It's Not Your Salt Shaker

If you're worried about salt, it's worth asking where the salt in your day actually comes from.

Most of it doesn't come from your salt shaker. In the United States, more than 70 percent of the sodium people eat comes from processed and restaurant foods. Only about 11 percent is added while cooking or at the table. You could put your shaker away entirely and still eat more sodium than recommended.

In fact, I recommend a salt dry brine for our steaks and some of our poultry. Salt, used this way, is a tool you control, not something hidden in a product. Here is how I do it: Dry Brining A Grassfed Steak.

That's because salt is doing a job in processed food that has little to do with your taste buds. It's a preservative. It holds moisture. It makes a product last longer on a shelf and taste the same every time. Bread, deli meat, canned soup, and restaurant meals carry a lot of sodium without tasting particularly salty. One store-bought sandwich can hold most of a day's sodium before you add anything to it.

Salt does matter for health. When you eat a lot of sodium, your body holds onto more water to balance it. More fluid in your bloodstream means more pressure on your arteries, and over time that raises blood pressure. High blood pressure is a major driver of heart disease and stroke.

A large global study, the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017, estimated that about 11 million deaths a year were attributable to dietary risk factors, most of them cardiovascular disease. High sodium intake was one of the leading risks in that study. Those are estimates, not counts from death certificates, but they point in a consistent direction.

Here's the part that gets missed when the conversation stops at salt: the foods carrying that hidden sodium bring other problems with them. They tend to be low in potassium, and potassium helps your body get rid of sodium and relax blood vessel walls. They're also easy to overeat, because they're made to be. So it's not just the sodium. It's the whole package, and the package is ultra-processed food.

That distinction matters for what you do about it. Telling people to use less salt doesn't fix a problem they didn't create at their own table. The fix is eating food you can recognize, made from ingredients you know, where salt is something you add because you want it, not something hidden in the product before you ever see it.

That's how I think about it here. Our beef is 100 percent grass-fed, raised on pasture. Our chicken is pasture-raised. Our eggs come from hens on pasture. None of it needs a long ingredient list to make sense, and none of it arrives already seasoned by a factory.

You don't need a farming vocabulary or a nutrition degree to ask a useful question about your food. You just need to know what's in it, and who put it there.

Good food comes from a place.

Sources: Global Burden of Disease Study 2017, published in The Lancet; sodium source data from the CDC and the American Heart Association.