The Skinny on Salt

The original Morton Salt girl (left) and the one styled by Vogue (right)

As I mentioned in my last post, I traveled quite a bit last week - for work and for a friend's wedding - and as I usually do when traveling, I picked up a couple of girlie magazines to read while vegging in my hotel room, one of which was the November 2010 issue of Vogue. Although it's technically a fashion mag, Vogue usually has one or two good food/nutrition articles in each issue; I read the October issue on my trip to Savannah a few weeks ago.

The November issue included an article on the pros & cons of salt, in response to NYC Mayor Bloomberg's anti-salt campaign, and I was surprised to learn a few things about how our bodies process and use sodium, and how vastly people's tolerance or sensitivity to sodium can differ.

One thing that the author pointed out I found interesting:

"Even if manufactureres discover a magic ingredient that helps them create delicious crackers without the sodium, some experts question whether we'd consume substantially less salt, because they suspect out appetite for the white stuff may be encoded in our DNA. ... [Researchers] from the University of California, Davis, analyzed diet data from 19,000 people in 33 countries and found that everyone's daily sodium consumption falls within a fairly narrow - and shockingly high - range of about 2,700 to 4,900 milligrams, or as much as three times the new recommended limit."

There was one quote that I didn't quite agree with, though:

"Michael Alderman, M.D., a professor in the deapartment of medicine at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine and leader of the low-sodium resistance ... and others argue that telling everyone to reduce salt because some people develop hypertension is a little like telling everyone to avoid sugar because some people are diabetic."

I think it's a poor analogy and actually contradicts his low-sodium position: avoiding excess sugar helps prevent diabetes, so wouldn't avoiding salt help prevent hypertension?

Check out the whole article here (click on the thumbnails below):