Here's a proposal worth its salt By Bill Hauda Egyptian mummies were preserved with it. Merchants over the course of centuries traded it. People used it as currency. Authors wrote about it. Literary expressions were coined because of it. Wars were fought over it. Thousands of Napoleon's troops died because they lacked it to treat their wounds during a retreat from Moscow.
It is salt. Sodium chloride. Along with water,
probably the most important of all the chemical substances needed to sustain life.
Today there is a new salt war under way. It was launched by the American Medical Association when its House of Delegates adopted a resolution urging the federal government to pressure food manufacturers to reduce the amount of salt in processed foods. The resolution was prompted by concern that too much salt in the diet may boost blood pressure and thereby result in more heart attacks and deaths.
The
AMA's urging is "to be taken with a grain of salt." (My apologies to literary giant Charles Dickens, who included this phrase in a Victorian ghost story.)
Are prepared foods and restaurant entrees packed full of salt? Yes. Does ingestion of high amounts of salt by people who have high blood pressure increase their cardiovascular risk? Probably. Does that mean government should mandate lower salt levels for all of us? Absolutely not.
What the AMA is addressing is the general population.
We recreational athletes are a sub-group of that population. We are not in the 60 percent of the population that is obese. We are not in the majority of the population that never exercises to break a sweat. We are in an active minority, and for us salt is extremely important.
Think about your first few runs or bike rides in the first hot days of spring. Your sweat is salty, and it stings your eyes. As you become acclimated, less salt is released. Your body retains it because it's needed to
make your muscles function.
When athletes are dehydrated during marathons, they are administered IVs consisting of saline solution. That's because they have run out of one of the most important electrolytes: salt.
You've probably heard people say you can drink too much water while exercising in hot weather. Well, maybe if you're not pushing yourself to any degree. Probably if you do not supplement the water, which is essential for the body's cooling, with salt. Drinking lots of water
without salt will get you into serious trouble, not because of the water, but because of electrolyte depletion.
Guess what? Those same high-salt prepared foods and things like potato chips that are perhaps (I say perhaps because the evidence is contradictory) dangerous to the fat, out-of-shape general populace are OK for those of us who strenuously exercise in warm weather. The reason is the salt.
You don't, however, have to eat junk food to get salt. In extremely hot weather, when you
are drinking or sweating a lot, there are some alternatives. Add additional salt with a salt shaker to your meals. On the road, one phenomenal source is beef jerky, which is not only low fat, but has 520 milligrams of sodium per ounce. That's 22 percent of the daily requirement.
An excellent alternative to regular table salt is so-called "lite salt" in which about half the sodium chloride is replaced with potassium chloride. A quarter teaspoon provides 290 mg of sodium (12 percent of the
daily requirement) and 340 mg of potassium (10 percent of the daily requirement). That's significant, because potassium plays a key role in muscle operation.
The reason to be skeptical of the AMA's lower-salt missive is not just because we, as recreational athletes, are different than the general population, but because the evidence about the role of salt in exacerbating health problems is unclear.
The Salt Institute (which is not exactly an independent reviewer, but one that,
nevertheless, has an important point of view on this subject) took immediate issue with the AMA.
"Of the 13 studies that have examined whether cutting salt will reduce heart attacks or improve mortality – what AMA calls 'the population burden of cardiovascular disease' – not a single study supports the AMA resolution," said Salt Institute President Richard L. Hanneman. "Four studies even show the AMA 'solution' might create additional risks."
One such study was published in the March
2006 issue of the American Journal of Medicine. It concluded that the group following the AMA's lower sodium recommendation had 37 percent higher mortality. In other words, they died earlier than those on higher salt intakes.
Maybe that's explained by the so-called double-decker London bus driver/conductor study phenomenon. Nobody knows whether a group of London bus conductors were in better health than the bus drivers studied because they repeatedly climbed from the bottom level to the
top (while the drivers just sat) or whether more fit people just opted to be conductors. This self-selection problem is one that confounds many studies unless the researchers are able to eliminate it.
So, perhaps the higher death rates among lower sodium consuming people in the American Journal of Medicine study resulted because those ingesting less sodium were consciously doing so because they already had high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease, putting them at higher risk of death.
I have a suggestion for the AMA: Stop viewing things with a myopic perspective that assumes everyone is fat, out-of-shape and diseased. Recognize that many of us take care of ourselves. And try to get more people to do the same.
Instead of proposing that the government limit the salt in our diet, why don't you pass a resolution urging government to pressure business and industry to get more people to exercise? Why don't you endorse better bicycle commuting facilities? Why don't you
call for a tax credit for employers who provide fitness centers and showers for their employees?
If you did, I'd say you were worth your salt.
Bill Hauda is a veteran of about 50 marathons, a former competitive triathlete, a bicyclist, founder and first president of the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin, and currently a BFW board member. He is currently the out-going director of Wisconsin's two major cross-state bicycle tours, GRABAAWR and SAGBRAW. | 
