The explanation was and still is correct. But when I’m asked to furnish it again, I’ll provide some additional information.

My niece was a preteen, overweight, and on a diet. After losing 10 pounds in 10 days, she celebrated with two slices of pepperoni pizza and a breadstick.

When she weighed herself the next morning, she was 3 pounds heavier and about as woebegone as a girl can get over something other than a boy. I told her not to worry.

That the amount of sodium she ingested in just that meal alone could’ve topped 1500 milligrams - the amount the American Heart Association sees as the ideal daily limit for a full-grown adult. That excessive sodium intake, especially during dieting, causes your body to retain water and could easily increase your body weight by 3 pounds.

So she should drink plenty of water, eat meals high in fiber, not stress out, and not weigh herself for two days.

By that time, the water weight was gone. And I was, in her eyes, almost as cool as Josh and Drake on the Disney Channel.

While I’m betting you’ve already heard an adult version of this story (and wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve told one also), I’ll wager you’re not as aware there’s another type of weight gain that can be linked to ingesting too much sodium. The long-term type that leads to metabolic syndrome and obesity.

In March 2018, for example, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a study that found feeding a high-salt diet to mice caused hyperphagia - the medical term to indicate an abnormal increase in eating. While the hyperphagia didn’t seem to adversely affect the mice at first, after a few months the mice experienced “progressive weight gain and metabolic syndrome developed.”

Equally as important, these researchers figured out what helped cause both: “endogenous fructose production.”

In reaction to the high-salt diet, the mice’s own livers were producing fructose. The researchers confirmed this by feeding the same high-salt diet to specially bred mice that cannot make or process fructose and by finding weight gain and metabolic syndrome did not occur.

(Just to be clear: Table salt and sodium are not the same, though the terms are often used interchangeably, so I’ve used whichever one is used in the study or by the source. Table salt is sodium chloride, a crystal-like compound abundant in nature while the mineral sodium is one of the chemical elements found in salt.)

In a review of the PNAS study published three weeks later in Nature Review Nephrology, lead researcher Miguel Lanaspa, DVM, Ph.D., and professor at Oregon Health and Science University, states that their research shows salt, “despite the fact that in fact it does not provide any calories, can in fact stimulate appetite.” As well as that it seems to do so by elevating leptin levels to such a degree that leptin resistance results.

With that, the link between high-salt ingestion and obesity comes full circle.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, leptin resistance causes your body to go into starvation mode, adversely affecting your brain function, decreasing your overall energy level, and causing you to use fewer calories at rest. Moreover, since it creates hunger while decreasing metabolism, fat storage is likely to occur.

A subsequent paper published in the July 2019 issue of Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care reaffirms what Lanaspa and colleagues found and also cited fructose consumption as a “key player” in metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is the catch-all diagnosis you receive from your doctor if you have three or more of these problems: too much belly fat, too much “bad” cholesterol or too little “good” cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar.

It can lead to Type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Now you need to seriously consider all the aforementioned information since is there’s a really good chance you ingest too much sodium.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 90 percent of people in the U.S. take in too much, 70 percent of which comes from restaurant, prepackaged, and processed foods - “including many products that don’t even taste salty.”

So why are food producers as hooked on using sodium as the public seems to be? The CDC’s article, “The Role of Sodium in Your Food,” offers a few less-than-altruistic answers.

Besides enhancing the sweetness of added sugars (and thereby hooking you on that, too), salt increases shelf life, enhances color, prevents chemical changes in baked foods that would adversely affect taste and growth of bacteria that could lead to disease, and “masks the ‘off notes,’ such as bitterness and strange tastes that can result from food processing.”

In short, the way to keep too much sodium from turning into too much weight is simple, albeit time-consuming.

Cook more of your meals on the stove at home. Get fewer of them from the microwave, convenience stores, fast food joints, and fine-dining restaurants.