It’s National Salt Awareness Week. I’m already quite aware of salt, it tastes great, and it even looks pretty, particularly those fancy hand harvested varieties. I cook with it, and I add it to food. I don’t have high blood pressure or a family history of heart disease, so can anyone convince me that this is bad for me?

In the interest of research I had a look at the ironically named ‘CASH’ website, Consensus Action on Salt and Health. Someone has gone to a lot of effort to come up with that acronym, shame they didn’t go to the same effort to proofread the web copy. It’s riddled with spelling mistakes, atrocious grammar, and sentences that go: “The supermarkets and the food industry claim that no-one ever told them they want foods with less salt and unless consumers demand it, they don’t see a need to change.”

How reassuring that this is the language of peers and professors. You may think I’m being overly picky here, but I don’t think this online amateurism is going to win any hearts or minds. I would offer to rewrite it for them, but there is no ‘Contact Us’ information.

But back to the science, salt is going to give me high blood pressure, left ventricular hypertrophy, stomach cancer, proteinuria, osteoporosis, asthma, fluid retention and obesity. I’ve looked at the ‘evidence’ on the website, which is largely postulates and propositions. The evidence is poorly referenced, the references are mostly written by the 22 expert scientific members who comprise the committee. There are confounding variables all over the place, does salt make me fat? Or is it the chips I am liberally sprinkling it on?

But how much salt is too much? The recommended level is between three to six grammes, which is a teaspoonful. As I don’t eat any prepackaged or processed food, I can safely say that my level is well within allowed limits, despite my culinary penchant. I might be packing an extra couple of kilos, but I have the bone density of an elephant, and the blood pressure of a 20 year old. So far I seem to be getting away with it. 

The French cook with significant amounts of salt, yet their incidence of many of the above diseases is far lower than ours. It’s not because they use Fleur de Sel either, because as the CASH website points out: rock salt isn’t “any different from common salt just because it’s mor (sic) expensive.” Imagine how many Michelin stars Alain Ducasse would have if he stopped using salt.

So for the time being I am not going to worry, especially after one of the tabloids carried a headline this week saying that there wasn’t enough salt…It seems such a waste to spread it on the roads, but it does make for gourmet snow.