Salt. I love salt. I salt my pizza. I salt my tuna. I bath my french fries in salt. Give me a platter of thin, crisply fried sweet potato chips and some garlic salt. Salty fried eggplant. Ummmm. Salt.
On cooking competition shows that we watch, I point out to my partner that 
contestants are regularly faulted for not using enough salt in their cooking. Proper amounts of seasoning, applied at proper times, elevate food from “stuff” to exquisite joy in the mouth. Adding salt from a shaker after its cooked just isn’t the same in many cases.
My partner is constantly yammering* at me about my salt intake. Perhaps he fears I’ll suddenly stroke out with a fork halfway to my face. I don’t know if he restricts his salt intake because he simply doesn’t like it, or if it is because of the messages we have been seeing for the past 30 years from the National Institute of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture that too much salt might be bad for you.
It turns out, as discussed in a New York Times article, that we’ve been fed a load of crap. Everyone who has been telling us for the past 30 or 40 years that salt was bad for us, also freely admitted that there was absolutely no scientific evidence behind this claim that made it true. Back in 1972 when the NIH started pushing this tasteless load of bull onto the American public, it was based on two observations, none of them qualifying as a scientific study.
Finally, someone has gotten around to doing some scientific studies, backed by some real and proven science, and guess what? They found that if you cut back your salt intake too much, you can actually do more harm than good. Yes, reducing the amount of salt you eat can result in some people in a temporary reduction of blood pressure, but there is no scientific evidence that this does any long-term good…or any long-term bad …..or any long-term anything. The only thing that a reduction of salt does for sure, is that it makes pretty much everything we eat taste like baby food. Bland and lifeless.
Throughout the history of the world, salt has been a foundation of civilization. It was used to preserve food, long before we had refrigeration or other sophisticated methods of making food picked today still edible next month. It was an important and vital part of many ancient economies, in fact the word “salary” is derived from the Latin salarium. The Roman empire depended on salt, and even plain old Liverpool rose to be a great port because of nearby salt mines.
There are now scientific studies showing that over a long term, people who restrict their salt intake secrete a higher level of Renin from their kidneys. This higher secretion of Renin can set off a chain of physiological changes which, remarkably enough, end with an increase in risk for heart disease. One of the very things that the NIH and USDA said we could prevent by reducing our salt intake.
A slew of recent trials indicate that reducing your salt intake to anything near what our government says is the upper limit of “safe” will probably do more harm to us than good. These more recent studies are large, covering 100,000 people across 30 counties.
I am going to rejoice! I’m going to make sure that salt is always on the grocery list. I’m no longer going to restrict the salt I use when I cook just because I’m afraid I’ll send someone into sudden kidney failure.
I’m going to keep salting my pizza and french fries, and no longer going to feel guilty just because someone else seems to think that salt is evil. Salt makes life taste good – I even remember my grandfather salting the limeades that my grandmother used to make on those sweltering summer days when even the asphalt on the street was beginning to melt.
Black salt, grey salt, red salt, white salt – it’s all good and has a place in my kitchen, and everyone is welcome!
*footnote – Yanmmer. To utter persistent complaints, cries of distress or sorrow.