Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet
MIT Press. 275 pp. $26.95
A year after I quit eating sugar and flour in an effort to slay my food demons, I read a section of my medical chart that compared my latest blood-test results with earlier ones. Good cholesterol: way up! Bad cholesterol: way down! It was so satisfying to see that hard data, even if it was in a measure of health that I habitually ignored.
The promise of better cholesterol readings would never have motivated me to change my diet. It took years of accumulated misery around mirrors to make me quit pie. This is one reason its hard to get people to care about something as invisible as sodium intake. If high blood pressure caused double chins, sodium-reduction advocates might stand a fighting chance. But for most people, salt remains highly ignorable until a cardiologist or a stroke forces the issue.
In his new book, Salt Wars, scientist Michael F. Jacobson makes a compelling argument that salt presents a singular threat to life and finance. Jacobson, who earned his doctorate in microbiology from MIT, is a co-founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group focused on nutrition and health. He has spent years examining the science and politics around dietary salt. Salt Wars illuminates those efforts and why they matter.
Subtitled The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet, the book both sounds an alarm and presents an analysis of why so many of us remain content to consume too much salt every day. Inertia might be one factor, but, as Jacobson points out, there are plenty of other, more active forces at play.
The bottom line is that America is suffering an astounding tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and wasting many billions of dollars annually simply because we are consuming too much sodium, Jacobson writes. That kind of toll would cause a national furor if the deaths were immediately obvious after eating a salty meal. But the harm from overly salted foods accumulates quietly and invisibly over the decades.
Jacobson lays out the reasons salt holds us in its grip. Sodium chloride helps regulate bodily fluids and aids nerve and muscle function, so some salt is necessary for good health.
Our palates appreciate salt even when we dont recognize a dish as salty. Chefs add salt to many recipes because it brings out other flavors during the cooking process. (This explains why a typical restaurant meal tends to contain more sodium than what you would cook from scratch.) Sodium also inhibits the growth of bacteria, making it almost ubiquitous in many categories of processed and packaged foods. No wonder were so acclimated to high salt content.
But how much salt is too much? For more than a century, researchers have dug for answers, seemingly found them, argued about them and searched some more, resulting in a morass of confounding information.
The scientific puzzles have been these: Can too much sodium cause or exacerbate hypertension? Does hypertension cause cardiac illness? And thus, can too much dietary salt cause critical illness? If youre a consumer with an average interest in such issues, you might have assumed this was all settled decades ago (yes, yes and yes). Or perhaps you thought it was settled until you glanced at headlines in recent years suggesting that the old research had it wrong, and that newer and better research tells us we can relax.
Jacobson aims to debunk the debunkers.
Scientists have long debated the health effects of salt at countless conferences, at government advisory committee meetings, and in the pages of scientific journals, he writes. But in recent years, journalists at prominent news outlets with their voices augmented by social media and bloggers have broadcast those debates to the public in the form of man bites dog stories.
In a phrase reminiscent of arguments around man-made global warming, Jacobson says that sodium skeptics have been successful at sowing doubt where none should exist. That doubt, in turn, has hampered efforts to impose regulations.
Why is so much effort spent on regulating sodium? Jacobson shines light on the constituents that gain from avoiding potentially costly changes to how they do business. Those include restaurants, companies that sell processed and packaged foods in grocery stores, and suppliers of ingredients for school lunches, which have historically been salt bombs, although they have improved.
Jacobson has been part of the decades-long effort to impose sodium restrictions that would help Americans inch toward the widely accepted maximum of 2,300 mg a day (about a teaspoon). In a chapter titled Progress at Last! he details some success, including a hard-won Obama-era Food and Drug Administration proposal for a voluntary salt-reduction program. Even that proposal, however, met with fierce pushback and has not yet been adopted. In a recent op-ed published in the Hill, Jacobson and law professor Marsha N. Cohen called on President-elect Joe Biden to place sodium right after the coronavirus pandemic on his public health agenda.
Its easy to conclude that the best solution to a salt-heavy diet is simply to eat cleaner: Put down the shaker, eat fresh fruits and vegetables, make more meals from scratch. That will take you a good distance, but, as Jacobson points out, even a few slices of store-bought bread add up over the course of the day.
Moreover, eating clean is a privilege the poor often lack. It runs from the impractical to the impossible in food deserts, where processed foods are far more widely available than fresh produce. Real improvement demands widespread changes in the food industry.
One of the most important takeaways of Salt Wars, though, has little to do with salt, although it may well raise your blood pressure. Sodium wars are just one more example of how effective modern propaganda tactics can be in our post-fact world. Almost anyone with an agenda and some know-how can shove a wedge of doubt between citizens and consequential facts, whether they be election results, climate science or ways to avoid life-threatening illness.
Salt Wars isnt particularly difficult reading, but its message is unlikely to spread with the lightning speed of the latest conspiracy theory. Thats too bad. Most of us could use an extra dash of reality in our diets.
Sandstrom is a writer and illustrator in Cleveland.
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Book World: Salt is the dietary danger that's easy to ignore - The Union Leader
