Over the years I have done some awful things for work: got up at dawn for a month; done a juice fast; eaten disgusting TikTok foods. But when I find myself contemplating going a single day without salt, my whole being mutinies – I just don’t want to. There’s a French expression, “Long like a day without bread”, and my equivalent is a day without salt: interminable, grey and tasteless.
I know, because I’ve done it before, and not just for a day. Aged 20, I was prescribed high-dose steroids for an auto-immune condition and instructed to cut out salt. I tried – I stopped salting my food and avoided everything obviously salty – and found it a joyless, despair-inducing slog. Since then, I’ve made up for lost sodium. I liberally salt food before tasting, crave olives and capers and have enthusiastically bought into the vogue for salted chocolate (literally, I buy M&S vegan hazelnut sea salt bars in bulk). My favourite drink is a dirty martini – mmm, brine – and I eat crisps every day. Since I cut out dairy, they’re my go-to treat. I gave blood yesterday and surveying the snack table afterwards, happily selected and ate a packet of Seabrook Ready Salted. At 10am.
But salt is… bad? Right? Unequivocally so, according to Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine and chair of the campaigning group Action on Salt, though getting that message across is tricky. “It’s a very difficult battle because salt is seen as a normal part of our diet – it’s not. Every time you turn on the television there’s a chef adding salt – of course, they’re all salt addicts, they probably have high blood pressure. A lot of chefs have strokes.” The headline issue with salt is precisely that it raises blood pressure, increasing the risk of hypertension, the “silent killer”. “High blood pressure is the biggest cause of death in the world,” says MacGregor, adding that “60% of strokes are due to high blood pressure, and 50% of all heart disease is due to raised blood pressure.” In addition, as MacGregor explains, salt can increase your susceptibility to stomach cancer and a high salt intake causes you to excrete more calcium. “That makes it much more likely that you’ll get bone thinning as you get older.” Excess sodium can increase your susceptibility to kidney stones and, he says, according to research, “There seems to be a link between high salt intake and loss of immunity.”
How worried should I be? I’ve been comforted by the knowledge that my blood pressure is fairly low, but the thought of a stroke terrifies me, osteoporosis is a real concern, not to mention the other nasty stuff. I’m relatively health-conscious: I eat carefully and don’t drink to excess, smoke or vape; I take my vitamin D and omega 3s. So why am I ignoring these risks? What is the hold that salt has over me?
For a start, I’m hardly exceptional. We need salt – our muscles and nerves require sodium to function – meaning we’ve sought it out since we emerged from the primordial ooze. The evolutionary move to land meant we needed to maintain our “internal sea”, turning us into salt seekers, explains professor of physiology Matthew Bailey, who has a particular interest in salt. “As we evolved from marine animals to living on land, we faced the challenge of getting salt. Our body fluids are essentially salt water and you need to replenish that, so mammals evolved lots of molecules that allowed them to find salt in the environment. When the body detects the depletion of the ‘internal sea’, your brain triggers you to go out and find salty food.” That was how prehistoric man operated in salt-scarce times, generating an intake of around 0.5g a day. Now, with salt cheaply, freely available – and added to almost everything we eat – we consume around 8.4g in the UK, vastly in excess of what we need. Our bodies haven’t evolved to cope with that, and our salt-seeking has no off switch.
Our uncontrollable impulses have meant human history is heavily seasoned – we’ve been extracting it from the sea and land since prehistoric times. In 2021, a 6,000-year-old salt hub was discovered in northeast England, the oldest in the UK. There have been salt wars and rebellions, and salt has been used as currency and incorporated into religious rituals. Louis XVI’s salt tax, the gabelle, was one of the key grievances aired in the French Revolution, and Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March protested the salt monopoly and tax imposed by the British, which forbade Indians from making or gathering their own. Our geography is marked by salt, too: prehistoric man followed animals along salt paths to natural deposits of salt, then later salt roads mark the routes along which it travelled and was traded. The common “wich” suffix in British place names sometimes derives from an Anglo-Saxon term for saltworks.
We initially valued salt as a preservative (and as an antiseptic – “salubrious” is derived from salt), but gradually we’ve shifted to using salt mainly because we like it. We’re hardwired to find eating salt pleasurable. “There’s a molecule on the tongue – an ion channel – that links the gustatory nerve from the tongue to the brain and when sodium passes, a nerve signal goes to the brain and triggers the limbic system, all that pleasurable stuff happens,” says Bailey. “It’s a little bit like the reproductive drive: when you eat salt, you get pleasure for your reward.”
Can we also accept it makes food delicious? Chef James Strawbridge certainly thinks so: “It can provide such sensation and taste and flavour.” His new book, Salt and the Art of Seasoning, is a paean to the transformative effects of natural salts (as opposed to harsh, chemical varieties) on food, from sardines to sauerkraut, amplifying flavour in the mouth and conveying it to the brain. Strawbridge prepares flavoured salt blends (including rhubarb, leek ash, and roast dinner salt) and provides food pairing notes, salt sommelier style, explaining the notion of merroir, the sea version of terroir (how a product’s origins affect its taste).
