Food Adventures

Salt

Food Myths No.2: ‘Salt is bad for you’
This article first appeared in Olive magazine

I know it’s the wrong thing to say, but here goes: I love salt. Apart from the taste, it’s got such a rich history of lies surrounding it. For instance, we’re told that when boiling vegetables we should add a pinch of salt to the water and it’ll raise the boiling point, thereby cooking them quicker. It’s all nonsense. A pinch won’t make a blind bit of difference – you’d need vast amounts to make any significant change (1kg of salt to heat four litres of water to 110_C).

Some say that salt added to water when boiling vegetables will improve their flavour. Another fib - almost none is absorbed by the food, so it has a negligible effect. There’s also an idea that you can only keep your beans green by adding salt to the water you boil them in. Well, the colour is actually dulled by the calcium in water and an enzyme that’s activated by mild heat, but destroyed by evaporation. So it’s best to cook your beans in low-calcium water, and once you’ve dropped them into the pan, get it boiling again as quickly as possible.

And then there’s the really hairy one: ‘salt = heart disease’. The government wants us to lower our salt intake, so the Food Standards Agency recently made a series of gloriously patronising ads featuring a slug called Sid who hated salt. Well, I’ve got this thing about dietary hysteria: it always sounds like lazy journalism. Salt is essential to our diet, and the Japanese eat 40% more salt than us, yet their death rate from heart disease is 75% lower. Something about Sid didn’t add up.

So I analysed the conflicting information. It’s not been a barrel of laughs, so I’ll be brief. Basically, the salt hit the fan in 1995 with an American study in Hypertension journal linking salt and heart attacks, which was then variously ripped to shreds or corroborated. In 1996 the British Medical Journal pulled the subject apart with similar equivocality and since then, the salty swingometer has been flailing about, fuelled in no small part by the salt producers themselves. But nothing I read ever gave an unqualified, uncontested answer.

The FSA’s own 134-age report uses opaque words such as ‘likely’ and ‘suggests’. It even admits that the high salt levels in processed food make it ‘extremely difficult for individuals to reduce their own salt intake.’ OK, let’s launch a multi-million pound ad campaign aimed at the consumer, then.

So I talked to doctors and nutritionists. They started by supporting the anti-salt line, but when pressed, they admitted that it’s overshadowed by the effects of obesity, alcohol, and genetic issues. The general conclusion was that if you could lose a pound in weight, you’d be doing more for your heart than you could ever do by limiting salt intake.

Doesn’t sound so sexy, though, does it? And that’s where this whole murky story seems to lead: salt is an easy marginal target for a government that needs to project a caring image. Much easier than taking on the powerful processed food or alcohol industries and tackling obesity. I read the recent white paper that was expected to tackle obesity, and it’s so weak, inconclusive and out of touch that I was genuinely shocked.

Eating less salt won’t harm you. But there’s a debate raging about the 6-14% of people who might actually benefit from a reduction. It’s not conclusive, it doesn’t make a slick soundbite or feature a big slug, but it’s the truth, and I think that the readers of Olive are grown-up enough to handle that. My guess is that you probably avoid processed food, so you probably eat a moderate amount anyway.

But for me, it’s a flavour enhancer, and despite what some say, it seems odd to call this a crime. Surely we want all of our food to taste better, and if that requires a pinch of salt, I’m damned if I’m going to feel guilty about it. Heston Blumenthal’s food tasting great with a pinch of salt? Bring it on. Just don’t waste it in saucepans of boiling water.

Here’s a recipe for guinea-fowl cooked in a salt and herb crust

Ó Stefan Gates 2005