How much or how little salt is good for you?

The Food Police keep changing their minds - "Should you eat eggs; how many eggs per week are OK; should you avoid saturated fat; does poly-unsaturated fat bring other problems; does sodium affect heart disease..."

I'm not going to get into those arguments, but I will suggest that the best way to avoid diet-related diseases is to eat a whole range of foods - fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy products, nuts and grains, and wash them down with plenty of water and moderate amounts of wine and beer.  Note: this is my personal view and I have no scientific evidence to support it.

I have a policy for this blog that I will not publish comments or articles that are thinly disguised advertising for commercial services.  However, I have made the occasional exception where I think the benefit to readers outweighs the downside.  Today is one of those exceptions.

The FDA recommends a maximum intake of 2,300 mg sodium per day.  In principle, it should be possible to limit our intake.  However, salt is used in many foods and, in some cases, is a critical part of the preservation process, while in others, it's primarily about sensory characteristics of the food.

I was approached by Maggie from Healthline in San Francisco, offering a link to a visualisation of sodium intake, illustrated as the amount found in various foods.

I am not familiar with some of the food products, but it allows readers to evaluate their own sodium intake in more easily digested (sorry) terms than milligrams of sodium.  I think that this link is worth a look.  I was surprised to see how much sodium there is in my favourite smoked salmon and chicken breast, but not at all surprised to see the levels in bread and snacks.  By remembering the high salt foods, consumers can at least moderate their involuntary sodium intake.

A few years ago, my colleagues and I did some formal sensory evaluation on breads baked with various levels of salt.  The results suggest that the average consumer cannot detect a small but significant reduction in salt level in white bread.  The baking industry, and several other sectors in New Zealand have taken steps to reduce sodium in their products to help protect the health of their consumers.

It's the pits - bacterial hideaways

Modern food processing is often carried out in stainless steel equipment - tanks, pipes, valves and conveyors are commonly made of various grades of stainless steel.  We tend to think of "stainless" as not suffering from corrosion.  To a large extent, this is true.  Stainless steel has a natural oxide coating that prevents water molecules from oxidising the iron.

However, stainless steel can still corrode where grain boundaries or embedded contaminants allow water to access the iron.  The contaminants might be grinding swarf from welding or repairs.  Stainless steels may therefore benefit from a process called passivation, in which the surface is cleaned with sodium hydroxide and then treated with nitric acid.  This restores the oxide film.

We use stainless steel in our laboratory experiments and routinely passivate with hot nitric acid.  One of my students used a bottle labelled "Concentrated nitric acid" from the chemistry laboratory to passivate some new samples.  Unfortunately, it appears that the contents were actually Aqua Regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids.  (How often have I said that correct labelling is critical in food safety?).  

Chlorine ions are extremely electronegative and react strongly with certain compounds.  They can severely damage stainless steel.

The first photograph shows two coupons treated with the acid mixture.  It is obvious, even to the unaided eye, that the surface is pitted.  Chloride pitting tends to occur at right angles to the surface, so deep pits form rapidly.  Obviously, the use of aqua regia is a very extreme case of chloride attack, but even food materials containing sodium chloride will eventually attack stainless steel.  Even 316 stainless steel, which contains molybdenum that helps to stabilise the passive film, will corrode if exposed to high levels of chloride ion, or if the oxygen level is very low.  This is what may happen under a biofilm, where the bacteria use up the oxygen.  The area then becomes anodic and current flows, resulting in corrosion and the formation of a pit.

I took a couple of coupons to Dr. Jen Wilkinson who runs our Scanning Electron Microscope.  She took the following images, which show clearly the damage to the surface and the deep pits caused by the corrosion.  The second image below shows the interior of the pit.  Bacteria could easily enter the pit and would be very difficult to remove during cleaning.  If the bacteria form a biofilm, they will be protected by the extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) which glue them to the surface and may inactivate disinfectants.  The bacteria will be impossible to remove.

More on Salt in Foods

It’s generally accepted that we eat too much salt in New Zealand – up to 150% of the maximum recommended intake (see Sodium in Food, 13 July 2010). Excessive consumption of sodium raises blood pressure and may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Bread is the greatest contributor to our sodium intake, followed by sausages and processed meats.

One of the concerns of manufacturers of foods that contain added salt is that the consumer will detect the change if salt content is reduced and refuse to buy that brand.

