The following is an excerpt from p. 37-39 of Chapter 1, “Precious Crystals: What Salt Teaches Us About Drugs” from my book, Drugism (2022):
[Note: today’s excerpt picks up where “When Salt Was Medicine...” left off.]
As the various fields of medicine advanced, more drugs became available to treat the conditions which historically had been treated with salt. In theory, this might have meant that less people used salt. However, salt consumption did not go down. It went up. This is largely because, continuing on the tradition of using salt to preserve food and enhance its taste, processed food companies over the last century embraced salt as a multipurpose addition to their recipes.
The electric tingle on the tongue, the jolt of energy through the body, the dopamine rush. In large enough doses one may feel one’s heart beat more forcefully or one’s blood pressure rise. I certainly have. And I felt it thousands of times before I learned to recognize it.
As the various fields of medicine advanced, salt consumption did not go down. It went up.
Growing up in the US, my childhood was full of salty processed food. Long trips to visit my grandparents were punctuated with stops at gas stations for candy, soda, sometimes pizza. At home there was more salty food: crackers, soup, more candy. I eventually wised up and have long since abandoned the above-mentioned products. My heart is happy for it—I can feel it.
We all know the feeling. Whether paired with a crispy crunch or something more smooth and creamy, salt generally imparts a joyous sensation. It is so commonplace in our diet that the reader may not even be able to recall the specific taste; it is found in nearly everything. It is easy to confuse the taste of the foods we know and love with the taste of salt.
In the generations since the industrial revolution, food producers have added ever higher amounts of salt and salt-based compounds to their products. And for the most part, consumers have responded enthusiastically. If we had known that there were other ways to obtain their sodium and chlorine, and that we need not expose ourselves to something which would drastically increase their risk of heart disease, would consumers have chosen differently? Quite possibly—but this was not the case. As seen countless other times in history, this was just one example in which commercial success thrived—depended—on ignorance. Still today, heavily salted, processed foods are astoundingly popular.
The combined impact of high doses of salt and sugar can create a powerful euphoria.
As most of us know from personal experience, salt can enhance the taste of food, and can make sugar taste sweeter.[i] The combined impact of high doses of salt and sugar can create a powerful euphoria, as anyone who has eaten gas station junk food can attest to. The more food manufacturers salt their products, the more consumers gobble them up.
In addition to functioning as a preservative, salt, just like any other drug, invites repeated consumption. Highly salted food is more likely to make an impact on the consumer than less-salted foods; the consumer is then more likely to buy the heavily salted product again over the less salted one. Food companies know this, and they have responded by adding copious amounts of salt to processed food items as "a way to increase sales and consumption.”[ii]
This brings us to the modern era of recreational salt consumption. I say recreational because most of the salt consumed today is eaten purely for the joy if it—not to satiate hunger or medical need. When any other substance is consumed in this manner, it is deemed recreational. Why should salt be any different?
Processed food companies add salt to their products to incentivize consumption.
We see that, like many other drugs, along with functions in religion and medicine, salt also serves as a ubiquitous, economic commodity (in fact, it was one of the first). Now, salt is consumed in exorbitant doses for the sheer euphoria it generates. These days it is everywhere, all the time, one more recreational substance among many.
It is not only "junk food" that has high doses of salt. Many items which are marketed as health-conscious and organic also contain unnecessary volumes of salt and sodium. As a result, most people consume more sodium than is necessary. But how much is too much? The USDA recommends that people consume no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium daily.[iii]
However, this figure is far higher than the actual amount of sodium required for sustenance. Historically, various populations have lived healthily on just a few hundred milligrams of sodium daily. The National Academy of Medicine (NAM, formerly the Institute of Medicine) estimated that the minimum level of sodium required to function is 180 milligrams daily.[iv]
The average person in the US consumes roughly 20 times more sodium than is needed for survival.
The average person in the US consumes between 3-4,000 milligrams of salt each day. As the textbook from my undergraduate biology class insists, "the average American eats enough salt to provide about 20 times the required amount of sodium.”[v] While this may seem absurd, when we compare the 180 figure determined by the NAM to the number the average US citizen consumes—roughly 3,500—the ratio is not far off.
This chronic overdosing of salt is killing us by the millions. The consequences of its overconsumption include heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease, and an estimated three million deaths each year across the globe. A team of scientists at Harvard found that sodium overconsumption takes 100,000 lives each year just in the US.[vi] And the leading cause of death in the US is heart disease, which itself claims more than half a million lives annually and to which salt consumption is a major contributor.[vii]
For reference, heroin overdose has rarely caused more than 15,000 deaths annually in the US.[viii] Even if we combine all opioid overdose deaths from 2021, the figure comes to about 81,000.[ix] Granted, many more people consume salt than heroin or fentanyl, so statistically, salt is the least lethal of the three. Regardless, the sheer number of people whose lives salt claims each year is still staggering and worthy of our attention.
Chronic overconsumption of salt—salt overdose—kills us by the millions.
Scientists who study salt readily connect the effects of salt to those of other drugs. For his book Salt, Sugar, Fat, journalist Michael Moss interviewed Paul Breslin, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At Monell, Breslin is just one of many who conduct research sponsored by Coca-Cola, Philip Morris, and others behemoths of processed food and tobacco. As Moss wrote, Breslin is quick to compare daily salt consumption to habitual drug use. Reflecting on this, even Moss admits that in the brain, “narcotics and food—especially food that is high in salt, sugar, and fat—act much alike.” As he learned from Breslin, food and drugs both, when ingested, utilize “the same pathways [and] the same neurological circuitry to reach the brain’s pleasure zones.”[x]
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