Take It With A Grain Of Salt

Until relatively recently in human history, salt was a precious commodity. Urban legend has it that Roman soldiers were given money specifically to buy salt or were paid with salt, thus the word ‘salary,’ from the Latin salarium, and it’s why we say someone not good at their job isn’t worth their salt.

Obviously if you had to fight barbarian hordes to buy substantial quantities of the stuff, or have your wife defy God and turn back to watch the ancient equivalent of Las Vegas being destroyed so she’ll turn into a pillar of the stuff, it couldn’t have been that easy to come by. Some people even still refer to going to work as “off to the salt mines”. To be fair, I refer to a night at the cinema as “going to the pictures”. But I get teased for it.

These days of course you can buy salt easily and inexpensively at your corner grocer. I’m not talking about the boxes of Sifto sallt, or designer sea salt, I’m referring to the sodium they put in practically everything.

In general North Americans eat (or drink) too much of the stuff. I’ve griped about this before. Whether it’s in what some people call lunch or in soda pop, the stuff is everywhere.

In North America the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for sodium is far higher than it is in the UK – for adults, 1,500 mg of sodium per day is considered adequate and 2,300 mg — about a teaspoon  — is the upper limit… but Canadians eat about 3,400mg a day of the stuff.

Americans manage to down 4,000mg daily, almost double the recommended maximum amount. The Salt Institute, a non-profit organization set up by the salt industry, hints that salt could be a “feed limiter,” and that people, like animals, may have an unconscious appetite for it.

I think they intend this to absolve the industry from the levels of sodium in food by saying “hey, people want it” but it has the backlash of saying that it’s something people crave on an almost narcotic level, which if anything would be an argument for more regulation or oversight.

The Canadian federal, provincial and territorial health ministers ended two days of meetings in St. John’s last Tuesday, in which they discussed a national strategy released in July. The result: a new program to get Canadians to reduce sodium intake down to 2,300 milligrams a day by 2016. Six years to get us to eat no more than the maximum. Yep, there’s just that much sodium in our diet.

Nancy Crater used to be hot... but she craved salt and ate too much of it. Now look at her!

You do need salt in your diet. During my starvation I experienced very low blood pressure – part of the reason for my dizzy spells, the theory goes – and I was actually told to eat more salt. But most of us aren’t starving.

Distinguishing between food products that use salt for taste, physical effect, fermentation, preservation, or character is also a pain in the ass. Salt is often necessary for food safety, which doesn’t make it any easier to determine where to draw the thin white line.

I’ve bitched about how many of our food problems started back in the early 1980s when the AMA began preaching the “low fat” diet and when the Final Level Boss of food villains, high fructose corn syrup, started to appear in everything. Indeed the salt industry points out that sodium levels in foods have stayed the same over the last 20 years, which sounds pretty stable. Lessee here: 2010 – 20 = …. 1990. Still well after everything went to hell in a handbasket.

But we’re eating more salt than ever because we’re eating more than ever. Even if the FDA in the US were to reclassify salt as an additive (which it isn’t, yet) and mandate lower sodium levels in food or put a program into place begging us to eat less salt as Canada plans to do, it may be that neither are effective. People might simply reach for the salt shaker and add it back to their meals, or they might just eat more food.

Rather than waiting for government programs that use our tax money to tell us to stop eating more salt than we should, wouldn’t it be easier to just eat less salt? Sodium is listed on the nutrition labels and ingredients list of the boxes and cans prepared foods come in. Avoid high salt canned soups – well, high salt anything, but things like canned soups and veggie wieners are among the worst offenders.

Shop smart. Shop S mart. Er, I mean salt smart.