Sales of US dry salt jumped 37.2% in 2007 to 31.7 million tons, according to the annual Salt Institute Statistical Report of US Salt Sales released in February. Salt industry revenues rose 11.9% to $1.68 billion, excluding transportation costs.

Highway salt sales were the second best year on record with 20.3 million tons (the record was set in 2005: 20.5 million tons were used to keep winter roads safe and passable), up sharply, 67%, over 2006, the worst year in highway sales for the past decade. Revenues for highway salt sales were $585.7 million.

Among other major markets, salt for animal nutrition grew for the third year in the past four years after rather steady declines over the past decade, increasing 7.3% to 1.627 million tons. Chemical sales reversed an historic descent, recovering 11.3% to 2.1 million tons, the most since 2004. Food salt sales were totally flat: 1,562 in 2007, 1563 in 2006. The only declining market was water softening salt which fell from 3.6 million tons to 3.5 million tons in 2007, down 2.7%.

Salt sales back to 1977 are reported on the Salt Institute website.

 

Medical experts dispute the importance of curtailing dietary salt. Experts focused on blood pressure favor cutting salt. Experts who focused on reducing heart attacks and protecting cardiovascular health disagree and favor an approach of improving overall dietary quality. A new study suggests the 30-year debate may have been irrelevant; human physiology has multiple systems that ensure proper intakes of salt and water to protect health. The body has redundant systems and is self-regulating. No matter what the experts may advise, research by Joel Geerling published in the February issue of Experimental Physiologyoon rat models suggests the unique consumption level for salt is "hard-wired" into our systems to protect our health against do-gooder meddling.

Geerling will present at the Salt Institute annual meeting.  His publication shows that this multi-factorial system is so robust and includes so many failsafe mechanisms that it continues to function even after large sections of its system are shut down.  That's true in rats (and, we would postulate, perhaps equally in humans).  Employing a complex cascade of physiological functions from powerful hormones, such as aldosterone, to pressure sensitive receptors in the brain, this water thirst and salt appetite mechanism moderates behavior quickly to replenish the volume and ionic balance of the blood, so that it is pressurized sufficiently for the heart to circulate it through the body.

If this is true in humans, when fluids and electrolytes are lost, such as with sweating, physical exertion, diarrhea or other circumstances, we immediately get a water thirst signal. So we drink water to make up the loss. After a delay, our salt appetite kicks in to ensure that the ion levels are replaced. If we don't respond on time to the salt appetite, we die.

The research confirms that the physiological apparatus we have evolved over the eons to maintain a fully operational cardiovascular system is largely dependant upon maintaining both a balance and sufficient quantities of the two nutrients most essential to life, water and salt. This fundamental system can be found in fish, reptiles and all mammals. Life depends on it.

In order for us to survive, our circulatory system must have an adequate volume of blood that is under sufficient pressure to supply all our tissues with the nutrients they need and to remove all the toxic byproducts of metabolism. It is a finely tuned balance of water and salt that allows this to happen. Any amount of water or salt that is consumed in excess of our needs is quickly eliminated through our kidneys. However, an equally important issue is ensuring that we have ingested enough water and salt to make up for any losses we experience. This is where the incredible mechanism controlling the thirst for water and the appetite for salt comes in.

The implication indicts the current strategy for reducing population sodium intakes.

Will people who consume lower-salt foods actually reduce their intake of salt? Based upon this latest publication on salt appetite, individuals faced with foods that are mandated to be low in salt may make up for this in other ways. They may eat considerably more food in order to get more salt or they may simply pick up the salt shaker and add more voluntarily. Other research suggests this may be a very good thing.

The human body may know better than the various "expert" committees which recommend reducing dietary sodium to a maximum of 2,300 mg/day sodium. At that level, the body senses inadequate sodium and stimulates the hormone aldosterone which dramatically raises the risk of heart attacks, much as does another hormone, renin, also stimulated by low- salt diets and also responsible for increased rates of heart attacks. More.

The winter in North America has been severe and challenging to both the salt industry and its highway salt customers. Not only did winter storms repeatedly pound the Midwest and East, but also Canada and the Great Plains. Record snowfalls were recorded in Illinois and Wisconsin, but it was the freezing rain and ice storms that chewed through most agencies' road salt stockpiles.

A Google search at presstime found 438,000 stories on "salt shortage" - but that's down a bit from a couple weeks ago when the number approached a half million. Media calls flooded into the Salt Institute and Dick Hanneman's recorded podcast was downloaded by more than twice the normal number of visitors. The Salt Institute's SaltSensibility blog posts captured many stories, but, in truth, there were far too many to report.

 

Health outcomes matter. We were reminded yet again this month that entirely-plausible, widely-accepted, even vociferously-advocated interventions still need to be supported by rigorous scientific data. Headlines in the Washington Post screamed: "Deaths Halt Part of Diabetes Study. Scientists Fear Heart Attacks, Strokes Were Tied to Treatment."

The headlines were similar to those when the feds halted part of the ALLHAT trial of anti-hypertension drugs because, while lowering blood pressure, they weren't reducing heart attacks or strokes. The headlines mirrored those when the government embarrassed itself advocating Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for post-menopausal women only to find it was killing them. After all, scientists had offered untested assurances that the interventions "can't hurt anyone." Sorry.

Soon, the same headlines may be written to apply to advice to lower dietary salt.

Public health leaders are so anxious to overcome serious and perplexing health problems that they lose their discipline. They set aside standards of evidence- based medicine that demand scientific support before approving an intervention. Everyone wants heroes. Certainly the researchers want success. So do the intervention sponsors, whether a pharmaceutical company or an activist lobby group like, in this case, the American Diabetes Association. So do the media; overcoming a dread health threat is important news.

