Reducing Salt
Epistemic status: Low, thoughts and observations from a person outside of medicine and nutrition science.
From childhood, I remember a friend's father who once threw out a pack of salt. It wasn't iodine-enriched, and, as a doctor, he understood the importance of iodine. Later in life, I learned that iodine deficiency poses health risks.
Nowadays, salt has a bad reputation because processed foods, snacks, and comfort foods contain lots of it. There's evidence that reducing salt intake can lower blood pressure and decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease.
However, well-intentioned advice to cut back on salt often overlooks the danger of iodine deficiency. For some people and diets, this oversight could have significant consequences. Iodine is a crucial element for life and essential for producing thyroid hormones. Historically, iodine deficiency led to goiter and cognitive impairments. So, public health authorities in many countries began enriching table salt with iodine, effectively addressing these issues.
If people reduce their salt intake, they might lower table salt when cooking because salt consumption is obvious. The not-so-obvious salt intake, however, comes from processed foods and snacks, which aren't usually iodine-enriched. So, salt reduction might be less effective than thought with the additional drawback of iodine deficiency. It's particularly concerning for vegetarians and vegans, who don't get iodine from animal products like dairy and seafood, which are natural sources of the element. Reducing table salt could push them into iodine deficiency.
Of course, this doesn't mean adding table salt to everything is the solution. An approach might be to cut back on salty processed foods and snacks while allowing for moderate use of iodized table salt in homemade meals.