Salt has been a food-preservation tool for thousands of years and transforms ingredients in fundamental ways. It’s key to culinary staples worldwide: Korean kimchi, French fleur de sel caramels and the chips we eat in Australia.
You know, being an Aussie, obviously I have chicken salt running through my veins.Dylan Jones, Melbourne restaurateur and creator of Chotto Motto’s flavoured salts
This seasoning is linked to cultural identity – and tells a story about where it’s found: from the Pakistani salt mine that houses a pink-salt mosque to the white flakes harvested from Tasmania’s Southern Ocean by Alice Laing. Her Tasman Sea Salt products are flavoured with local ingredients, like pepperberry and wakame seaweed from Bruny Island.
Salt is also essential to our bodies – you’ll notice it in your sweat and tears and an adult contains the equivalent of “three or four salt-shakers” of this mineral.
Well, it's true we do need salt … But in terms of getting the minimum amount of salt, no one in Australia is at risk of missing out. So there’s a much bigger problem with having too much rather than too little.Peter Breadon, Health Director of Grattan Institute
Peter is the co-author of Sneaky Salt: How Australia Can Shake Its Salt Habit, and he explains how we’re consuming much more of this ingredient than we realise and offers advice on how to get the flavour hit we’re after – without going overboard with salt.
Credits
Should You Really Eat That? is created by Lee Tran Lam
Mixed by Max Gosford
Artwork: Grace Lee
Theme music: Sydney Sunset by Nooky
Transcript
This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation, I'd like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country
Dylan Jones: You know, being an Aussie, obviously I have chicken salt running through my veins.
Alice Laing: It's a great idea, but we're not going to move to Tasmania to harvest sea salt. Once we'd had the idea, we just couldn't really shake it.
Peter Breadon: Well, it's true we do need salt … But in terms of getting the minimum amount of salt, no one in Australia is at risk of missing out. So there’s a much bigger problem with having too much rather than too little.
Lee Tran Lam: From Persian blue to Peruvian pink salt and every colour in between, sodium chloride has been essential for millennia. The Great Wall of China was funded by a salt tax and hunger for this mineral has led to revolutions. Our bodies need this staple to function and chefs tell us to season with it generously – but health experts say we’re eating way too much salt. How do we get that balance right?
I’m Lee Tran Lam and you’re listening to Should You Really Eat That?
This show explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet.
Should you embrace olive oil, native ingredients and chocolate? Or skip the butter, salt and soy? It can be bewildering keeping up with what’s quote unquote good for you and so many different beliefs shape what we consume – what’s fact and what’s fashion and whose perspective is being overlooked? Untangling all of this can be tricky, which is why I started this podcast!
Today’s episode is on salt.
From Vietnamese nuoc mam to French fleur de sel caramels, salt adds punch and character to what we eat. It’s been a food-preservation tool for thousands of years – with salted fish surviving in Ancient Egyptian tombs. This resource is so versatile, it can make gunpowder, melt ice on roads, clean wounds and repel slugs from your home. There are 14,000 uses for salt, according to Mark Kurlansky’s book on the topic. It can be found in a rainbow of colours across Australia, from Murray River pink salt to grey salt off the Great Barrier Reef to white flakes from Tasmania’s Southern Ocean.
Alice Laing: Hi, my name is Alice Laing and I am one of the founders of Tasman Sea Salt. My husband Chris and I started our business here harvesting pure sea salt on the east coast of Tasmania.
I was born in London. My husband Chris is Tasmanian originally. He'd been living in London for sort of eight years when we met.
The first time he brought me here on holiday to Tasmania and brought me down to the East Coast, which is where he'd spent a lot of his summers – oh, I was just blown away by… It’s so remote and isolated and wild and rugged and it just feels so clean, it's sort of cold and clean you know, you're right there, the next thing is Antarctica. It's this amazing sort of purity of the sea water here which I was blown away by, but at the same time his parents were using Maldon salt which is harvested on the east coast of England – so that's near where actually where my mum's family are from. They actually call that area the Blackwater, and I feel it's for a reason because, you know, well, you're essentially in the English Channel almost. It's like a motorway on water. There's loads of freight, loads of industry. And it just sort of seemed so crazy that you would ship – well, one, ship salt halfway around the world, and two, from that water when we thought, surely you could make way better salt over here from this amazing pristine Tasmanian ocean?
