The cure for anything is salt water:  sweat, tears or the sea.

Isak Dinesen

So I had every intention of writing a blurb on salt intake and why we need to reduce how much we eat because of its detrimental effect on our health.  When we eat too much salt we retain water.  This increases our blood pressure.  If our blood pressure is increased at a sustained level, the strain is detrimental to our kidneys, heart and brain.  It can lead to dementia, kidney disease, heart attack and stroke, ultimately to the very real possibility of early death.

Therefore salt = death.

Clearly those little white sprinkles are not only to be avoided, but feared.  If you see salt, cross the road. If it tries to talk to you, plug your ears with your fingers and go “nah nah nah I can’t HEAR you nah nah nah.” If it gives you the Vulcan Death Stare, run away!

Then I hit controversy that I didn’t see coming.  I had never heard that we were being misled by the anti-salt movement.  Less salt is good for us, right?  Well, maybe.  Or not.

I came across a website run by Joseph Mercola, a doctor who has made it his business to challenge the prevailing wisdoms of conventional medicine.  He describes himself as an “alternative physician” who rails against everything from microwaves to sunscreen.  He’s been accused by the FDA for making false health claims on his products and he believes that bird flu is a hoax designed to make money for big business and governments.  (On the latter issue he’s probably right  – if I hear that we’re overdue for a pandemic by the World Health Organization one more time I’ll scratch my eyes out.  Illness is big business and it has made a lot of people rich.  If cancer were cured tomorrow, a lot of people would be out of a job).

I’m suspicious because he sells his own alternative medicines and products which shows he has a vested interest in making money off of his claims, yet his salt claim intrigues me:  he says that the FDA recommendations for salt intake are too low and that eating 1500 mgs of salt per day is not enough for our bodies to function at an optimal level.

Sounds like a nut, or is he?

It appears that the evidence that salt is bad for us is more anecdotal than empirical and Mercola is not alone in his beliefs.  Gary Taubes’ article in the New York Times Sunday Review, entitled, Salt, We Misjudged You, focuses not only on the flimsy evidence that salt intake should be lessened, but that scientists have ignored the other very real possibility that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) might be the culprit after all.  He cites a well-known 30-day study that claims to prove that salt is bad.   Called the DASH Diet, which stood for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, 421 individuals ate veggies, fruit, lean protein, low-fat dairy and whole grains for 30 days.  The participants did show a very mild reduced hypertension, but the diet was also very low in fructose, the significance of which was ignored.

We have been warned against high salt intake because of a vague connection made by the the National Institutes of Health in 1972.  They observed that societies who ate little salt had suffered from almost no hypertension, while they ignored the fact that those societies also ate little sugar or high fructose corn syrup.  The second observance that the NIH used was an experiment on rats that had been bred to be sensitive to salt, and then they fed them 60 times the amount of salt that the average American consumes each day (which would equal about 200,000 mgs). Those poor creatures probably died from kidney failure before their little hearts had a chance to react.

Our consumption of HFCS has increased by 1000% since the early 1970s, when it was first put into mass production, which coincides with the increase of obesity rates and Type 2 Diabetes and, ironically, the NIH’s anti-salt stance.  As a sweetener and preservation agent,  it’s an ingredient in about 40% of ‘foods’ that we eat from breakfast cereals to ketchup to cookies to yogurt, and in virtually all canned or bottled items.  It’s no coincidence that an opened ketchup bottle can last for months in the refrigerator.  That just doesn’t seem right to me.  Food should go bad within a reasonable length of time.

So, why pick on salt?  I’ll advance my own conspiracy theory here.  Probably because it doesn’t have the powerful lobby group that high fructose corn syrup does.  The corn lobby is big and influential, and its large commercial farmers receive billions annually from the US Government in the form of subsidies. Companies like Nestle and Coca Cola have made billions off of what they pass for as food. The more sugar we eat, the more we crave.  Monsanto sells genetically modified high-yield corn seeds impervious to pests to produce corn that is sterile so that farmers are forced to buy seeds every year.  Yet corn still uses more pesticides and fertilizers than any other crop.  Roughly 20% of corn grown in the US makes it to the table, the rest going to biofuel production and animal feed.  Of the corn that we eat, the majority goes into the making of high fructose corn syrup of which the average American eats 63 pounds per year.

There may be no connection between HFCS and high blood pressure, but there is connection between HFCS and the rise in obesity rates, which is an established risk factor for high blood pressure. We’re getting fatter and so are our kids, in a land where parents don’t bat an eye when their children drink a 64oz bucket of pop loaded with sugar and HFCS.

Maybe salt is just a convenient red herring after all.  Michael Pollan says, “Eat food.  Not too much. Mostly plants.”  Eat food that remembers where it came from.  And pass the salt, please.

Read Gary Taubes very insightful article here

American Heart Association – Obesity-Related Hypertension

Health Risks of High Fructose Corn Syrup – Eat Right Ontario

StatsCan:

Health Canada for % Daily Values:

Health Canada Adequate and Upper Limit of daily sodium intake