If there’s one constant in most prepared prepping/canned food, it’s that there’s just too much sodium in them. WAY too much.
Too much sodium really is a big deal now, but if the Stuff Hits The Fan, it can be extra bad.
Why?
Sodium Increases Blood Pressure, The Last Thing You Need If The SHTF
Sodium has one really, really bad side effect when it comes to the day-to-day operation of the human body… it jacks up your blood pressure (BP). Water tends to follow salt around like a duckling follows it’s mama. Put a lot of salt in your blood and the water tends to stay there with it. Too much blood makes the pressure high.
Having one survival food that’s packed with sodium isn’t perhaps the biggest worry in the world, the problem really comes in when LOTS of things that you have stored are overloaded with the stuff.
Why Exactly Is High Blood Pressure Bad?
Yes, we all know the “health class” lecture that “high blood pressure” can eventually lead to heart disease, stroke, etc… but those are long term effects, right?
Why should I care about blood pressure in the short term?
Two reasons. Most commonly, very high blood pressure in the short term can cause something called a ‘hypertensive crisis’. It often starts with a headache, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What’s really going on is the small blood vessels are being damaged by the high pressure. The combination of the damage and the high pressure being fed into the smallest vessels (capillaries) causes the capillaries to start leaking extra fluid into the tissues around them.
The most immediate threat of this edema (fluid leakage into the tissues) is that it impairs cardiac efficiency. That’s right, the heartbeat becomes less effective. The person may get chest pain, extreme anxiety (no help; that makes the blood pressure rise further), breathlessness. The end of this road (and it can be the end, very literally) is organ failure.
The other reason is that it raises the risk for hemorrhagic stroke. That’s when a blood vessel in the brain rips open, spilling out a bunch of blood which causes damage to nearby brain regions by compressing them, and damage to any brain tissues that vessel was supposed to feed the blood to down the line.
The Whammy! Increasing Sodium Intake While BP Meds Run Low and Stress Runs High
A serious crisis has the perfect storm of conditions to provoke a hypertensive crisis or hemorrhagic stroke.
1. Crises are stressful, and your brain responds by raising blood pressure.
2. You may not have access to blood pressure meds; both the ones you normally take and the ones that might help you make it through a hypertensive crisis.
3. If your food is overloading you with sodium, it gets way harder to keep the blood pressure down. Some people are more sensitive to this than others; but it’s true for everyone to some extent. That’s why we recommend being thoughtful about how much sodium is in your stored foods.
Learn From My Mistake
My internet nickname is Salty, and truth to tell, I LOVE to eat high salt foods. I’ve never really met a high sodium food I haven’t liked, to the point that my blood pressure runs pretty high without medications.
I take a drug called lisinopril orally, and for a while it did a pretty good job of keeping my blood pressure down. Then, slowly, my BP started to rise, so the good doctor raised my dosage… and that didn’t go very well.
They backed off my dosage and put me on a diuretic (it’s a “make you pee” drug), which (more or less) flushes the excess sodium out of my system. Since then, as long as I don’t go crazy on the salt, my blood pressure is rock solid in the green zone.
And Then…
Then there was this one day… I was busy at work so I instead of breakfast I just had half a bag of cheese curds. For lunch, only had a few minutes so I grabbed a small bag of potato chips and some cottage cheese to use as a dip. I got hungry at about 4 so I finished off the cheese curds, then for supper I had a couple pieces of pizza. Guess who also ended the night with a half a bag of microwave popcorn… yeah, this guy.
I noticed that night that I wasn’t feeling well, and that my heart was beating pretty hard. Spice took my BP and it was 155 over 92 (WAY WAY high, mine usually runs in the 110’s over 70’s when on medication).
I went to bed, and the next morning I still felt off. Took my BP and it was 148 over 88, so I took my pills and went to work. An hour into a stressful day I took my BP (I had taken my machine with me) and it was 169 over 89 and I felt terrible.