It's a great idea, but we're not going to move to Tasmania to harvest sea salt. Once we'd had the idea, we just couldn't really shake it.
Lee Tran Lam: How did Chris and Alice go from sports-related jobs to harvesting white flakes?
Alice Laing: I literally, our first ever – I Googled how to make sea salt. Our first ever batch of salt was back in England on my grandmother's stove. We just got a big pan of water, seawater from the estuary there and just boiled it down.
We used all her gas and we ran her out of gas. And just made this sort of, grainy salt on the bottom.
So we learned two things very quickly. One, we needed to find a much more energy-efficient way of doing this. And two, to get flaky salts, it's got to be slow. Can't speed up that process.
Lee Tran Lam: It’s apt they produce salt as a couple – as many traditions connect the mineral with romance. I talked about the Turkish wedding custom of serving salted coffee to the groom in season one’s coffee episode and Mark Kurlansky’s Salt claims “in Germany, the bride’s shoes were sprinkled with salt”.
Time magazine notes the Oxford English Dictionary once had more entries on salt than any other food. The phrase “salt of the earth” comes from The Bible, and deciding if someone’s worth their salt has ugly origins – it’s how ancient traders paid for slaves.
In Japan, you place salt in front of your restaurant to keep bad spirits away and bring luck.
This seasoning is cheap now, but once had world-shaping value – unfair taxes on this staple inspired the French Revolution and Gandhi’s Salt March.
Alice Laing: It's had such a huge impact on where we live and how we live. You know, it was really important. It was the main way of preserving food. So it’s really, you know, people didn't need to be so reliant on seasonal produce. Back in the days of empire building, you know, having preserved food, it meant you had food that could be taken on ocean voyages, armies could march further into enemy territory. It was just, it was really valuable and if you didn't have salt, you needed it, it became a really important commodity to be traded. The Venetian empire kind of rose and fell off the back of its monopoly on the salt trade.
Lee Tran Lam: Venice’s power came from controlling supplies rather than making salt. How did Alice and Chris start producing their white flakes?
Alice Laing: We moved over here in 2013 to start Tasman Sea Salt. We sold our first box of Tasman Sea Salt in July 2014. We're on the border of the Southern Ocean here, which is fantastic. Makes for a great salt.
We essentially use evaporative cooling to evaporate. So that's just evaporating off a lot of fresh water. And then the second stage is crystallising. So that's the bit where you, you get your salt crystals to form on the surface. And that's the slow bit that you just can't speed up.
Lee Tran Lam: You can harvest salt from the sea, springs, lakes and caves. A lot of salt is mined from underground deposits and some have become tourist attractions: in Poland, one salt mine has a cathedral and chandeliers carved from the mineral; in Pakistan, one mine is so big, it holds a mosque constructed from pink salt bricks.
Tasman Sea Salt works on a different scale.
Alice Laing: So that very first batch that we did on my grandmother's stove top, we just boiled it all the way down and you're left with these sort of grainy salt flakes.
But we wanted those lovely flakes that you can crumble between your fingers. For us, that's really important. A cooking salt needs to be soft, easy to crumble, easily dispersed, melts into your food.
Lee Tran Lam: From the mountains of Peru to the waters of Djibouti, salt from around the world can have unique characteristics.
Alice Laing: The reason that different salts from different parts of the world have different flavours is to do with the different minerals that you're getting there. And that's particularly the case with sea salt where loads of those trace minerals and nutrients stay in the salt. The seawater here is so clean that we don't have to do any rinsing. So Tasman Sea Salts are totally unrefined salt.
Someone wrote to us just to say, ‘oh my gosh, I've come across your salt. It's amazing. I'm from Tassie, but now living up in Queensland and eating your salt just reminds me of jumping into the ocean in Tasmania.’
Lee Tran Lam: Visitors to Tasman Sea Salt’s site can book a salt sommelier experience that unfolds on a nearby wine estate. What’s it like?
