A Salty Situation

Everyone is salty these days. At the grocery store. At the food court. At the breakfast table, and at the drive-thru. We are a big, salty bunch and it is taking a toll on our life expectancy and healthcare costs. ICYMI: I am not talking about “grumpy” salty. I am taking about sodium chloride salty, i.e. the salt that comes from a shaker and not the salt that comes from a meanie pants.

We as a nation consume way too much sodium chloride, which is about 40% sodium and 60% chlorine (chloride being a negatively charged chlorine atom). Of the compound, it is the sodium component that is causing a major problem in our society, one of which is heart disease.

• 90% of us consume too much salt
• Coincidently 90% of us will develop high blood pressure
• Since the 1970s salt intake has risen 69% in women and 48% in men
• We only need 500 mg daily of sodium to survive (about a 1/4 teaspoon of table salt) but most Americans eat 4000 mg per day
  • Some research even suggests men are taking in 6200mg/day!
  • 1,500 is the recommended max

 

A Pandemic of Salt

Let’s consider a control group. Fact: there is a tribe in the Amazonian jungles that has an average blood pressure of 95/61. They lead an active lifestyle out in the jungle and they have NO added salt to their diets. They are mostly described as hunter/gatherer and “gardener”. They eat a lot of fruit, nuts, and fiber. In their isolated diet paradise, they are well-protected from the salt pushers. As a result, these people do not have to deal with heart attacks or heart disease.

Salt intake is one of single most important controllable factors when it comes to high blood pressure. Excess sodium essentially causes the brain to trigger certain glands to release hormones that raise our blood pressure. Cut the salt, to cut the hormones, and cut the blood pressure.

Heart disease is the number one killer, and stroke is the number three killer, in the United States. Yet, if we all just adopted the Yanomami diet, theoretically we could eradicate heart disease overnight. Right? Yes, we could. It’s that simple.

STOP!

Don’t argue with me.

Let it sink in.

If we all isolated ourselves in the jungle and ate plantains, casava, river fish and nuts, then our blood pressure would drop.

AGAIN, DON’T ARGUE.

Our blood pressure would drop. Accept this as fact. Move to the jungle and eat nothing but plantains and river fish and your high blood pressure will disappear.

We know that is probably not going to happen. But it would be amazing if we did, right!

What if there was another approach instead of moving to the jungle? What if our society here went anti-salt instead?

 

How Did We Get So Salty?

Woodstock: look at a picture from Woodstock. What do you notice? Everybody is thin. A lot of people are also nude, so you can’t argue. Yes, they are thin.

Next, look at a picture from Coachella. Notice the difference?

What happened between the two timelines is a double-edged sword. We began eating garbage and we began eating more of it.

Garbage eating:

With the rise of two-income households, busy schedules, hectic chaos day in and out, we have trended towards convenience foods. From frozen to drive-thru. These foods are mass-produced, manufactured goods. The manufacturers of these foods seek a tasty product that is economical (cheap) and most importantly, holds up in the cold chain or on the shelf. Salt and other nasty ingredients are their secret. Salt is probably the number one culprit in today’s modern food travesty due to its link to high blood pressure and heart disease.

“More garbage please” …

According to an article at Revolver News that has been making waves, the author argues that people back in the day were thinner because they nutritious food that was made from scratch. Because they ate nutritious, they required less food to satiate themselves. For example they could survive on 1500 calories per day of nutritious food versus having to consume 2500 calories of garbage food to extract the same level of valuable nutrients. 

It’s a one-two punch. We are essentially eating way more volume of food than we should because the quality of the food that we eat is diminished and a lot of that poor quality food is packed with salt. Too many empty calories and too much sodium. Heard that before?

 

WHAT IF WE BOYCOTTED SALT?

A 2012 study by the CDC suggested that if we cut salt by a paltry 1,200 mg per day that we could save $20 billion in medical costs. So, CDC admits that salt is driving up healthcare costs, but they missed the point. 1,500 mg is the recommended maximum daily value, and we think most Americans are getting about 4000 mg. So, reducing by 1,200 mg, down to 2,800, you do not address the salt problem.

HEY, CDC! How much money could we save if Americans only ate 1,500 mg of salt per day? A trillion dollars? Could we cut healthcare spend by 25%? That’s what I want to know!

During the cigarette pandemic they probably understood that cutting back on smoking was helpful but that it wasn’t until you stopped entirely that you saw the real benefits. I encourage the CDC and other organizations to model the economic impact of what would happen if we got average salt intake down to the recommended value.

Given what we’ve heard about tribes in the Amazon, it would be clear. High blood pressure would be significantly reduced if not eradicated from a large swath of the population by nudging society to reduce their salt intake to 1500 mg or less. We would still have other variables to address like physical activity and caloric intake, but the lion’s share of the high blood pressure problem would vaporize. I am talking about many hundreds of billions of dollars in savings. Money that is spent on the prevention and treatment of heart disease related issues. It’s a whopping, staggering amount of our overall healthcare spend and it could be addressed.

Here’s another and final public call to action. What if our food MANUFACTUERS shifted their focus from mass-produced garbage to producing nutritious food? We manufacture cars. We should not manufacture FOOD. What if these “manufacturers” instead became artisans that produced nutritious foods? Perhaps the next revolution could be a shift from medical services to proper nutrition services? We are paying almost 20% of our money towards “health”. You’d think we’d get higher-quality nutrition as part of that arrangement.

REFERENCES

Brill, Jane. Blood Pressure Down. Harmony Books, 2013.

https://hub.jhu.edu/2018/11/15/yanomami-yekwana-tribe-blood-pressure/

https://www.revolver.news/2023/01/how-were-people-effortlessly-thin-in-the-1950s-60s-and-70s/