At The Forgotten Side of Medicine, the writer known as “A Midwestern Doctor” discusses the medical establishment’s ongoing war on salt. He writes:

Many medical policies are driven more by profit than by evidence of what truly benefits patients. Because of this, we frequently see medicine refuse to ever discuss the things that are making us sick (e.g., numerous studies show vaccines make children 2-10X more likely to develop chronic illnesses that are now widespread) while in tandem, we are relentlessly pressured to put all focus onto a few things which do not make enough money for lobbyists to defend them.

In this article, I will explore one of my key frustrations with this dynamic: the medical establishment’s ongoing war on salt. In this article, I will focus on one of my major frustrations with this medical paradigm—the war against salt.

Note: the war against salt began in 1977 when a Senate Committee published dietary guidelines arguing for reduced sodium consumption despite the existing evidence not supporting this. Since then, like many other bad policies, it has developed an nearly unstoppable inertia of its own.

Is Salt Bad For You?

Many people you ask, particularly those in the medical field will tell you salt is bad, and one of the most common pieces of health advice given both inside and outside of medicine is to eat less salt.

Over the years, I’ve heard two main arguments for why salt is bad for you.

First, salt raises blood pressure, and high blood pressure is deadly, so salt is too and should be avoided.

Second, with individuals who have heart failure, eating too many salty foods will create exacerbations of their condition, and as a result, after holidays where people eat those foods (e.g., the 4th of July) more heart failure patients will be admitted to hospitals for heart failure exacerbations.

Note: excessive sodium causes these exacerbations because if an excess amount of fluid accumulates in a compromised system (e.g., because the weakened heart can’t move enough blood to the kidneys to eliminate it), it then overloads other parts of the body (e.g., causing swelling and edema, which, if in the lungs, can be life threatening).

Because of these two things, many in the medical field assume that salt must be bad for you and hence strongly urge patients to avoid it (to the point you often see an elderly patient who loves her salt be aggressively pushed into abandoning it). Unfortunately, the logic behind those two arguments’ logic is less solid than it appears.

Read more here.