Is salt good or bad for you? How much should you get?

[lmfao]

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[Lister]

@lmfao Salt is pretty toxic to the endothelium cells that line our blood vessel walls. For that reason alone I don't put salt on my food. It took me a while to adjust but boy did I notice a difference in my energy levels because I'm not inhibiting vaso dilation by putting the wrong foods in my body.

There are some people on the internet who like to argue that additional salt on food is healthy and use examples of people getting ill when their salt was depleted during heatwave. If I need to replace sodium because I had an excessive sweat on I will juice a head of celery and get electrolytes that way. But table salt, himalayan salt, Celtic sea salt are all bad for us to consume, this is common knowledge despite what some naturopaths and certain health gurus like to tell us. 

[outlandish]

It's not a bad/good thing. Like many aspects of nutrition it's a question of balance. Your body needs sodium in order for your nerves to fire, without it you would die. In the modern world it's way easier to have too much salt than too little, and most people consume far too much salt.

In general people should drastically reduce their salt intake. Like Lister said, you can get all the salt you need from whole foods without needing to add it to your food. OTOH, if you're careful with it, cooking with a little bit of salt isn't going to kill you. It tastes nice, and especially if you're active, you'll excrete it efficiently.

[iTommy]

Good question, there are different kinds of salt, so I don't think it's fair to sweep them all under the same rug. I consume pink salt/himalaya salt, but aren't sure if there's much of a difference between the one I use, and the ones that most people buy in the local store.

[lmfao]

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[Ibn Sina]

Salt (Na+ Cl- ) is important for our body as it contains the micro-nutrients sodium and chloride which is essential for our body. It is essential to meet the daily requirement of salt in our body. Do you know why in hospitals people saline is given to the bed ridden patients through canula? It's to maintain the plasma level in the blood and to maintain the sodium level. If the sodium level is too low, it causes hyponatremia, which has it's own range of symptoms (look it up), and too much salt intake causes hypernatremia (look it up). One of the main consequence is hypertension.  The regulation of salt is done by Aldosterone a hormone released by the posterior pituitary, it helps in salt regulation. 
If you take too much salt, then less Aldosterone is released, which means there is less diuretic action, and less urine is absorbed in the PCT and DCT of the nephrons hence more urine is produced and voided with sodium. Likewise when less sodium is present then more Aldosterone is produced which means there is more reabsorption of urine hence more concentrated urine is formed and less loss of nutrients. 
Like any nutrients we take, be it Vitamin A, D, calcium, etc it is all about balance,  taking more or less causes hyper and hypo conditions.