Americans Need More Salt in Their Food … NOT!

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The host of Iron Chef America is in hot, salty water

 The host of Iron Chef America and Good Eats, Alton Brown, might as well be nicknamed Salt and Brown. The congenial chef with the scientific slant is under the heat lamp after appearing in a Cargill advertisement and online video that professes the power of a pinch of salt to enhance flavor in foods like fruit, cookies and even ice cream. See the video at www.salt101.com.

It's disappointing to see Brown at the tip of the knife for a campaign aimed at putting salt back in a favorable light after highly visible crusaders for health, such as first lady Michelle Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg put the pressure on food companies to shake out the salt from processed foods. The campaign, called Life Enhancing Salts, is part of a plan by the maker of Diamond Crystal Salt (Cargill) to get ahead of the growing anti-salt campaign.

In Salt 101, Brown proclaims, “Whoever controls the salt is in power.” So true. From wars to boardrooms, since the dawn of time salt ruled the world. Today, sodium rules the $2 trillion consumer packaged-goods industry. Sadly it is also overruling our taste buds and undermining our health.

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that as many as 150,000 deaths a year could be prevented if sodium levels are reduced in processed goods and restaurant foods.

New Regulations for Salt Labeling?

The Institute of Food Medicine is calling for a major overhaul of sodium food labeling, stronger food-production guidelines and better transparency from restaurants and manufacturers about sodium levels of foods.

On Salt 101, Brown touts the power of the pinch with an interactive salt-pinching exercise. If your hands are nimble enough with a computer mouse, you can grab just enough pixels to mimic what a pinch of salt looks like. It’s a fun exercise showing the home cook just how far a pinch of salt can go. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with Brown, a pinch of sea salt on a fresh wedge of watermelon may be a flavor sparkler for a summer day, but this has nothing at all to do with a pinch of salt here and there. Brown is naively caught up in a common campaign by food companies to get ahead of a negative trend that could affect sales. Salt is the new tobacco.

Salt 101 fails to point out that 77 percent of salt consumption in this country is from processed foods; only five percent is used in home cooking. In Brown’s world, salt is used to enhance the flavor profile of a food, not overpower it. But the American processed-food system is built on a foundation of rock salt. According to a recent story in the New York Times, for the past thirty years food companies offered up excuses for getting the salt out – food will cost more, if salt is out then sugar will go in and it won't taste the same.

Major food companies such as Kellogg, Campbell’s and Kraft are reformulating and reducing sodium in traditionally high sodium foods such as lunchmeat, soups and frozen dinners. Laboratory scientists say they’ve dropped sodium levels anywhere from 25-35 percent, but reductions below this line affect flavor and texture and, above all, brand loyalty.

Despite what the food companies think, our taste buds can be retrained to actually like less saltier foods. According to Dr. David Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, the food industry got us here in the first place. They trained our taste buds to prefer salt, so they can be trained in reverse. Yes, a cup of tomato soup with 1400 mg of sodium won’t taste the same as a lower sodium version, but is that really a bad thing? Perhaps we all need to start learning what real food really tastes like.

You can read the New York Times story about the hard sell on salt here, and about how Americans get too much salt here. 

Kimberly Stewart can be reached at eatingbetweenthelines@gmail.com

Read all of Kimberly Stewart's blogs here.

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