It really is an era of worry piled on worry.  Every day, something else we have long lived with, even enjoyed, is added to the list of dangers to our health.

So we are careful not to add concerns lightly to everyone’s load, but an old friend in all our diets is calling us to attention, again.

That friend is salt.  At the risk of rubbing salt into our worry wounds, we wanted to share more news of just how important our overload of salt is, and what can be done.

For much of the history of life on earth, salt was one of the most valuable of nutrients, and often in dangerously short supply.  During all this time, salt was in often a prized commodity, used as money in the Roman era, often viewed like gold, but even more important, as a shortage could be fatal.

Those days are long gone, and with other major nutrients, notably sugar and fat, the times of shortage making salt valuable have been totally supplanted with our current glut.  Salt has moved from being a precious rarity, to an item we are all soaking in, to a degree that is surely causing harm.

What is salt?

Salt is a chemical composed of one atom of sodium and one atom of chloride.  These two atoms each play a central role in all the functions of all our cells.  There is no life without plenty of sodium and chloride.  They are essential for any electrical activity in any nerve, muscle, brain, or any cell, and they are vital to the chemistries within every cell.   Most of our sodium (90%) comes from salt, as does most of our chloride.  It is so essential to life that we really like it.  Very, very people don’t like even a little bit of salt.

How does salt get in our bodies?

The only way salt gets in our bodies is by our eating or drinking it.  And in today’s world, that happens all the time.

One obvious route is via the salt shaker, adding salt to our foods and drinks is done mainly by salt shaker and salt dispensers, and you would think that’s how most of our salt enters our mouths, but that is really not true.  Only about 25% of all the salt we eat and drink comes in by our shaking salt onto our meals, or cooking with it.

That leaves about 3/4 of all our salt coming from somewhere else, where could it be?

Well, it’s food, but it’s processed food.   Just for context, keep in mind that a full 1/4 teaspoon of salt delivers about 575 mg of sodium.

Take a look at nearly any food you buy, any food made by a person- that excludes raw fruits and vegetables.   Now take a look at the amount of sodium in that food, whether it be juice, bread, crackers, cereals, really anything made by people, and see if the morsel you might have of it contains something like a 1/4 teaspoon of salt.

How to reduce salt intake

The best path to all of us eating less salt is for food manufacturers to reduce the amount of salt in their manufacturing recipes.

This turns out to be a long, difficult process for a very powerful reason- we all love salt so much.

When manufacturers reduce salt in their recipes, public tasting groups really despise the new cracker, cereal, soup, etc.

Very interestingly, when a group is given foods with salt slowly decreased over some time, the group doesn’t notice the change and can actually find itself loving an essentially salt-free food they once despised.  If the transition is gradual enough, the mind adapts just fine.

But while we wait for the public health debates to reduce the salt in our purchased foods there are two things we can do:

1. Get rid of the salt shaker, don’t add salt to food or drinks.

2.   Eat more fruits and vegetables, they always have less salt than manufactured foods.

3.   Get used to reading ingredient lists and avoiding snacks, juices (yes, juices), and all foods with high sodium.

Why does it matter?

Too much sodium causes high blood pressure, and it causes heart attacks, and it causes strokes.

How much?

A major study in the United Kingdom found that when food manufacturers dropped sodium content enough to reduce the population’s sodium intake by only 15% (turns out this is a drop in daily average intake of 560 mg, or about that 1/4 tsp of salt a day), the overall chance of developing high blood pressure, a heart attack, or a stroke dropped by an astounding 40%!   

Imagine being able to do something that drops your chance of a heart attack, a stroke, or high blood pressure by almost half!

Now, how much of our usual intake is a drop of 1/4 of a teaspoon of salt or about 560 grams?

The usual American eats an average of 3500 milligrams of salt a day, that’s nearly 3 pounds of salt we eat a year.

The drop of 560 mg is a drop here in America of about half a pound of salt a year.

The official US goal is to drop our salt intake to below 2300 mg a day, down from our current average of 3500.

So the goal is not to eat no salt, as noted this would cause harm.  Fortunately it’s also essentially impossible to eat a sodium free diet.

The goal is to drop our intake by about 15-30%, and the reward should be a dramatic drop in the number of strokes and heart attacks.

BOTTOM LINES

1. Salt is one of the great and most important compounds our body needs to live.  It is vital to the function of every living cell.
2. As with many useful compounds, we overdo our taking in salt.  We need no more, and likely far less than, 2300 mg of salt a day.  But on average we eat about 3500 mg of salt a day.
3.  75% of our salt comes from manufactured foods- all snack foods, many juices, many baked goods, cereals, etc.  The rest comes from our own cooking and the salt shaker.
4.  The ultimate solution will be for our food manufacturers to drop salt content by 15-30%
5. In the meantime, we should:
6. Get rid of our salt shakers and cook with no or much less added salt.
7. The goal being a drop of about 1/4 tsp or 560 mg of salt a day from our diet.
8. The impact of dropping salt content, even by that 560 mg, is enormous, as much as 40% of all heart attacks and strokes are prevented!

Salt is essential, but too much is a real danger.

Enjoy salt, but take it with the grains of truth noted here.

To your health,
Dr. Arthur Lavin