John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, thinks we should stop giving Uncle Salty a hard time. All this worrying is more likely to give you a heart attack than the salt itself...
This week’s call for sanity on all things food and diet related regards that fantastic and popular white stuff. No, not Class A narcotics. I’m talking about a hit of good old sodium chloride, baby.
Salt is one of the many, many things we should be scared of according to the medically qualified lunatics who are in charge of our health.
We're told to keep our intake of salt to 6g or under per day and are given all sorts of scary stories about what will happen to us if we don’t. It’s not even an interesting disease that one might acquire from eating lots of salt; no large swollen bulbous genitalia – no, it’s always just a boring old stroke or heart attack. Salt gives you high blood pressure and that makes your heart, well, burst. That's the principle theory we are all told is the absolute truth. It is, of course, utter drivel.
I'm aware it seems that week after week I'm just being ornery. Surely it can't be drivel? Surely all those doctors know more than a hairy old rocker like you, Johnny? Well maybe. But what all my investigations into such matters has led me to believe is that when it comes to doctors, by and large, you are not dealing with thousands of independent, well-educated minds; quite the opposite, you are dealing with a hive which operates by group think. Once policy is adopted they all accept it without question. While some independent minds must exist, I've yet to meet one. So if something is wrong, and yet it gets adopted as policy, they all get it wrong simultaneously.
Many researchers, doctors and nutritionists have said for years that salt is not bad for you, and it has not been proven to raise the blood pressure of someone who hasn't already got high blood pressure. It can aggravate an existing condition but it can’t create it.
In other words, eating big spoonfuls of salt is only bad for people who already have high blood pressure. However, what is classed as high blood pressure is not a fixed thing. It used to be much higher than it is now. Indeed, like so many things, it was lowered from a higher level and in doing so brought a whole lot more customers for Big Pharma's blood pressure lowering tablets.
Always follow the money.
If you had a tablet that lowered blood pressure you would pay for as much science as you could to prove that most people needed their blood pressure lowered, wouldn't you? That is, in essence, what happened.
Salt has always been important to humans. Wars have been fought over it. The French even had a salt tax from the middle ages to 1945 when it was repealed, presumably as a reward for their citizens’ splendid effort in the war.
If you read the NHS web site, and I suggest you don't because it's full of silliness, they tell us to base our diet on starchy food such as bread and potatoes ( please don’t), neither of which taste any good without salt. Then they tell us to reduce the amount of salt we're eating. Idiots. Is it any wonder people are messed up about food?
Most salt we eat is in processed food. You don't notice it but it’s there. If you don't eat any processed food – definitely a lifestyle choice you want to be making – then it’s easy to control the amount you add in cooking or at the table. And it means you can use Sea Salt rather than the sludge awful Saxa-style table salt which has all manner of gubbins added to it to allow it to flow freely – because non-free flowing salt is something you've always worried about isn't it?
I've got a blood pressure monitor and I like to play with it. As an experiment for The Meat Fix I deliberately ate a lot of salt – up to 15 grams a day – for a couple of weeks and measured my blood pressure at the start and end of every day. If salt raises your blood pressure as it is claimed it does, I should have seen some difference but of course, I didn't. Nothing. It didn't move from around its usual 114/75 level. Getting angry about misinformation about salt did, however, put my blood pressure up on at least one occasion, proving that the advice is worse for your health, not better!
My partner, Dawn, tried the same experiment and got the same result. Weird huh? Not so much. Listen to what the then president of the American Society of Hypertension, Michael Alderman, said in 1997: "Even if a low sodium diet could lower the blood pressure of most people (probably not true) and both the diet and change in blood pressure could be sustained (not established) this alone would not justify a recommendation to reduce sodium intake.” And personally, I trust what Mickey says. His gig is all about blood pressure.
In 2011 a report published in the American Medical Association journal looked at 3,681 healthy people aged 60 or under and found above average salt intake did not increase blood pressure.
Another recent study found that those who had the least salt in their urine had a higher risk of death from a stroke or heart attack. So what the hell is this low salt message going on about? Why are they creating so much fuss?
As usual, everyone except the patient benefits from paranoia about blood pressure being high from salt intake – the pill makers, the chemists and the doctors earn more by getting more people on their books, as do the people who make the packets the pills come in, the people who make ‘low salt’ salt, and the processed food industry, which can market a new product ‘low in salt.’ Who wants that salty gravy train to end?
Yes you can eat too much salt, just like you can eat too much of anything; sit at the table and eat ten tablespoons; you'll feel pretty gross and your kidneys might stop working, which is always a drag, but no-one does that. Use pure sea salt and stop worrying about it.
Because all this worrying about salt is more likely to give you a heart attack than the actual salt. So unless you’ve already got high blood pressure don’t worry about Uncle Salty. Ok? Good.