Statement of the Obvious

Sea salt, we are told is just like, er salt…

Rock and sea salt is no different to ordinary table salt, despite claims it is natural and more healthy, say consumer groups.

It took research to figure this out, too. Naturally, we could never have reached such a conclusion for ourselves. However, this research and its findings come on the back of the usual cack about salt being bad for us. The BBC publishes the same old propaganda from the likes of CASH without any hint of challenge –  the pseudo science that has long since been debunked and ignores the basics of biology.

Most UK adults eat too much salt, far above the recommended guideline of about a teaspoon a day.

Eating a diet high in salt is linked with high blood pressure, a risk factor for stroke, heart failure and heart disease.

Yup, that. Those links were noted in the early twentieth century, but no direct causation was determined. Indeed, subsequent studies have come up with contradictory findings, effectively debunking the hight salt diet risk factor. Besides, it is up to no one to issue guidelines, least of all, single issue fake charities. It is up to us to decide for ourselves what is in our best interests, not the state and not those single issue pressure groups and fake charities. And if we want to spend more money on a product because it is supposedly more natural, well, so be it –  consumer choice and all that.

They say all contain almost 100% sodium chloride and are equally damaging to health in large quantities.

So is water. Drink too much of it and your electrolytes go haywire and you die. However, what these control freaks regard as too much is easily remedied by a healthy pair of kidneys.

Celebrity chefs should not be encouraging people to sprinkle sea salt on food, the report claims, as you can get all the salt you need from a balanced diet.

Ah, yes, those naughty celebrity chefs encouraging people to eat stuff they might actually like. I will continue to use salt in my cooking and sprinkle it on to taste. I don’t measure how much I consume and don’t plan to start now.

Professor Graham MacGregor of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine is chairman of Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH).

He said it was “disgraceful” that chefs still encouraged people to use so much sea and rock salt.

No, what is disgraceful is a shill for a fake charity thinking that it is any of his business what we eat. So, I will continue to eat salt –  sea or otherwise –  to my heart’s content. I will continue to treat Graham MacGregor with the utmost contempt which is rather more respect than he deserves.

Which? is apparently calling on manufacturers to reduce the salt in their products. Not only that, they are going to monitor them for compliance. There was a time when Which? may have been a useful consumer champion. These days, it is just another body indulging in arrant control freakery and lining up behind the fake charities and lobby groups to interfere in our personal decision making. When an organisation talks of the public being “confused” I stop taking what they have to say seriously. Patronising me is the quickest way to turn me off from your message. Not that this particular message was worth listening to in the first instance.

14 Comments

  1. Over the past few years I have noticed an huge increase in the number of products being branded with ‘NEW IMPROVED FLAVOUR!’ and somewhat less prominently ‘x% less salt’ and have come to the conclusion that the new, improved flavour is merely a reduction in the amount of salt.
    Rarely is it an improvement, but it is one which can, in most cases be easily rectified. Soups, for example can be seasoned accordingly, but when they recently ‘improved’ bacon flavour Wheat Crunchies by taking the salt out I was left lamenting a much loved and occasionally thoroughly enjoyed snack which now tastes rubbish and which I won’t be buying again. Thanks salt fascists!
    As an aside, I was listening to Weekend Wonen’s hour a week or two ago, and Jane Garvey asked Heston Blumenthal what was the one thing that people did at home which prevented them from producing restaurant quality foods. A completely bland question, but one which produced a legendary answer; he lamented the fact that people were too afraid to season properly, and that people should use more salt in their cooking. Poor Jane didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t tell one of the world’s great Chefs that he was wrong, but she wanted to, and in the post interview link there was a little disclaimer about salt being DEADLY POISON and making your heart stop and your brain explode. Ok, I exaggerate, but only a little bit… Anyway, Heston had proved himself to be the Anti-Oliver (in my eyes at least…) and that can only be a good thing!

  2. Heston made a big (career) mistake there. That kind of frankness is not welcome on the BBC and I suspect that sooner rather than later he will join David Bellamy and others in the congregation of BBC unpersons.

  3. I would have thought sea salt is more likely to contain various modern day impurities and toxic chemicals, than rock salt deposited thousands of years ago?

  4. “various modern day impurities”
    three of us fish once or twice a year at Porthkerris in Cornwall… no facilities of course so at intervals a pee in the sea is called for…. a chap came to tinker with some gubbins in a small pumphouse behind us, I asked him what it was all about and he told me that where we were fishing (and peeing) was the intake to the pumps that supplied the sea salt factory a short distance away, I often wonder which food faddist got our ‘impurities’ and whether the food tasted better than seasoning with cheap old Saxa

  5. I have a packet of wheat crunchies sat on my desk right now (part of my lunch), it clearly states that it contains 0.5g (8% of GDA) of salt (25g packet from a multipack). Maybe they relented.

  6. And can someone tell me what the hell iodised salt is and what it’s for? Well, just what it’s for since I looked at the packet in the supermarket and found it’s basically potassium iodide, but is this for people with some special dietary need because of a thyroid problem or something or is it, as I suspect, more low salt bullshit? Anyone know?

  7. Anything taken to excess will kill you.

    I had to laugh a few years ago when an American health Freak thought that carrot juice was the secret to eternal life. He dranks so much of it he turned bright orange, got Carrotine poisoning and died.

    The salt is poison bullshit is the same as the units of alcohol bullshit and the secondary smoke bullshit, just that… bullshit made up on the back of an envelope.

    But the salt thing is just so entrenched now as to be unshakeable. My 87 year old mum spent a couple of months in hospital in Cardiff last year. She had fallen and managed to break both wrists and was also waiting for a hip replacement. We were bombing back and forth down the M4 from Bristol to Cardiff every weekend. She said that the nurses etc were marvellous but the food was appalling. Why? no bloody salt in it, so it tasted of nothing. We ended up smuggling food in for her so she wouldn’t waste away.

  8. @ haddock (comment #5) – That made oi larf! But I was thinking more of the chemicals, rubbish and sewage dumped at sea, to say nothing of heavy metals chucked out by ships running on low grade “bunker fuel”.

  9. AE.

    I was told in my chemistry class at skool that all table salt was “iodised” to prevent folks from getting something called a goiter, which is caused by iodine deficiency.

    It’s just that nobody decided to bleat on about it till recently.

    Dunno if sea salt is “iodised” cos I can’t be arsed to look at the ingredients.

    Just off to buy some seabrook crisps as they now do them in big bags – at long last! Before they make it illegal to sell us more than 20g at a time……

  10. It was my understanding that sea salt was better because it contains minute amounts of other things. The attack on sea salt by the sadistic puritans is thereby wrong, because it is these other things – “impurities” – which make it better for you.

  11. LR mentions that excess of water can cause problems. There have been a couple of cases in which stupid local radio “DJs” (in UK and USA) ran a competition “Who can drink the most water in 24 hours” or similar. Deaths resulted. The only recent death of someone on the London Marathon was an idiot who drank too much water during and after the race!

    Seriously dihydrogen monoxide is an even greater problem, and something must be done about it, and soon. See dhmo.org for more details. Don’t forget to read the Press pack.

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