Almost at birth we are warned about the dangers of salt. We are bombarded with salt hyperbole and issued dire warnings to carefully monitor our intake of salt by teachers, nurses, doctors, and friends. To season food with salt is surly an evil, wicked path to hell.
Last year, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg announced an initiative for food manufacturers and restaurants to cut the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant foods by 25 percent over the next five years. And the servile main stream press reaction was to lavished Bloomberg with praise.
But the Mayor’s intrusive salt meddling created quite an uproar with New York City chefs. “I’m all for trying to make New Yorkers healthier people,”said acclaimed chef Ed Brown, owner of the restaurant Eighty One on the Upper West Side. “But when it comes to him telling me how much salt to put in food, I have a problem with it”
Noted chef David Chang, owner of the Momofuku Noodle Bar, said cooks have been using salt with food almost as long as they have been using fire. “You need salt to draw flavor out of food,”Chang said. For that to be regulated by the government is just stupid and foolish”
Salt/Hypertension Connection
The hypothesized connection between high salt intake and hypertension dates back to 1904, according to an article in Scientific American.
Then in the 1970s, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Lewis Dahl claimed to induce high blood pressure in rats by feeding them the human equivalent of 500 grams of sodium a day.
Dahl also concluded that people living in countries with high salt consumption like Japan are inclined to suffer from high blood pressure and more strokes.
But a research paper published several years later in the American Journal of Hypertension pointed toward genetics or other cultural factors when comparing sodium intakes within populations.
Yet in 1977, Dahl’s work was used by the Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs in a report that recommended Americans cut their salt intake by 50 to 85 percent.
“For every study that suggests salt is unhealthy, another does not.” — Scientific American
According to Scientific American, Intersalt, a large study published in 1988, compared sodium intake with blood pressure in subjects from 52 international research centers and found no relationship between sodium intake and the prevalence of hypertension.
On the contrary, the population that ate the most salt had a lower median blood pressure than the population that ate the least.
In a review of 11 salt-reduction trials, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, low-salt diets resulted in negligible reductions in blood pressure during long-term trials, and a review of 57 shorter-term trials came to the same conclusion: there is scant evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake.
A 2006 study published in American Journal of Medicine compared the daily sodium intakes of 78 million Americans to their risk of dying from heart disease over the course of 14 years; the study concluded that the more sodium people ate, the less likely they were to die from heart disease.
And a 2007 study published in the European Journal of Epidemiology followed 1,500 older people for five years and found no association between urinary sodium levels and the risk of coronary vascular disease or death.
Michael Alderman, an epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and former president of the International Society of Hypertension explains that “the human kidney is made, by design, to vary the accretion of salt based on the amount you take in.”
A 1987 study published in the Journal of Chronic Diseases found that people’s reaction to high salt diets were split down the middle: the number of people who experienced a drop and rise in their blood pressure after eating high-salt diets were virtually the same, while many people’s blood pressure remained unchanged.
“Evangelical Antisalt Campaigns”
Alderman and his colleague Hillel Cohen suggest draconian government salt policies based on insufficient data mislead people, and entice them into drawing the wrong conclusions.
“A great number of promises are being made to the public with regard to this enormous benefit [of low salt] and lives saved,” Cohen says. “But it is based on wild extrapolations.”
Although it may be too costly for consideration, Alderman and Cohen suggest that instead of creating drastic salt policies based on conflicting data, the government should sponsor a large, controlled clinical trial to gauge for themselves what happens to people who follow low-salt diets over time.