Salt series II: Why is everyone afraid of salt?!
I'm sure you've heard that you should not consume too much salt because... well because it's bad. Somehow.
But why? What is the reason behind this fear of salt?
It all started about 100 years ago, in 1904, when two French scientists put 6 of their sick patients on 20g of salt a day and their blood pressure went up. When they cut the salt again, blood pressure decreased. Later, another scientist did the same thing but did not see the blood pressure decreasing, and that's how the debate about salt started. The low salt hypothesis was born.
Louis Dall, a doctor, wanted to investigate the salt effect too. This was in the 1950's or so. He discovered that he could give normal rats as much salt as he wanted and it would not cause any harm or high blood pressure in them! Even when he supplemented them with the human equivalent of 100g of salt per day! So he genetically engineered rats to be salt sensitive. Even those rats he had to give the human equivalent of 40g of salt a day to finally see an increase in blood pressure.
A 1954 study picked just a few populations and said when salt intake goes up, blood pressure goes up too. BUT: The neglected 48 populations saw a decrease in blood pressure with salt intake going up! But they were kindly ignored in the study... (I wonder who founded the study... maybe the food industry?^^ Little reminder here: Don't trust research, read a paper closely when you have to deal with one.)
So why should 2.3g of salt per day (close to the maximal daily recommendation) cause high blood pressure in humans? That's just bullshit and ignoring facts, sorry.
Some people also blame high salt as a cause of kidney stones because of the enhanced calcium content in the urine. In addition, osteoporosis and weak bones are said to result from a high salt diet too. I explain later why this is not the case.
Another argument against salt is that "we've never consumed a lot of salt during evolutionary times". This is not true either. We will look at ancient people and their salt intake in the next article.
Read the next article here: Evolutionary salt consumption