Alice Laing: Our saltworks is right next to the sea. So people come on a tour of the saltworks first. We show them our clean-energy harvesting process. You know, they can taste the brine, how clean it is, see the bright white salt flakes that have come out of our process. And then they come up to the cellar door, which is just a couple of hundred metres away, where they can have a glass of wine and then we run through the tastings.
So for me, the best way to taste salt is [with] a tomato. It's a really good way to taste salt and also to taste different types of salt.
And we used to just do tours of the salt works and then give people some salts to taste afterwards. But I think the wine to quench the thirst really helps now. Nobody really eats salt on its own. Salt is all about how it interacts with the flavours of other ingredients, how it makes other things taste amazing and pulls out their flavours.
Lee Tran Lam: Salt can transform food in many ways, from tenderising meat to draining moisture from cucumbers. On Slate’s How To podcast, chef Sohla El-Waylly explains how beans are like tight leather pants that haven’t been worn in ages. Soak them in salt, “it relaxes the pectin a little bit, and it’s like they’re switching into some sweatpants”.
Alice’s salt-sommelier experience reveals other ways this mineral can alter ingredients.
Alice Laing: We always start with a tomato and we ask our guests to try half a tomato without any salt on it and then sprinkle some of our natural flakes on the other half and take a step back and think about the difference that the salt is making to the flavour of the tomato.
And you actually, you notice that the greenhouse sort of stem flavour that the salt brings out. It's actually been really good in winter when we've had really terrible tomatoes. And somebody came on the experience and said, ‘oh, it makes the tomato taste like summer’, which I thought was a really lovely way of describing what the salt does. Because salt allows us to taste the quieter, maybe more subtle or hidden flavours in a dish or ingredient much more deeply when it's been seasoned with salt.
Lee Tran Lam: Alice sells salts flavoured with local ingredients, such as wakame seaweed from Bruny Island and pepperberry.
Alice Laing: The Tasmanian pepperberry is a native shrub to Tasmania. It grows wild through the Central Highlands. It's got this wonderful, fruity, spicy aroma – [and] surprisingly peppery afterkick. I think you're often taken back by it.
They were used by First Nations people in traditional medicine – so for their medicinal properties, but often also as an anesthetic, because if you chew on a berry or a peppercorn, or one of the leaves, it can sort of numb your mouth. It's got that almost like Szechuan pepper or cloves – that sort of mouth-numbing thing.
Lee Tran Lam: Indigenous uses of pepperberry include treatment of sore gums and toothaches, as well as enhancing food.
Alice Laing: That was the first salt we developed. It seems so obvious to us and it goes really, really well – particularly great with beef. Tasmania produces loads of incredible beef, so we often pair it with beef on our salt sommelier experience. We finish with that because it's quite peppery. You want it at the end. You've got to go through all the others first.
But it's versatile because of the fruitiness. I love it. In mango season with the kids, I'll often make mango slushies with a bit of lime and pepper berry on it, or it's lovely on some papaya.
Lee Tran Lam: I have childhood memories of my parents serving cut fruit they’d seasoned – which is a near-universal joy: from India to Mexico, people savour sliced fruit sprinkled with chilli and salt.
Visitors have taught Alice a lot about how food is seasoned around the world.
Alice Laing: Like with the smoked salt, we had an Italian guy and he said, oh, well in Italy, often between courses, we will have slices of orange with olive oil and smoked salt on there as a sort of palate cleanser between courses.
I often do that now as a pairing in our salt sommelier experience.
Lee Tran Lam: In Tokyo, there’s a store with over 600 types of salt. Guruguru Shakashaka is named after “the Japanese onomatopoeia for mixing and shaking”, says the Spoon and Tamago site.
You can do a five-salt tasting here with kanten jelly, “which helps accentuate the flavors”. You can also step into the neighbouring shop, which sells 16 types of salted plums, known as umeboshi.
This salty fruit is a star of Japanese dramas, it’s an onscreen trope for families to eat umeboshi pickled by grandmothers – long after her death. “Eventually, they'll run out. That's the moment when they really accept their grief," musician Tomo Nakayama explains in Kate Lebo’s Book of Difficult Fruit. This has become such an onscreen Japanese cliche that he can't remember if it happened to him, or if that's just a scene he’s familiar with.