Fearing something awful (both sides of my grandparents had strokes) I called Spice who hadn’t left for work to pick me up and take me to the urgent care. I took my BP again on the way and it was up to 175 over 92, so I changed that to the emergency room.
An Expensive Lesson
She took me to the ER, and when I told the person behind the counter I was having a blood pressure crisis I was (literally) whisked into a room and hooked up to all kinds of machines.
I was actually feeling a little better and I was laying there feeling like an idiot for wasting all of these people’s time and a whole lot of our money over something that was no big deal.
Then, I looked over and the fancy BP machine read me in at 210 over 94. That’s “danger of stroke” level.
They immediately started me on an IV and gave me some kind of drug to drop my blood pressure down. After several hours I was down to 140 over 88 and stable for two hours, and they discharged me.
I asked the doctor if that wasn’t pretty high and she replied “Here in my ER? No, it’s OK. If I read that in my clinic, then yes, we would be having a long talk and doing some more tests… speaking of that, who is your doctor, you need to go see him or her tomorrow and get whatever caused this looked at.”
Salty Was Just Salty
I was able to set up an emergency appointment with my doctor the next morning, and Spice accompanied me to the office. My doctor asked me a whole bunch of questions about if I had taken my meds (I have), and then about what I had eaten. As I was telling her and Spice my menu of a couple of days ago, both women’s faces were dawning looks of horror…
As I was describing my eating habits, Spice chimed in and said “Salty is the kind of person who puts extra salt on Chinese food.” I looked at Spice and said “is that a bad thing?”
Apparently, it’s a bad thing.
The doctor said “If you don’t stop eating like that it’s going to kill you. No, wait… I won’t, because if you don’t stop eating like that I WILL KILL YOU”. (Fun fact, our doctor is also a personal friend outside of her office).
Here’s what I learned. Cheese curds have a ridiculous amount of salt in them, as does the “old fashioned style” cottage cheese, potato chips, pizza and microwave popcorn?
Who knew?*
Conclusion
Having some higher sodium food in your storage isn’t going to cause you and your family to keel over dead. It won’t.
The thing we want to be careful about, however, is that we don’t want everything we are eating in a high-stress SHTF situation to be packed with sodium… because, as I have shown in my example above, that can be a very bad thing.
I had a hospital to go to, and they had plenty of medicines there to help me out.. but the S had not HTF that day or that week… so it was no big deal. (Spice’s note: Umm, yes it was. Whenever blood pressure gets that high, you’re playing Russian roulette.)
All we ask is that you think about it and start watching those labels.
*anybody with half a brain (which apparently does not include Salty in this case) knew, that’s who.
High salt foods in my LTS are why I store so much rice and pasta. I can cook the rice (or pasta) and mix in the high salt meats or other foods and it helps stretch my food supply and reduce the amount of salt per meal. So no need to worry about all that spam in the LTS. 😛
Most people are not as sensitive to sodium intake as you are and do not have to be that careful. Increasing or decreasing sodium has only a transient effect on my BP, but I have for years eaten a low sodium diet anyway because American cooking has been completely debased by an over reliance on salt as a substitute for flavor.
Thanks for the comment, Judge.
As a pathophysiologist, I agree with what you have to say … but there’s an important caveat. Salty is not *generally* all that salt sensitive. He’s not one of the 10% of hypertensive people who get unhypertensive as soon as salt intake drops. We tried that and it had minimal impact. He’s like most people with high blood pressure in that salt reduction helps lower the BP, but it’s not a big reduction. That’s why the hypertensive crisis from salt intake surprised us, to the point we felt a need to share the story. Within a reasonably normal range, his salt intake doesn’t much matter … but when he got out of that range on a particularly high salt day, things got ugly in a hurry. Seeing how much salt is in some of the prepper foods we’ve evaluated, I can see that kind of reaction as being a problem when a lot of adult Americans (many of whom are hypertensive) switch to a prepper food diet suddenly.