Apparently it is (or was, as of yesterday) National Salt Awareness Week, organised by some worthies known as 'Action On Salt' (actiononsalt.org.uk/), with the hashtag ''#eatlessalt'.
If nothing else, the existence of such things probably tells you all you need to know about our unhealthy relationship with food and the tsunami of pseudoscience that carries it all along. Anyway: Salt. Why are people obsessed with eating less of it, and should we take any notice? Have a look at Action on Salt's claims:
"The current target is to reduce salt intake to an average of 6g a day for adults and even less for children, from the current average of 8.1g a day. This reduction will have a large impact on reducing strokes by approximately 22% and heart attacks by 16% saving 17,000 lives in the UK as well as other health benefits for the population."
Is there really any justification for this?
As this excellent article explains...
journals.lww.com/nutritiont...
... your body will adapt readily to a wide range of sodium intake, because that's what it's designed to do. It just excretes what it doesn't need, but it'll have real trouble magicking salt out of nowhere, and has to do quite drastic things to compensate for a lack of dietary salt. The risk curve shown at the bottom of the article is unsurprising, given the underlying physiology.
To the extent that there might be any meaningful 'recommended level', it's somewhere between 3-5g/day (equivalent to 7.5-12g salt) based on a neat definition of 'nutrient requirements'. By some mysterious coincidence (mysterious, that is, if you're a nutritionist) this is more-or-less the intake that people naturally tend towards, left to their own devices.
The takeaway point is this:
"In a recent Cochrane analysis of nearly 170 randomized controlled trials, Graudal et al found not a single example of a study with a blood pressure effect from sodium intake reduction in normotensive individuals. There were no studies of health benefits accruing to the reduction of salt intakes of healthy adults to levels below those prevailing in Europe and North America (~3450 mg/d; 150 mmol/d).
...Blood pressure reduction is a reasonable proxy for health outcomes in hypertensive individuals on high sodium intakes, but it simply does not track health outcomes in normotensive individuals at average or below average sodium intakes."
In other words, people who are put on low-salt diets are at risk of stroke for reasons largely unrelated to salt intake ... and the medical establishment has no interest in addressing those reasons.
But let's assume for the sake of argument that we are all eating too much salt. Where is it coming from? Here's the answer for Americans, at least:
webmd.com/hypertension-high...
"Only 10% of [salt] comes from our shakers. An estimated 77% comes from sodium in processed or restaurant foods:
Yeast breads
Chicken and mixed chicken dinners
Pizza
Pasta dishes
Cold cuts
Grains contribute 37% of our daily sodium. These foods include grain-based frozen meals and soups, breads, and pizza (which is mostly salty bread).
Meats, including poultry and fish, contribute 28% of our daily sodium.
Vegetables contribute more than 12% of our daily sodium. This seems surprising, but potato chips and french fries are vegetables. And canned vegetables, vegetable soups, and vegetable sauces tend to be loaded with sodium."
Now, we of the LCHF persuasion eat few of these things (I have no idea what a 'mixed chicken dinner' is, but I'm guessing it means KFC with fries and Coke, or similar). We probably eat less meat than the average American (280g/day). We don't touch 'yeast breads', pizza, pasta, or anything else with grains in them. I doubt many of you eat canned soups or sauces. Processed foods just don't feature on the LCHF menu.
And yet our diet is still considered disastrously unhealthy because of all that salt/fat/cholesterol (move goalposts accordingly). I guess it's another one of those 'paradoxes'.
How about that claim about saving lives? There's no reference given to back up that claim, and frankly anything that claims to save a specific number of lives is BS almost by definition. What do we mean by 'saving lives'? How do we accurately predict what would happen in a hypothetical scenario? And then there's this, which I posted a while back:
healthunlocked.com/lchf-die...
Which noted that older people with high cholesterol simply don't have strokes. So rather than getting a measly 22% reduction in strokes by putting everyone on a diet of salt-free gruel, how about ensuring that all older people have high cholesterol and eliminating strokes entirely?
It doesn't really work like that, of course. But the observation is fascinating in that it gives some strong pointers for future research which might actually reduce the number of strokes. Predictably enough, there's zero interest in that.
