I know (and I know you know) that similar arguments are often made around vitamin c - absolutely essential, but carnivores seem to either need much less, get it somehow, or both. 

Makes some of these nutrition issues a bitch to figure out, given all this variance and complexity. 

elvismercury

HealthAndFitness

Is salt necessary in the human diet? A few viewpoints

Signal312

I was thinking about this in the context of salt licks for deer as well. I'm not sure I have an answer to that. 

And here's the AI answer about "is salt critical" -Salt (sodium chloride) is absolutely critical to the human diet. You cannot do without it.

But delving further - yes, sodium chloride is essential, you will die without it. However, populations that ate lots mostly meat and fish were fine, so those items have enough salt for people to thrive.

The answer clearly needs to be that humans do not need added salt, because many early populations did NOT have a source of salt, other than meat and fish. 

What's interesting to me is that AI immediately jumps to the standard answer. It wouldn't come up with something from an old book from the 1920's.  