An update from the trenches: My challenge last week of some "facts" asserted by an anti-salt blogger in The Morning Cup prompted a further exhange that our readers might enjoy.

Host Bob Messenger was chastised for "taking up for salt and Mr. Hanneman's organization" and defending "a 'killing' ingredient like salt and an industry organization like the Salt Institute." Even if the medium is digital, it doesn't pay to quarrel with someone who buys his "ink" by the barrel. Messenger responded:

First of all, Joan, I don't even know Mr. Hanneman. Never met the guy. Never talked to him either. In fact, that email, as far as I can recollect, was the first time I've ever directly heard from him or his organization. So I have no agenda to "take up" for Mr. Hanneman or the Salt Institute. But it does tick me off that an ingredient so historically important to the flavor and taste of our food as salt is, can be so recklessly branded "a killing ingredient" by people who don't know what the heck they're talking about. Humankind has "salted" its foods for centuries, but, what, the people in this one little decade who are trying to 'demonize' salt are right and everyone else who ever used salt in the whole wide history of the world are wrong? People, please, focus. If you hate salt, fine, if you think it's killing you, fine, because there are plenty of decent salt alternatives to choose from. So use 'em, okay, and leave the rest of us alone ... I'm just saying, don't be surprised if in the future a few hundred arrogant activist looneys succeed at wiping salt from the nation's dietary agenda. It is their goal and I, for one, do not underestimate them.

The next day, Brenda Neall , editor of the South Africa Food Review, joined the discussion, telling the anti-salt complainant that she "is one seriously mislead, misinformed (and sour) lady, as you pointed out, Bob, in your response to her laughable diatribe against you and 'killing' salt, and clearly completely taken in by the activist looneys" and suggesting she read "a sane and measured article on the salt saga from the brilliant book, Panic Nation." She even posted Panic Nation article by Dr. Sandy Macnair on her website. It's worth reading. Macnair concludes:

Without adequate randomised trials to show that it is effective and establish its long-term safety, in particular to show reduced cardiovascular mortality, the imposition of a low-salt diet by government diktat appears particularly foolhardy and without any scientific basis.

We couldn't have said it better.

Returning to Panic Nation, Neall explains her endorsement:

Panic Nation, by the way, is a very valuable addition to every food industrialist's book shelf, and wonderful reference and defense against those who would point fingers at our profession and industry.

It's a compilation of expert essays, edited and vetted by eminent British medical scientists, Stanley Feldman and Vincent Marks, and demonstrates, most succinctly and soundly, how, when it comes to food, diet and lifestyle, the public is gullible victim of an incredible amount of mumbo-jumbo hogwash.

The book explains why and how we have become a society of 'miserablists', unhealthily obsessed with our health and looking on the dark side of life, instead of celebrating the fact that we live far longer, healthier lives than any of our ancestors. We live with a powerful cultural aversion to risk; the default setting for the human condition is a state of vulnerability and victimhood, and we need professional and governmental nannies to protect us from the challenges and problems of everyday life.

So, in our susceptibility and uncertainty, we believe the 'entrepreneurial scaremongers and professional panic merchants', and 'as though gripped by semi-religious conversion, we condemn this or that food as being "junk"; we pay over the odds for food termed "organic", although we know it possesses no extra power; we spend millions on magic potions, treatments and herbal medicines that have been demonstrated to be useless; we eat silly diets in the ill-founded belief that they will make us happier or live longer . . . Even though the gurus of this modern cult turn out, time and again, to be no more than witch doctors in modern dress, they still scare us to the point where we become irrational and accept their brew of pseudoscience and magic.

Though outspoken and given ready media access, anti-salt activists remain an angry minority opinion. Salt has accumulated many friends in its millennia of culinary service to mankind.