Choose Your Own Adventure
Why do we crave salt?
Salt is essential to keeping our bodies alive and functioning, and our brains are wired to notice when we’re running low. Most adults need about 500 mg of sodium per day (about ¼ teaspoon). Extremely low sodium intake over time can cause hyponatremia — symptoms include fatigue, confusion, seizures, and in severe cases, death.
Salt isn’t a seasoning. It’s a memory.
A memory of an ocean we once called home.
We are haunted by a sea we no longer swim in.
Because the very thing we call life began in saltwater. Early life was surrounded by salt—suspended in it, shaped by it. It was the medium, the solvent, the setting. The natural thing to do was to rely on it, to adapt around it, until life became impossible without it.
And despite all our progress, evolution, and conquest of dry land, we never truly left the ocean.
We brought it with us. Into our blood. Our tears. Our sweat. Salt was the first thing we learned to carry.
Your craving for salt, then, is not weakness.
It is memory.
It is origin.
It is the signal to return.
Before vertebrates ever took a breath of air, before legs pressed against dry earth, we were water, surrounded by it, shaped by it, regulated by it.
And when some ambitious fish made their awkward climb onto land, the ocean didn’t get left behind.
We internalized it.
“Salt is the reason your heart still beats.”
Your blood. Your tears. Your sweat.
We carry salt not as a remnant, but as an active technology - a living system for survival, signaling, and sensation. Sodium isn’t just a nutrient.
It’s the body’s current.
Salt = Signal.
🧠 Salt as Signal
Every thought you’ve ever had was delivered by a pulse of sodium. We crave salt because every nerve signal in our body is a wave of charged particles crossing a membrane.
Sodium and potassium shift like tides, rising and falling to create pulses of electricity.
The sodium-potassium pump - Na⁺/K⁺-ATPase - is one of evolution’s most brilliant hacks. A molecular machine in every nerve cell that creates tiny voltage differences, allowing neurons to fire, muscles to contract, and memories to form.
Half of the energy your brain consumes goes toward powering this pump - and it couldn’t happen without salt.
Without salt? No movement. No memory. No life.
🌊The Internal Sea
Leaving the sea was improbable. Evaporation, UV radiation, gravity—land was hostile. We didn’t conquer land.
We remodeled ourselves into water balloons wrapped in armor.
🛡️ Keratinized skin evolved to stop water loss.
🫀 Blood plasma evolved to match ancient seawater.
🧠 Salt signals evolved to fire nerves and shape thought.
The solution wasn’t to escape the ocean.
It was to become the ocean.
To carry it. Internalize it. Protect it.
Salt was a strategy.
Blood plasma evolved to mimic seawater.
Cells became sealed vessels, protected by keratinized skin.
Internal chemistry became a self-contained ocean,
maintaining electrochemical gradients across every membrane.
We didn’t just move into a new world.
We engineered ourselves to carry the old one within us.
📍 Craving salt
Our craving is not indulgence.
It’s is not addiction.
It is orientation.
It is how life points toward what it needs to survive.
We don’t crave salt because we’re flawed.
We crave it because we are
fish-shaped containers of seawater,
still seeking the shorelines we lost.
Your heart beats with waves that remember the sea.
Your cells still hum with ancient tides.
You are not a modern human craving seasoning—
You are a creature with a biological compass,
always scanning for the signal.
So where does that craving lead us?