Let’s hear from locals who showcase Japanese and Australian culture with salt.
Dylan Jones: My name is Dylan Jones. I'm one of the founders of the restaurant Chotto Motto in Melbourne.
Tomoya Kawasaki: My name is Tomoya Kawasaki. I moved here from Tokyo 20 years ago and then I start this Chotto Motto with my business partner, with Dylan. And mainly I'm controlling the kitchen and then Dylan is controlling whole vision.
When I was a child, I went to McDonald's and then they had a shaky, shaky bag. Same one in Australia.
Dylan Jones: We have the same one sometimes.
Tomoya Kawasaki: Yeah, when I was a kid.
Dylan Jones: We have our own one now, our shaky, shaky bag.
Tomoya Kawasaki: And then we end up, we decide to make our original, kind of like a Chotto Motto shaky, shaky bag. Customer order chips, we actually give them like our salt and then mix together, shake in together.
Dylan Jones: You know, being an Aussie, obviously I have chicken salt running through my veins.
I remember once a week, I had this after-school course and my mum would be out and she'd give me money to go to the charcoal chicken place and I would always get quarter chicken and chips with extra chicken salt on the chips and you know they'd come out and they'd be caked in chicken salt. That's exactly how it should be. I don't think you're gonna have too much.
Lee Tran Lam: Chicken salt was invented in Adelaide during the 1970s by Peter Brinkworth, who told the ABC, he produced the multi-spiced mixture “out of laziness more than anything”. Combining many flavours in one saved him from using “a dozen different containers”.
While countless chicken salt recipes exist today, his version contains “salt, chicken stock, MSG, paprika, garlic, onion, celery, some herbs and spices”.
The Aussie legend has inspired a short film, Salt of The Earth, which has shown at international festivals and the 80-something inventor still sells chicken salt, via his car, an honesty box near his home and even Facebook. He sends out five-packs across Australia if you’d like to try the OG recipe.
This chip-enhancing sprinkle has evolved in its five-decade existence: you can order chicken-salt margaritas from Central Park Cellars in Melbourne and at Chotto Motto, chicken salt has become a multicultural spice blend.
Dylan Jones: We kind of try to focus on products which are unique and fun and maybe kind of bridge that gap between Western and Japanese culture a little bit, which explains, you know, Japanese curry chicken salt.
My business partner, Tomoya, is a big lover of Japanese curry, and we decided to team up to combine those flavours into Japanese curry chicken salt.
Obviously curry isn't originally from Japan. I've always thought of Japanese curry as kind of like a copy of an English curry, which in turn is a copy of an Indian curry. So it's kind of along the way become a bit of a cartoon of curry.
Lee Tran Lam: As Emiko Davies writes in her Gohan cookbook, this dish originated from curry powder the British navy brought to Japan in the 19th century. “It was considered Western food, not Indian. The first kare raisu recipe appeared in a Japanese cookbook in 1872, and shortly afterwards in a restaurant in Tokyo,” she writes. “The Japanese Navy still serves curry every Friday.” Apparently it helps sailors keep track of the week.
Now what makes Japanese curry distinct is its sweetness.
Tomoya Kawasaki: [It’s] always kids’ favourite in Japan, like ‘what's your favourite food? Ah yeah, curry!’ You know? All kids eat it, so it shouldn't be too spicy.
Lee Tran Lam: Where does that sweetness in Japanese come from?
Tomoya Kawasaki: Probably more from onions or vegies.
Dylan Jones: Quite common to put apple as well.
Tomoya Kawasaki: Even honey, we put some type of honey as well. Yeah, every family has completely different recipe for curry. So my family love to put like a honey and tonkatsu sauce.
Lee Tran Lam: Even though chicken salt began as a way to season roast chooks in an Adelaide shop, Chotto Motto’s Japanese curry chicken salt is actually vegan.
Dylan Jones: When we were starting to manufacture it for retail, we tried a lot of different recipes to see which one was good. And surprisingly, we actually liked the vegan one more.
