Pasta Sauces slammed for salt intake

Consensus Action on Salt & Health (CASH) have done a survey on the salt content in pasta sauces and found, horror of horrors, that Jamie Oliver’s spicy olive garlic and tomato pasta sauce has 3g of salt per 100g of product.

When are we going to have a CASH 2 – Consensus Action on SUGAR & Health? Why does no one seem to care about the sugar in food? The weight watchers product, apparently, compared quite favourably on salt content – probably because there was no room for salt once all the sugars were fitted in!

Here are some interesting thoughts on salt:
1) If you eat real food, you never need worry about salt or check a label again in your life – nature will put salt (and potassium) in food in the right balance.

2) If you are getting ‘too much’ salt, you are, by definition, eating processed food (because nature will get it right). Hence we cannot conclude that salt is causing a health problem because salt comes in processed foods and this generally, and all the other ingredients specifically, may be causing the problems.

3) Hypertension (blood pressure over 140) and obesity absolutely go together hand in hand. So, whatever is causing obesity is likely to be a chief culprit in hypertension (that’s processed food in my view).

4) Carl Von Voit (1860) first observed that water retention and hypertension go hand in hand. He deduced that carbohydrates play a huge part in water retention, and therefore in hypertension. (I tell you – most of the things we needed to know about diet and obesity, we knew before 1900 and then we went backwards during most of the 20th century!). The Harcombe Diet Phase 1 has a massive impact on water retention – how about testing this for hypertension?!

5) Gary Taubes – genius – does some great maths on p146 of The Diet Delusion: cutting our average salt intake in half (difficult to do) would drop blood pressure by 4-5mm Hg in hypertensives and 2mm Hg in the rest of us. If we have the lowest level of hypertension, we already have (systolic) blood pressure (that’s the first reading they give you when they take your blood pressure) at least 20mm Hg over what is considered healthy. If we have stage 2 hypertension, we are 40mm Hg above ‘healthy’. So, GT concludes: “cutting our salt intake in half and decreasing our systolic blood pressure by 4 to 5 mm Hg makes little difference.”

What will help high blood pressure? Being within the normal BMI range is probably the single most important thing that will help. But then, of course, dieticians will try to achieve this by putting overweight people on a low fat/high carb (high water retention) diet – brilliant!