In Defense of Salt

We've all watched as death row inmates, after having spent years in prison for crimes they did not commit, are released after exculpatory DNA evidence proves their innocence. This all too frequent scenario is what led Ron Paul to rightfully change his mind about the death penalty, despite the fact that his convictions are so well thought out, so solid, that he very rarely has to change his views about something so important.

One has to wonder how many common criminals are convicted with faulty evidence and testimony, with or without malicious intent. In these cases the stakes are rarely high enough to warrant the attention given to the lifers, or deathers as it were. Wouldn't we all love the opportunity to come to the aid of even one such innocent target of malicious state prosecution?

Well the opportunity is here and the victim is salt.

Our society loves to hate a villain and our politicians will seize any opportunity to exploit that hatred. These villains provide politicians with the opportunity to ride the wave of popularity, sauntering into town with a heroic swagger like John Wayne to put the bad guy behind bars where he belongs. Our heroes ride into town on our television screens along with their posse of assistants, calling out the villain and his accomplices, usually business owners, because as we all know, anyone who owns a business amasses great wealth using nefarious means at our expense.

In the case of food, the health Nazis have issued all manner of ill-informed proclamations, attempting to encourage us all to eat as they do based on limited information and simplified and/or biased interpretations of it. One thing that politicians don't know how to do well is where to draw the line. They want to use the popular bans on cigarettes as templates for intrusions on our freedom of choice wherever they can, but they haven't yet learned that while banning cigarettes will find plenty of support as smokers are in the minority, they will find a public mobilized against them when they start slamming the bars on our friends.

What happens when a politician doesn't know what he's talking about? He advocates things like banning salt in restaurants. According to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, "salt and asbestos are not good for you." He said, "modern medicine thinks you shouldn't be smoking if you want to live longer. Modern medicine thinks you shouldn't be eating salt, or sodium."

Apparently Mayor Bloomberg is not familiar with the fact that the National Academy of Sciences recommends that Americans consume a minimum of 500 mg/day of sodium to maintain good health. In fact, sodium chloride is one of the 12 daily essential minerals. As far as I am aware, there is no minimum recommendation for asbestos consumption.

Mayor Bloomberg isn't alone in his ignorance. One of mainstream society's problems is its seeming inability to ferret out the good from the bad, or even that there is often plenty in between. We love to parrot the concept of "everything in moderation," yet we have difficulty applying it unless someone in authority stands up and tells us to. Our mindfuls seem to be about the size of our mouthfuls. Anything that cannot fit into a soundbite is too complex for the simplest among us, toward whom most of our information is geared. Since there is a correlation between salt and hypertension, all salt must be bad. The difference is that the average person can live his life in blissful ignorance without wielding the power to enact laws that govern the rest of us based upon it.

Our bodies cannot create salt and without salt we die

Our bodies are approximately 60 percent water, some of it within our cells and some without our cells. Salt controls the amount of water in our bodies and it maintains the critical balance between our cells and body fluids. Salt also aids in the contraction of muscle tissue and serves as a vital ingredient of blood plasma and digestive secretions. According to a University of California study, our bodies regulate our sodium content, ensuring that serum sodium levels remain within a certain range at all times. We lose sodium with our sweat and waste and without replacing it our bodies attempt to redistribute it in less than optimum ways.

Before the extreme result of death, it may serve us well to find out what happens to our bodies when we withhold or restrict such a vital nutrient: an eight-year study of a New York City hypertensive population found that those on low-salt diets had more than four times as many heart attacks as those on normal-sodium diets. Could it be that since the heart is a perpetually active muscle, constantly contracting and relaxing from birth until death, that removing one of the aids to muscle contraction may impede its effective operation? The fact is, some of the draconian recommendations for salt use have just as dramatic effect as a pharmaceutical intervention. Just don't tell that to the FDA or we may find salt classified as a drug.

The ways in which the human body needs and uses salt are far too numerous to be covered in one short article. Nevertheless, if we decide that salt is good, we should ideally be choosy about the type of salt that we pick. Natural salt cannot be directly replaced with processed salt. Like many other sources of nutrition, it is the co-action of all the constituent parts that performs the complete function of the food. Unfortunately as in so many areas of food and our health, the good is that which we have subsisted on for millennia and the bad is that which we process for the convenience of products that are "trouble-free." We can reasonably expect that the foods we buy that contain sodium will contain the processed form, so the salt that we add at home should be a minimally processed natural form.