Salt This Away…

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Plan Z is not a salt-restricted diet. In fact, we encourage you to salt your food. Use sea salt instead of the “normal” refined table salt. Salt has many health benefits. And it doesn’t give you high blood pressure.

Never did.

In fact, you’re more likely to die if you skimp on salt.

Gary Taubes is our go-to science writer. Here’s a brief excerpt from his article in the NY Times:

Bad Salt: Good Salt.

When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.

“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”

While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.

Here’s the article in case your doctor has put you on a low salt diet.