Salt and Obesity
I always find it a bit strange to see the looks of disbelief on the faces of journalists when I tell them that lowering the salt content of foods will greatly increase the obesity epidemic. How can that be?
Well, it’s quite simple really. People will eat more food and ingest more calories just to satisfy their innate appetite for salt. We have decades of experience with animal feeding as a basis for this statement. If you’re freely feeding cattle expensive feed, you add more salt to satisfy their appetite and limit their intake. If you want them to eat more feed, you cut back on the salt.
For the skeptics out there, we have a great many examples which everyone can easily identify with. When we cut the nicotine out of cigarettes, people smoked far more; when we cut the sugar out of soft drinks, people swilled tons more low-cal beverages; when we cut the fat out of foods, people gorged themselves on low-fat, no-fat foods to such an extent, they ushered in the current obesity epidemic.
What do you possibly think people will do when they face a big bag of low-salt chips?
All the pharmacists out there should not be surprised in future when they come across a rash of doctors’ prescriptions from their obese patients – “Salt (generic sodium chloride), for control of obesity – shake on food as required.”
