To be honest, I never monitored my salt consumption very closely. But then again I don’t eat very many convenience foods.

And one of these days you’ll have to cook for me, CG! 😉

Oliver, preaching will never get you far. My aim is to present people background information that lets them make an educated decision on their own.

Thanks for taking the time and contributing these links, Russell! I, however, have my doubts about the paleo diet.

That is very true about taste adapting to the amount of salt you eat. I avoid salt as much as possible and I can taste it in lots of things now like sweets and cakes. The biggest source in my diet was from bread and I couldn’t find any bread in the UK without loads of added salt, so I got a bread machine and make my own.

Yes, the big problem with salt is that it’s in so many things and that your taste buds get easily used to it, so you just eat more and more maybe without even you knowing it.

However I personally pretty much prepare all of my food from fresh or whole ingredients, due to my interest in cooking, so I’m pretty much aware of the amount of salt in my diet. Maybe I’m not in an immanent danger of sodium deficiency, but just saying that adding a pinch of unprocessed sea salt to dish when it needs just that flavour is more likely to be indifferent or beneficial to your health than kill you.

Also I’d say that there being many ways of living in the palaeolithic era, a large portion of hunter-gatherers had a larger sodium intake. Many hunter-gatherers lived on the shores where salt is easy to acquire, and it would’ve surely been used for it’s flavour and for storing.

Kael, it would be quite difficult to reduce sodium intake to a dangerously low level as it is present in so many foods. I had a look at bread in the supermarket today and most loaves had around 9g of salt in – some had 12g. Just a couple of slices would give you a gram of salt. Salt is added as a cheap flavour enhancer – they even put it in icecream and cola! You are more likely to get hyponatraemia from drinking too much water than not getting enough salt.

The results of the European study published in JAMA are inconsistent with a large number of high quality studies over the past decades regarding the effect of sodium on blood pressure and coronary disease risk. As you have indicated, the study has several weaknesses – there is a good summary here:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/salt/jama-sodium-study-flawed/index.html

Although sodium is as you say an essential nutrient, our bodies are adapted to a palaeolithic diet that would be very rich in potassium but poor in sodium. A consequence of this is that the body tries to retain sodium and when presented with a high sodium diet (as most people have), this extra sodium is retained along with water leading to increased blood volume. This is why blood pressure rises with sodium intake.

The palaeolithic diet would typically contain just 700 mg of sodium per day, and some current hunter-gatherer communities have been measured at just 500 mg per day of sodium without experiencing health problems. Along with this low sodium intake, they take in much higher levels of potassium. Sodium/potassium balance is regarded by some as the key, not just total sodium intake.

Harvard also has some good info on dietary sodium generally:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/salt/lower-sodium-and-salt/index.html

There is good evidence that it increases risk of stomach cancer and risk of osteoporosis.