Combatants in the Great Salt Debate divide into two camps with radically different views. One believes that we eat too much salt and should reduce our intake (a lot). The other believes that we eat too much salt and should reduce our intake (a bit).
The weapons for each side are research papers that prove their point, and angry scorn for the “flawed” research that doesn’t. The health journalist Claudia Hammond and her team at the BBC ’s World Service recently convened a panel of professors (of cardiology, chemistry and health economics) to bring calm elucidation to this complex subject, plus a food historian (me) for some history. Do we even need to add salt to our food? Natural and human history give some interesting answers.
Palaeolithic people and indigenous populations who lived principally by hunting did not. Fresh meat provides the carnivorous body with all the salts it needs. Wild herbivores, however, find salt licks in nature, and as our Neolithic ancestors began to add more plants to their diet, salt works start to appear in the archaeological record.
As coastal gardeners know, few edible plants take up salt, and plant-based diets need a supplement from somewhere. For the same reason that a salt bath helps heal wounds by battling bacteria, it preserves protein – meat, fish and cheese – through the hungry winter, or keeps it edible through a hot summer. Most traditional savoury foods – herring, gravadlax, salt cod, bacon, cheese, olives, pickles, soy and.