did their hunter-gathering ancestors4). The earliest evidences of salt processing dates back to around 6,000 years ago. People living in Romania were boiling the salt-laden spring water to extract the salts. The harvest of salt from the surface of Xiechi Lake near Yuncheng in Shanxi, China, dates back to at least 6000 BC, making it one of the oldest verifiable saltworks5). Salt was required as a food preservative for thousands of years. About 5,000 years ago, the Chinese discovered that salt could be used to preserve food. Salt then became of great economic importance as it was possible to preserve food during the winter and allowed the development of settled communities. With the increased use of salt, salt became a precious commodity of commerce. About 1,000 years ago, salt intake in the western world had risen to about 5 g/day6).