Any excess salt added to food, outside of what is contained in natural foods, is likely to increase your risk of developing disease. Salt consumption is linked to both stomach cancer and hypertension. (1) I do not recommend that salt be added to any food. The DASH study indicates that Americans consume five to ten times as much sodium as they need and that high sodium levels have a predictable effect on raising blood pressure. (2) Elevated systolic blood pressure is an important risk factor for future development of heart disease in middle aged and older adults. Even if you don’t have high blood pressure now, you probably will if you keep eating lots of salt over the years.

There is a frighteningly high correlation between sodium intake and all cause mortality in men. High sodium intake predicts mortality and risk of coronary heart disease, independent of other cardiovascular risk factors, including high blood pressure. (3) This means that salt has significant harmful effects, independent of its effects on blood pressure. Salt also pulls out calcium and other trace minerals in the urine when the excess is excreted, which is a contributory cause of osteoporosis. (4)

You should resist adding salt to foods and look for salt-free canned goods and soups. Since most salt comes from processed foods, bread and canned goods, it shouldn’t be that hard to avoid added sodium. If you must salt your food, do so only after it is on the table and you are ready to eat it. It will taste saltier if the salt is right on the surface. You can add lots of salt yet hardly taste it if the salt is added to the vegetables or soup while they are cooking. Use herbs, spices, lemon, vinegar, or other non-salt seasonings to flavor food. Condiments such as ketchup, mustard, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, and relish are all high in sodium.

The more salt you consume, the more you lose the ability to appreciate the subtle flavors of natural food. As salt deadens taste, it makes you want more and more salt to get back some of the missing flavor. If you don’t use salt, your taste buds adjust with time and your sensitivity to taste salt improves. Avoiding processed foods and highly salted foods allows you to regain your ability to detect and enjoy the subtle flavors in natural foods and actually get heightened pleasure from eating dishes that are not heavily seasoned.

One should be clear that sea salt, celtic salt and other natural salts are still salt. To the extent that they add sodium to the body, they have the same risks as regular table salt. Just because a natural salt may contain a trace amount of other minerals does not make the extra sodium consumed from that source less harmful. Natural foods contain less than 50 mg of sodium per 100 calories. That means the sodium in a natural food diet is half as much as the calories. If eating whole grain bread, tomato sauce or any other prepared food, I advise not adding more than 300 mg of extra sodium on to the dietary sodium naturally occurring in unprocessed foods. Read the label when you purchase a food in a jar, can, bag or box. Avoid the food if it has more than 300 mg of sodium per serving and preferably chose foods that have less sodium per serving than calories per serving to protect your future health.

The American Heart Association recommends sodium intake be limited to less than 2300 mg daily. I consider that a dangerous amount of sodium in a diet. Remember, the guidelines of national and governmental authorities are designed to be acceptable to the social, economic and political views of their monetary supporters and constituents, these recommendations are not science-based. Ideally we should consume less than 1000 mg of sodium a day.

Populations in pockets of the world that do not salt their food do not have elderly citizens with high blood pressure. High blood pressure is not the result of aging; it is the result of continual salt and other dietary abuses that occur day in and day out for many, many years taking their toll. Remember, if you don’t have high blood pressure now, you will eventually if you continue consuming salted foods. When that happens after years and years of salt use, it may not come down so easy by stopping the salt intake then.

And lastly, most of my patients have decided not to have a heart attack and stroke and recognize that medications to control blood pressure and cholesterol offer only marginal protection against heart disease and stroke. They are taught what they need to do to say no to heart attacks and strokes. What happens to other Americans does not have to happen to you. But, you can’t expect to remove that dagger of risk hanging over your head unless you are willing to adopt a disease-protective lifestyle which includes a high phytochemical diet without the salt. To the extent that blood pressure and cholesterol-lowering medications enable people to think they are protected and can continue their disease-causing lifestyles, they allow the disease-process to continue unchecked and inevitably result in medical tragedies and a shortened lifespan.

1. Joossens, J.V., M.J. Hill, P. Elliot, it al. 1996. Dietary salt, nitrate and stomach cancer mortality in 24 countries: European Cancer Prevention (ECP) and the INTERSALT Cooperative Research Group. Int. J. Epidemiol. 3: 494-504
2. Obarzanek, E., F.M. Sacks, T.J. Moore, et al. 2000. Dietary Approaches to stop hypertension (DASH) – Sodium trial. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hypertension. May 17, New York, NY.
3. Ito Tuomilehto, J., P. Jousilahti, D. Rastenyte, et. al. 2001. Urinary sodium excretion and cardiovascular mortality in Finland: a prospective study. Lancet 357 (9259): 848-51.
4. H, R., and Y. Suyama. 1996. Sodium excretion in relation to calcium and hydroxyproline excretion in a healthy Japanese population. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 63 (5): 735-40.