Speaking from his seaside home in Cornwall, Strawbridge describes salt as “part of my lifestyle”, though he assures me he doesn’t carry salt around with him, à la Nigella and her handbag pinch pot of Maldon. “I get a lot of joy from handling salt, using it and understanding it and that’s what I’m keen to share.” He believes keen cooks can curate collections of salts, learning when and how to use them as they do for herbs and spices.
Strawbridge guides me through a taste test on two slices of tomato: industrial table salt v Cornish flakes. Table salt is “a bit intense, almost chemical. There’s a tang to it which is yuck.” The Cornish is “a lot more tomato-y”. He’s right: the table salt tomato tastes flatter, less sweet and subtle, even to my Hula Hoop-deadened palate. “Like speakers with surround sound compared with a rubbish old radio,” agrees Strawbridge.
Salt as a product with history, provenance and complexity is foodie catnip. I watch the Netflix adaptation of Samin Nosrat’s bestseller Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, in which she discovers there are more than 4,000 varieties of Japanese salt, tastes soy sauce fermented in century-old barrels and visits Kami-kamagari, where prized moshio salt is extracted from hondawara seaweed. This hipsterification of salt does not impress MacGregor, particularly cheffy sprinklings of flakes and crystals. “The bigger the salt crystal, the less salty it tastes. A tiny crystal dissolves much more quickly and you get a strong salty taste straight away.” Chefs prefer large crystals, he says, because “when you put it on your tongue you don’t get that really salty taste. The danger is, you eat more salt without actually tasting it. A lot is consumed before it’s actually dissolved.” He has no time for claims about their beneficial mineral content either. “You’d have to eat a lethal dose of salt to get your potassium intake.”
The one thing everyone agrees on is that we’re consuming far too much salt accidentally, unconsciously, in bread (three in four supermarket breads contain as much salt per slice as a packet of crisps, according to Action on Salt), breakfast cereals, sauces and… well, everything. Processed foods use salt to mask quality and flavour deficiency. “The message is, anything in a packet from the food industry has had salt added unless you can prove it hasn’t,” says MacGregor.
It doesn’t have to be like this. From 2001 to 2010, the UK made a concerted effort to reduce salt content in processed foods, with industry-wide targets and progress monitoring, achieving a reduction of 20-40%. That cut the average salt intake from 9.5g to 8.1g a day with knock-on public health benefits: a fall in population blood pressure and deaths from stroke and heart disease, preventing an estimated 9,000 deaths. But from 2011, the coalition government shifted responsibility to the food industry and salt reduction stalled.
Now, hunting out lower-sodium options requires a PhD in label semiotics and plenty of time. Action on Salt has an app, FoodSwitch UK, to help people navigate the shelves, though MacGregor warns, “you have to go to about 10 supermarkets”. If you can, cooking for yourself at least lets you control your own salt intake. For Strawbridge, “The more you cook from scratch, the more you have a physical, tangible understanding of salt.”
Of course, unless you’re so off-grid Ben Fogle might turn up with a camera crew, it’s near-impossible to avoid processed foods. There are interesting developments afoot, though. Bailey says major food-industry players are investigating substances other than sodium that might trigger the limbic system pleasure response (MSG is one strong contender). Food research is also exploring how complex, umami-rich salted products, such as soy, may also allow the pleasure sensation of salt to be triggered at a lower concentration level.
My salt intake must vastly exceed the UK recommended 6g a day. Bailey has tested his own careful, salt-aware intake on several occasions (it involves peeing in a bucket) and was disappointed to find it was “pretty much the national average, between 8g and 9g”. So should I cut down? What a grim prospect. “It’s not grim,” says MacGregor. “Once you get used to it, food tastes so much better.” Your salt taste receptors readjust and become more sensitive after a month or so, he says. Neither he nor Bailey use “discretionary” salt at home. “It’s a chemical dug up from the ground, why do you want to put it on your food?” says MacGregor. He has even foresworn most cheeses – “if you like eating seawater, go on eating cheese” – based on salt content (English Brie is his top tip).
Some people go cold turkey and adapt even quicker than MacGregor’s prediction. “It takes about a week; just have to replace it with other flavours,” one convert tells me. “Korean red pepper flakes were the key.” “Took me about a fortnight, now I absolutely hate the stuff,” says another.
But in my long-ago year without salt, I never lost my craving and right now, I can’t even manage a single day. Porridge for breakfast is boring but fine and I don’t add soy sauce to my lunchtime supermarket vegetarian sushi (though newly alert to hidden salt, I realise it’s in the rice, the nori, everywhere). But by evening, I’ve fallen entirely off the wagon, sneaking a fistful of crisps as I cook, then sloshing soy into my fried rice and adding a topping of salted peanuts. I’m addicted. I fear they’ll have to drag salt from my cold dead hands; unfortunately, that might be sooner rather than later.
Salt and the Art of Seasoning by James Strawbridge is published by Chelsea Green at £27. Buy it for £23.76 from guardianboookshop.com