What's wrong with repetitive adrenal whipping is that adrenal fortitude is variable; many people's adrenals eventually fail to respond to the prod of salt and the body begins to suffer from a lack of adrenal hormones. Often those inheriting weak adrenals manifest semi-failure in childhood. The consequence is that ordinary, irritating substances begin causing severe irritation. The person becomes allergic to pollen, dust, foods, animal danders, etc. We see asthma, hay fever, sinusitis, etc. Though one can then discover specific allergens and try to remove them from the environment or diet, often this case can be solved far more easily by complete withdrawal from all salt. This rests the adrenals and they may recover their full function; almost certainly their function will improve. The asthma, allergies and etc., gradually vanish.
Most of us don't need to eat salt as a nutrient. There's enough sodium in one dill pickle to run a human body for a year. There's enough natural sodium in many types of vegetables to supply normal needs without using table salt. Perhaps athletes or other hard working people in the tropics eating deficient food grown on leached-out depleted soils, people that sweat buckets day after day may need a little extra sodium. Perhaps. Not having practiced in the humid tropics myself, I have no definitive answer about this.
Unfortunately, the average American is entirely addicted to salt and thinks food tastes lousy without it. To please the average consumer, almost all prepared foods contain far too much salt for someone suffering from exhausted adrenals. Interestingly, Canadians do not like their foods nearly as salty as Americans, and prepared foods like soups and the like in cans and packages that look just like the ones in American supermarkets (though with French on the back panel) have to be reformulated for our northern neighbors. I've observed that Canadians are generally healthier than Americans in many respects.
We would all be far better off consuming no salt at all. Those with allergies or asthma should completely eliminate it for a month or two and discover if that simple step doesn't pretty much cure them. The trouble is that bakery bread is routinely two percent salt by weight. Cheese is equally salted or even more so. Canned and frozen prepared food products are all heavily salted. Restaurant meals are always highly salted in the kitchen. If you want to avoid salt you almost have to prepare everything yourself, bake your own bread, abstain from cheese (though there are unsalted cheeses but even I don't like the flavor of these), and abstain from restaurants. My family has managed to eliminate all salt from our own kitchen except for that in cheese, and we eat cheese rather moderately.
Sugar is a high-caloric non-food with enormous liabilities. First, from the viewpoint of the universal formula for health, no form of non-artificial sweetener carries enough nutrients with it to justify the number of calories it contains, not even malt extract. White refined sugar contains absolutely no nutrients at all; the "good" or "natural" sweets also carry so little nutrition as to be next to useless. Sweets are so far over on the bad end of the Health = Nutrition / Calories scale that for this reason alone they should be avoided.
However, healthy people can usually afford a small amount of sin; why not make it sweets? In small quantity, sugars are probably the easiest indiscretion to digest and the least damaging to the organ systems. Although, speaking of sin, as Edgar Guest, the peoples' poet, once so wisely quipped, (and my husband agrees) "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker." Sugar is a powerful drug! People who abuse sweets set up a cycle of addiction that can be very hard to break. It starts when the body tries to regulate blood sugar. Kicked up to high levels by eating sugar, the pancreas releases insulin. But that is not the end of the chain reaction. Insulin regulates blood sugar levels but also raises brain levels of an amino acid called tryptophan. Tryptophan is the raw material the brain uses to manufacture a neurotransmitter called serotonin. And serotonin plays a huge role in regulating mood. Higher brain levels of serotonin create a feeling of well-being. Eating sugar gives a person a chemical jolt of happiness. Heavy hits of high-glycemic index starch foods are also rapidly converted to sugar. So don't give your kids sweets! Or huge servings of starch to mellow them out. It is wise not to start out life a happiness addict with a severe weight problem.
Now that the chemistry of sugar addiction is understood, there currently is a movement afoot to cast the obese as helpless victims of serotonin imbalances and to "treat" them with the same kinds of serotonin-increasing happy drugs (like Prozac) that are becoming so popular with the psychiatric set. This promises to be a multiple billion dollar business that will capture all the money currently flowing into other dieting systems and bring it right back to the AMA/drug company/FDA nexus. The pitch is that when serotonin levels are upped, the desire to eat drops and so is weight. This approach is popular with the obese because it requires no personal responsibility other than taking a pill that really does make them feel happy. However, the same benefit can be had by strict adherence to a low-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. Eventually, the brain chemistry rebalances itself and serotonin levels stabilize.
| Grains | Fruits | Vegetables | |||
| all bran | 51 | apples | 39 | baked beans | 40 |
| brown rice | 66 | bananas | 62 | beets | 64 |
| buckwheat | 54 | cherries | 23 | black-eyed peas | 33 |
| cornflakes | 80 | grapefruit | 26 | carrots | 92 |
| oatmeal | 49 | grapes | 45 | chic peas | 36 |
| shred. wheat | 67 | orange juice | 46 | parsnips | 97 |
| muesli | 66 | peach | 29 | potato chips | 51 |
| white rice | 72 | orange | 40 | baked potato | 98 |
| white spagetti | 50 | pear | 34 | sweet potato | 48 |
| whole wheat spagetti | 42 | plum | 25 | yams | 51 |
| sweet corn | 59 | raisins | 64 | peas | 51 |
| Nuts | Baked Goods | Sugars | |||
| peanuts | 13 | pastry | 59 | fructose | 20 |
| sponge cake | 46 | glucose | 100 | ||
| Meats | white bread | 69 | honey | 87 | |
| sausage | 28 | w/w bread | 72 | maltose | 110 |
| fish sticks | 38 | whole rye bread | 42 | sucrose | 59 |
| Dairy Products | |||||
| yogurt | 36 | whole milk | 34 | skim milk | 32 |
Remember, the pancreas has another major service to perform for the body: secreting digestive enzymes to aid in the digestion of proteins. When the diet contains either too much protein or too much sugar and/or high-glycemic index starch foods, the overworked pancreas begins to be less and less efficient at maintaining both of these functions.
Sometimes a stressed-out pancreas gets overactive and does too good a job lowering the blood sugar, producing hypoglycemia. Hypoglycemia is generally accompanied by unpleasant symptoms such as fatigue, dizziness, blurred vision, irritability, confusion, headache, etc. This condition is typically alleviated by yet another hit of sugar which builds an addiction not only to sugar, but to food in general. If the hypoglycemic then keeps on eating sugar to relieve the symptoms of sugar ingestion, eventually the pancreas becomes exhausted, producing an insulin deficiency, called diabetes. Medical doctors treat diabetes with insulin supplements either oral or intramuscular plus a careful diet with very low and measured amounts of sugar and starch for the remainder of the persons inevitably shortened and far less pleasant life. However, sometimes diabetes can be controlled with diet alone, though medical doctors have not had nearly as much success with this approach as talented naturopaths. Sometimes, long fasting can regenerate a pancreas. It is far better to avoid creating this disease!