The salt we all put on our chips or scrambled eggs is scientifically known as the mineral sodium chloride. Both sodium and chloride are essential nutrients. We get chloride from lots of foods, but sodium we mostly consume in the form of salt.
We need both for critical body functions like the firing of nerves and muscles and maintaining fluid balance. If your sodium levels get too low it can cause cramps, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and in extreme cases, if not treated, can result in shock, coma and even death.
But consuming too much sodium also causes problems. It can lead to fluid retention in the blood, which increases the pressure on the blood vessels and causes high blood pressure. High blood pressure puts stress on the blood vessels and organs, increasing risk of stroke, blood vessel diseases, heart attacks and kidney disease.
Even so, most people in the Western world eat too much salt. Most adults need less than 2g of salt each day for our essential needs, so the WHO recommends a daily maximum of 5 grams or less (just under a teaspoon). But in the UK the average is 8.6 grams. This overconsumption of the simple mineral contributes to thousands of strokes, heart attacks and deaths every year.
About a quarter of the salt we eat comes from what we add when cooking or when we season our food at the table at home. We do this because salt makes everything taste better – it enhances flavours and depth of foods and blocks bitter tastes.
Even though it only makes up a fraction of the salt we eat, reducing the amount we put on our food can still bring significant health benefits.
A recent study carried out by Dr Yoon Jung Park, of Kyungpook National University Hospital, South Korea found that switching from always adding salt to food to usually adding it can reduce risks of certain heart diseases by more than 10 per cent.
How to lower your salt intake
Sensitivity to salt varies significantly between people. This is partly due to genetics, but acclimatisation also plays a role depending on our regular eating habits. It can even potentially be influenced by how much salt our mothers ate while we were in the womb.
The good news is that this means if we reduce how much salt we add to our meals slowly over a few weeks, our taste buds can adapt along with that change, so our perception can adjust to needing less salt.
Another simple way of reducing salt consumption is to switch to a finer grind and to only add salt to the outside of your food – this helps it dissolve and meet the taste buds more quickly, meaning we get a stronger salt bump from less salt. Adding herbs to food is also a way to enhance flavour without using large quantities of salt.
But, do pick your battles. Lots of very healthful foods, like vegetables, are innately bitter. So, don’t let reducing your salt intake lead you to avoiding vegetables.
So where does the other 75 per cent of the salt we eat come from? The answer is processed and packaged foods. This is largely down to the use of salt as a preservative, it helps to dramatically extend the shelf-life of ready-made food.
This works because salt reduces the amount of water available inside and outside of microbes in the food, which reduces the ability of bacteria and mould to grow and spoil it.
But it isn’t just salty-tasting foods like crisps and savoury foods like processed meats that contribute to excess salt intake. Shelf-stable sweet products like cakes, cookies and muffins can have huge amounts of salt in them, even though they don’t taste salty.
Ready-to-eat meals can also be high salt even if they look like balanced meals. Low-fat and low-sugar versions of products will often have more salt in them to boost the flavour profile too, so check the label.
When reading labels, remember that sodium is listed on the label, and this is only part of the salt – the 5g of salt or less that the WHO recommends is equivalent to 2000 mg of sodium.
In recent years, plain table salt has been joined in the marketplace by several other varieties of salt: sea salt, pink salt, Himalayan salt, Celtic salt and black salt. These products often claim to provide health benefits based on them containing additional minerals. But ultimately, they are still high in sodium and cause the same health outcomes as table salt when over-eaten.
The bottom line is that every little reduction in salt intake can help reduce the health risks, and it’s never too late to start stepping it down if you are eating more than the recommended levels.
So next time you are cooking or sitting down to eat, think twice before reaching for the saltshaker.
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