Please Pass the Salt

Lee and I sort of go around and around about salt.  I’m a fan–he’s not so much.

I’ve never really worried about my salt intake.  As a matter of fact, if anything, I’ve sometimes worried that I don’t get enough salt.  I exercise a lot, even in our hot North Carolina summers, and my sweat is both abundant and very salty.  When I was doing Ironman training and ultra-distance cycling, I actually found I performed better when I took salt tablets.

And my blood pressure tends to be quite low; I was at the doctor a couple of days ago (to get wax cleaned out of my ears–too much information?), and it was 74/60.  I actually asked the nurse to repeat it, because I thought I must’ve misheard.

So, yeah, when I get the urge for something salty, I tend to indulge.

Salt has been used for millenia as a preservative.  Besides–it makes things taste better.  Salt is one of the basic flavors that humans seek out; salt in food makes us eat more.

But salt has been getting a lot of bad press lately.  A new study came out in the spring confirming, yet again, that Americans eat too much salty food, and that salty food is making us sick.  Specifically, it’s pushing up our blood pressure, and causing us to have heart attacks and strokes.*

This is not the first time, by any means, that salt has been singled out as a problem in the standard American diet. The New York Times ran this article a couple of weeks ago about the food industry’s efforts, over the last quarter century, to block efforts to reduce salt in the foods we eat every day.

The problem, it seems isn’t the salt shaker on your dining room table.  It’s far more likely that the excess salt is already in your food before you even taste it.  The food industry (meaning the people who take the raw materials and turn them into pasta or frozen carrots or french fries or the daily special at your neighborhood bistro) puts salt in pretty much everything we eat.

Go to your pantry, and take out a box.  Look at the label–see that sodium number?  The recommended daily allowance for sodium, for 70% of adults, is no more than 1500 mg per day.**  Now go to your refrigerator, and look at a label there, and then one in the freezer.  Better yet, write down everything you ate yesterday, and figure out how much sodium you consumed (it’s not that hard, especially if you ate in a chain restaurant, or ate foods that have labels–those numbers are all easily available on the internet–and aren’t those the things most of us eat every day?).

How’d you do?  Getting a little more salt than you ought to?  Yeah, me too.

The most recent wisdom, based on the new studies that came out in the last few months, is that we need to cut our salt intake by about half.  And here’s the thing:  having low blood pressure now in no way guarantees that mine will stay low as I age; on the contrary–it seems that the salt I’m eating now, because I think I can, will cause my blood pressure to go up as I age.  Not an promising thought.

Get used to reading those labels.

*In an interesting side note, too much salty food also appears to harm our bones, and as a woman approaching menopause, with a family history of osteoporosis, I’m beginning to worry about my bones.  Maybe that’ll be an incentive to get me to put down the salt shaker.

**The RDA is actually 2,300 mg/day for adults, but there are exceptions:  if you’re middle-aged or older, black, or already have high blood pressure, then your RDA is 1,500 mg.  That’s most of us, apparently.