Alan Davies

You're walking on the clouds.

And they're not just out there doing epic landscape work.

If you're eating, they might be doing their magic inside your mouth right now.

And they're definitely working inside your veins, helping your nerves fire, your muscles move, and your brain decide, yes, keep listening.

They are sodium and chlorine, or, as a pair, salt.

Welcome to Life Without, where I simply subtract one element from the sum of our existence.

Something we rely on, just taken out of the equation with a snap of my fingers.

No warning, no recalculating, just the maths.

Will the result be positive or disastrously negative?

And can we live with the fallout?

For BBC Radio 4, this is Life Without with me, Alan Davis, and together we'll see if a life without salt adds up to a reality we never imagined.

I've brought in some backup.

With me is Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials and Society at UCL and nutritional food scientist, best-selling author and broadcaster, Kamud Gandhi.

Here's a quick chemistry lesson.

Salt is sodium and chlorine holding hands in a compound.

They pair up, crystallise and voila, table salt.

Then the moment they dissolve in your bloodstream or the ocean, they go solo and start doing the heavy lifting.

Nerves fire, muscles move, ecosystems run.

When I ring the bell at the end of this little lesson, every last sodium chloride crystal on Earth vanishes.

Just to be clear, the dissolved ions in the ocean are safe, so the fish are fine and the boats still float.