Warnings about blood pressure? I take them with a pinch of salt!

SALT — even the word makes me salivate. Yes, I am one of those uncouth types who can’t see a plate of chips without wanting to sprinkle salt all over it — and who risks the irritation of his wife by putting the stuff on whatever she has cooked ‘without tasting it first’.

She also reminds me that the doctor has told me to cut out salt on the grounds that it increases my blood pressure (for which, like vast numbers of men of a certain age, I take daily medication).

Now, however, I have been provided with what I have lacked: a response which goes beyond mere mute disobedience. On Saturday, the Mail published a long extract from The Salt Fix, by Dr James DiNicolantonio. The message of his book is that every bad thing we have been told about salt by his profession is . . . rubbish.

According to Dr DiNicolantonio — who is associate editor of the British Medical Journal’s Open Heart — the belief that salt consumption raises blood pressure is based on bogus science. This conventional wisdom, he says, originates from French scientists more than 100 years ago, who ‘based their findings on just six patients’.

Dodgy

Then it was taken up by one Dr Lewis Dahl of New York, who bred ‘salt-sensitive’ rats — and so based his warnings about the effect of salt upon the medical history of rats which had been specially selected to prove the force of his hypothesis. Which does sound a bit dodgy. Anyway, says the author of The Salt Fix, the whole theory that ‘excess salt’ raises blood pressure is ‘fundamentally flawed’.

Well, whoopee. Our taste buds are not all the same; but I find it difficult to understand how anyone can enjoy the blandness of food unseasoned by salt. This natural ingredient, the stuff of our seas, brings out underlying flavours in a way nothing else can. And to think that for years, I have been told to cut it out.

This is only the latest in a series of recent revisions to conventional wisdom which have lifted my spirits — and doubtless those of millions of others. We are now told that regular moderate drinking is good for the heart: a study of nearly two million people published in the BMJ two months ago showed that ‘nondrinkers had a 56 per cent higher risk of dying suddenly from heart disease, compared to people who drank a glass or two of alcoholic beverages a day’.

This suggests I need to increase my alcohol intake. As a rule, I don’t touch the stuff on working days. Obviously, this has been slightly unwise of me — I ought to be spurning my weekday water for a healthy glass of red wine. I think I should be able to do that.

And what about that other allegedly dangerous beverage, coffee? My doctor has told me that I should cut that out altogether, because of the risk it presents in terms of raised blood pressure. Now a study from Harvard University tells us that ‘ moderate coffee consumption reduces the risk of dying prematurely from heart disease’.

Again — and speaking as someone for whom breakfast is not breakfast without a strong cup of coffee — whoopee. The best news is the recent discrediting of the longstanding official advice that we cut animal fats from our diet and replace them with ‘low-fat’ alternatives. For decades, Western governments have told their citizens that, for the sake of their own health, they should chop off the fat from any meat they buy — that is, if they are so rash as to buy steaks in the first place. Yet, as any dedicated meateater knows, the flavour of a steak is in its ‘marbling’ — that is, the fat.

But it’s not just a pleasure: we benefit from animal fats in the diet because they provide essential nutrients.

These so-called ‘fatty acids’ help prevent all sorts of unpleasant conditions. If you think about it in evolutionary terms, this is why animal fat tastes good. If it were bad for us, our taste buds would warn us against it — this is the reason naturally occurring poisons taste very bitter.

Palatable

The deluded long-held view that we should be on ‘low-fat’ diets has actually led to an increase in obesity. In order to make low-fat meals palatable and not taste like cardboard, the food producers add copious amounts of sugar to them. And processed sugar, in anything more than very small quantities, really isn’t good for any of us.

Of course, many of our health problems stem from over- eating. But one of the good things about animal fats — as opposed to sweet stuff or carbohydrates — is that they are satiating. In other words, once you have finished off a big steak, it’s actually hard to eat much else; you are full. But carbs and sweet things are not filling in the same way — so can be consumed in much larger volumes.

Not for the first time, the wisest words are folk wisdom, long predating the now discredited dietary advice of the Sixties and Seventies: a little bit of what you fancy does you good. Pass the salt, please.