Note: the war against salt began in 1977 when a Senate Committee published dietary guidelines arguing for reduced sodium consumption despite the existing evidence not supporting this. Since then, like many other bad policies, it has developed an nearly unstoppable inertia of its own.

Is Salt Bad For You?

Many people you ask, particularly those in the medical field will tell you salt is bad, and one of the most common pieces of health advice given both inside and outside of medicine is to eat less salt.

Over the years, I've heard two main arguments for why salt is bad for you.

First, salt raises blood pressure, and high blood pressure is deadly, so salt is too and should be avoided.

Second, with individuals who have heart failure, eating too many salty foods will create exacerbations of their condition, and as a result, after holidays where people eat those foods (e.g., the 4th of July) more heart failure patients will be admitted to hospitals for heart failure exacerbations.

Note: excessive sodium causes these exacerbations because an excess amount of fluid accumulates in the body (e.g., because the weakened heart can't move enough blood to the kidneys to eliminate it), which then overloads other parts of the body (e.g., causing swelling and edema, which, if in the lungs, can be life threatening).

Because of these two things, many in the medical field assume that salt must be bad for you and hence strongly urge patients to avoid it (to the point you often see an elderly patient who loves her salt be aggressively pushed into abandoning it). Unfortunately, the logic behind those two arguments logic is less solid than it appears.

Blood Pressure

Many things in medicine resulted from what approach to patient care was the most profitable, not the most helpful. In turn, since recurring revenue is a foundational principle of successful businesses, a key goal in medicine often ends up being to have as many patients as possible be on lifelong prescriptions.

In most cases, the drugs that are developed and approved have real value for specific situations, but those situations are not enough to cover the exorbitant cost it requires to get a drug to market. As a result, once drugs are approved, the industry will gradually come up with reasons to give them to more and more people and in turn quickly arrive at the point where many of their customers have greater harm than benefit from the pharmaceutical.