In 2003, I took part in a trial in which we tested three commercially baked breads with varying levels of salt, from the standard content at that time of 550 mg/100g, 5% reduction (530 mg/100g) and 10% reduction (490mg/100g). We performed controlled trials in which 60 consumers were given three samples - two identical and one different - and asked to pick the odd one out. This is called a triangle test. Twenty eight percent of the panellists correctly identified the 5% reduced sample and 37% identified the 10% reduced salt bread. This relatively small trial showed that these differences in perception of salt content were not statistically different i.e. that the consumers could not detect the lowered salt breads. Recent figures show that some breads now have 20% less salt than equivalent products in 2003.

As I wrote in “Sodium in Food”, July 2010, sodium chloride has many functions in foods besides flavouring. What are the alternatives to salt? We can replace some sodium with other ions, such as potassium, magnesium and calcium. We can purchase reduced sodium table salt, though the UK Food Standards Agency does not recommend the use of salt substitutes, as they don’t reduce consumers’ taste for salt. Replacement of 40% of sodium by potassium in manufactured foods may result in detectable flavour changes and there may be problems for people with kidney conditions. We could use other preservatives, but consumers have been fed the line that preservatives are bad for them, so there is likely to be resistance to this approach. We could target other sources of sodium in the diet, such as monosodium glutamate (MSG, a flavour enhancer), or water binding agents, such as sodium tripolyphosphate.

How will we know if reducing salt in our food will result in safe food? We can conduct computer-based modelling experiments, using the vast resources of microbial growth models stored in databases. Some of these databases are freely available and allow us to predict such things as “time to spoil” or “time to toxicity” or simply “how long will it take this initial level of contamination to grow to an unacceptable population?” We can vary the formulation of the food and run the model again to see how it performs. In a matter of minutes, we can do extensive trials of alternative formulations.

Unfortunately, these models are not real foods. Once we have modelled the likely shelf life etc. we have to make samples and test them under normal storage and abuse conditions. This is not straightforward and can be very costly. The likelihood therefore is that we will not see rapid reductions in salt content of our manufactured foods, but rather a progressive reduction, as was the case with bread. We can, however, make a start on personal salt intake reduction by using other seasonings and spices in our homes.

Sodium in food

Most people like to have salt on their food. In mediaeval England, salt was expensive and only the nobility could afford it, as it was made by evaporating salt water over a fire. The salt was placed in the middle of the high table; the commoners sat at lower trestle tables and did not have access to the salt. Thus they were "below the salt" and this came to be an indication of rank.

Around 1650, rock salt was mined in Cheshire and salt became more readily available. The connotation of the value of salt remains, however, in expressions like "He's worthy of his salt".

These days, we probably have too much salt in our diets. In New Zealand, for instance, we consume around 150% of the recommended upper intake level. Much of this intake is involuntary - manufacturers add it to foods including bread, sausages and pies. The recent television series "Master Chef" had the judges saying repeatedly "Don't forget the seasonings", meaning not just herbs and spices, but also salt.

So, should we just ban salt in food and let individuals add salt to taste?

The answer may surprise some readers. Salt (sodium chloride) contributes to the safety of food and is essential for developing texture and flavour in processed meats. It helps to bind proteins, improving texture; it increases water binding capacity of proteins, also contributing to texture and assists in stabilising meat batters by improving fat binding. It also decreases fluid loss in vacuum-packed, thermally processed products.

Not only that - salt improves safety and shelf life by inhibiting the growth of bacteria, though relatively high levels are required if salt is used alone. It helps to reduce the water activity^* of the food, making it more difficult for bacteria to grow. That's why salted beef and pork were carried on long sea voyages - the meat was preserved.

Stringer and Pin (Institute of Food Research, Norwich, UK) have noted that "There is scope to reduce salt in foods. However, as salt influences bacterial growth, survival and recovery after adverse treatments, reducing salt in foods will have consequences for food safety that must be considered". These researchers used predictive models to show that reducing sodium content from 1.5g/100g to 0.76g/100g food allowed a much greater growth rate of certain foodborne pathogens. This could be acceptable, but other preservative mechanisms would need to be put in place. For example, other preservatives might be added at low levels and refrigeration might be necessary. Above all, reducing salt content would require even stricter adherence to good manufacturing practices, particularly with respect to plant and operator hygiene.

I'll write more on sodium in food in a follow-up posting.

* See the end of "Free Choice or Safety of the Population" in this blog for an explanation of water activity.