07/11/2021
Salt is in the news. The FDA is asking chefs and food producers to reduce the salt in their products by 12%. Doing so will, they say, reduce heart disease, improve blood pressure numbers, cure cancer, solve the poverty epidemic, bring about world peace, and all else that is good and just in the world.
Okay, I'm kidding about some of that stuff, but the refrain is a normal one: salt is killing you, and you should be eating less of it. I say no. Salt is good.
There's a big difference between the salt you put on food you made yourself, and unnatural amounts of salt in packaged snacks and fast food. It's easy to overdo it if you're eating those things. Using salt to flavor real food is a different story. Salt is one of those things that satisfies all the requirements for being an important part of the human diet: It's natural. It isn't manmade. It occurs in the wild. It's a mineral that our bodies co-evolved with. We encountered it, and have done so for millions of years. It tastes good. It makes the dish. Without salt, spices fall flat. It's natural and it tastes good. Things that both occur in nature and taste good tend to mesh well with our biology.
It has established physiological roles in our bodies. Sodium is probably the most important electrolyte we consume. When sodium drops, all other electrolytes suffer and fall out of balance. Low salt diets have consistently been shown to increase insulin resistance and even seem to cause (or at least are reliably linked to) type 2 diabetes.
I'm not saying salt prevents any disease or comorbid condition, but it could be a piece of the range of factors to consider. And if your doctor told you to cut back to address a condition, by all means, cut back. But revisit the salt topic when you're out of the woods.
The charitable position is that they're just "following the science," only it's the same misguided science that gets almost everything else about human nutrition wrong. If they think salt is giving us heart disease and ruining our metabolic health, then it makes sense that they'd tell us to reduce salt intake. But how charitable is that, really? Is that really excusable, given the information out there?
