Video by Roman Minaev

The theory about salt and our body is simple and intuitive. But does it hold true when we test it on the long-term? Woven into this groundbreaking talk is a story about addressing a medical comfort zone with unconventional research questions, conducted at unconventional places, carried out with unconventional people. Watch this talk now to learn more. I am a clinician-scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and University of Erlangen, Germany. In 1991, as a medical student in Berlin, I took a class on human physiology in extreme environments. The professor who taught the course worked with the European space program and presented data from a simulated 28-day mission in which a crew lived in a small capsule. They had collected the astronauts’ urine and other physiological markers, and noticed something puzzling in the data: Their sodium excretion went up and down in a seven day cycle. That contradicted all I had been taught in medical school: there should be no such temporal cycle. I made a decision that I wanted to study that. 25 years later, we have learned that humans and animals store large amounts of sodium in their tissues as they age, and that this sodium storage is coupled with disease. Our work suggests that we really do not understand the effect of sodium chloride on the body, and that it is time to rethink salt. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at