The adverse findings of the diabetes trial "stunned and disappointed experts," reported Rob Stein in the Post story: "Aggressively driving blood sugar levels as close to normal as possible in high-risk diabetes patients appears to increase the risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke."

The study involves 10,251 patients ages 40 to 82 at 77 North American sites. Over about four years, about half of the patients getting intensive treatment achieved blood sugar levels close to normal, and about half the patients in the standard treatment group achieved levels close to the average diabetic. But 257 patients receiving intensive treatment died, compared with 203 receiving standard treatment, a difference of 54 deaths -- or 3 per 1,000 participants per year, officials said. About half the excess deaths were from heart disease.

Plausible theory, but disputed by the data. Like the comfortable assumption that reducing dietary salt is safe and efficacious when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has determined there is no evidence supporting population advice to reduce dietary salt.

For more than a month, China has been struggling to recover from the transportation gridlock enforced by inadequate winter maintenance of its air and surface transportation infrastructure. Early stories were reported last month. The storm cost the Chinese more than $22 billion and unprepared snowfighters were forced to press more than 1.3 million soldiers into service clearing roadways; they even resorted to using food salt on highways. Food and energy prices skyrocketed, doubling in some areas. Shanghai celebrated termination of its month-long energy conservation efforts on Leap Year night when it turned on the city's landscaping lights (photo: Shanghai Daily).

 

Public health types sitting at WHO headquarters in Geneva or in academe are quick to decry "excess" salt intakes. National Public Radio's report of new "climate change" concerns for another cholera epidemic in Peru should remind them of the vital role of salt in population cholera prevention strategies.

Before 1991, very little cholera was reported in Peru. Then, under unusual circumstances, it infected Peru's coastal waters and the fish which are so important to the local diet. In order to quell the bad publicity regarding the quality of his country's coastal waters, then President Fujimori boldly posed for public television cameras eating some locally-prepared ceviche. Within 12 hours, he came down with cholera confirming that politicians cannot will away physiologic mechanisms.

That cholera outbreak eventually killed 3,500 people and was halted when doctors turned to effective and inexpensive oral rehydration therapy with clean water and salt. If not, the death toll would have been much greater. More.

 

Last March 21-22, the World Health Organization gathered experts in iodine nutrition together with anti- salt lobbyists, members of World Action on Salt and Health (WASH) to a meeting in Luxembourg to discuss concerns the anti-salt crowd had that WHO endorsement of iodized salt was undermining another WHO effort: to reduce dietary salt. Bottom line: the meeting consensus was that the two programs did not compete; those encouraged to eat iodized salt did not increase their intakes of dietary salt.

At least they said they agreed.

In the February 9 issue of The Lancet, the WASH media spokesperson for Australia, Trevor Beard, raised the issue with regard to FSANZ's proposal to require iodized salt be used in bread in New Zealand. He argued against iodizing table salt sold to consumers altogether. Backtracking on the Luxembourg agreement, Beard declared that "it seems unethical (primum non nocere)-and clearly self-defeating-to sell the public iodine by adding it to a substance we are now warning them to avoid."

Meanwhile, The Network for the Sustained Elimination of Iodine Deficiency released its Global Scorecard on progress in the worldwide campaign to iodize salt.

St. Clair sesquicentennial highlights salt industry contributions. Among the early industries that created the community of St. Clair, MI, only the salt industry remains. Now owned by Cargill Salt, the facility is best known for its unique role in producing Alberger salt, invented at the site in 1886. A 1998 photo from the St. Clair Times Herald shows the Alberger pan.

Compass Minerals reports record sales, earnings. "Robust" deicing sales led the way to a 30% increase in 2007 sales at Compass Minerals, the company announced February 11. Sales totaled 857.3 million. Earnings jumped 21% to a record $144.3 million. Fourth quarter sales skyrocketed 54%. The company also credited its integration into the fertilizer industry, but quoted CEO Angelo Brisimitzakis saying, "Our salt segment also posted substantial sales and earnings gains, aided by a significant year-over-year weather benefit in the fourth quarter." He added that the company's results in the 2006 period were affected by weak deicing demand due to a very mild weather.

 

NY Times op ed contributor Gary Taubes weighed in on the recent Vytorin flap, registering insights with equal applicability to the ongoing salt controversy. Taubes said the focus on cholesterol "is based on a longstanding conceptual error embedded in the very language we use to discuss heart disease." Since eating fat raises LDL cholesterol, it has been easy to assign a causative role to saturated fat in the diet, he continued, but "(i)n clinical trials, researchers have been unable to generate compelling evidence that saturated fat in the diet causes heart disease."

The problem, he feels, derives from the fact that "medical authorities have always approached the cholesterol hypothesis as a public health issue, rather than as a scientific one, we're repeatedly reminded that it shouldn't be questioned. Heart attacks kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, statin therapy can save lives, and skepticism might be perceived as a reason to delay action. So let's just trust our assumptions, get people to change their diets and put high-risk people on statins and other cholesterol-lowering drugs." Sounds a lot like the salt debate, doesn't it? And Taubes continues to recommend just what the Salt Institute has been advising regarding salt: "Science, however, suggests a different approach: test the hypothesis rigorously and see if it survives. If the evidence continues to challenge the role of cholesterol, then rethink it, without preconceptions, and consider what these other pathways in cardiovascular disease are implying about cause and prevention. A different hypothesis may turn out to fit the facts better, and one day help prevent considerably more deaths."

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