A few years ago, the National Institutes of Health released a weight loss calculator based on a number of studies, supposedly allowing one to plug in a number of body and lifestyle factors, such as height, weight, age, body fat percentage, caloric intake, percentage of intake from carbohydrates, and so on, and predict weight loss rates given specified changes.
I was playing around with this calculator, and found a really interesting result: decreasing the sodium intake from the default (4000mg/day) greatly increases the caloric deficit needed to achieve the same level of weight loss in the same time. Conversely, increasing the sodium intake decreases the necessary caloric intake, in theory allowing for quicker weight loss.
Is the result implied by this NIH weight loss calculator, that higher sodium intake increases weight loss per caloric deficit, supported by scientific evidence, and is this also true for other electrolytes?