It just comes down to the spices and stuff that you put in it. I guess a lot of what gives you that sort of real ‘chickeny taste’ is really the herbs and stuff that you would eat with chicken.
So that's kind of the path we went down. We're glad that, you know, everybody can really enjoy it as well.
Lee Tran Lam: What do you do with Japanese curry chicken salt?
Dylan Jones: At the restaurant, we just serve it on fries. But we find a lot of uses for it outside of the restaurant. I really like to make roast potatoes with it. Really good on popcorn as well. Like if you just get microwave popcorn and put the chicken salt on it. Honestly, it tastes good on anything.
Lee Tran Lam: Shichimi togarashi is a 400-year-old seasoning, invented in Tokyo by Yagenbori – a spice business that still exists today. This chilli mix was created for medicinal reasons and became widespread across Japan, usually sold at temple gates. One of the best potato chip flavours I’ve ever tasted was seasoned with shichimi togarashi from a business founded near a Kyoto temple in 1655. I still think about the zing of sansho pepper, seaweed dust and other spices that laced those crunchy chips.
Chotto Motto also makes a salt flavoured with shichimi togarashi.
Dylan Jones: It literally means like seven-spice chili. Just a blend of seven different spices.
We decided to mix ours with salt, just because we found – before we released it in salt, we did have one shichimi which was no salt which is kind of like traditional, how they do it in Japan.
We found people were just like not really sure what to do with it. We decided to add salt to it to make it a bit more obvious for a Western audience how to use it. Now it actually seems to be a lot more popular. And yeah, you can use it for anything.
Grilled fish is really nice or just to finish your stir-fry or anything like that.
Lee Tran Lam: Does Tomoya have memories of buying shichimi togarashi in Japan?
Tomoya Kawasaki: Yeah, when I was a kid, when you go to temples’ food markets, they always have a shichimi market. And then the old guy actually, we can even choose ‘this, this, this, this’, and then they can mix up in front of me and then make original shichimi.
At Tokyo’s Yagenbori, where the seasoning originates, you can make your own blend, too. Shichimi togarashi varies according to producer and customer preference. So what’s in Chotto Motto’s version?
Dylan Jones: We’ve got red chilli, ginger, pink pepper, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, hemp seeds, dried seaweed and dried yuzu peel. Very important, that last one to give it that sort of light, citrus-y zestiness to it.
Lee Tran Lam: Japanese citrus might inspire their next seasoning.
Tomoya Kawasaki: I want to yuzu salt as well. It's quite popular in Japan as well. And we put it in something with zesty salt. Maybe next idea.
Lee Tran Lam: Salt has cultural impact. For Jung Eun Chae and Yoora Yoon, who also are in our soy episode, using the right salt matters when making traditional Korean condiments for their award-winning Chae restaurant outside Melbourne.
Yoora Yoon: So if you make kimchi with a regular salt, it will make your cabbage go a little bit mushy after fermentation and it also has a bitter taste.
Jung Eun Chae: And the saltiness level is really high.
Yoora Yoon: The saltiness level is also very high, so it's not very ideal to use just any salt. If you want to make a really authentic Korean cuisine, we recommend using special salt, which is readily available in South Korea, but not so much in Australia.
So the difference between the Korean salt and the Australian salt is, we put a large amount of salt in a sack. And then we make a small cut at a lower corner, like a really small cut, prop it on a on a brick or something, put that in a shaded storage and we just leave it for three years, five years.
What happens during that three year, five year time is the moisture naturally drips, drips, seeps through that cut. And then what you end up with is a really dry sea salt that's eventually suitable for fermentation.
So yes, so mum sent us the dry sea salt and then using that dry sea salt, we make our kimchi, we make our soy sauce – but what I also like to add is if you don't have this dry sea salt, don't don't be too discouraged. It's not like you're making hundreds of batches of kimchi and let it ferment a year [like we do]. You just make small kimchi. And if you make small kimchi, it's perfectly fine to use any sea salt.
Lee Tran Lam: Salt can really express a place, as proud Bundjalung woman and restaurateur Mindy Woods explains.
Mindy Woods: And what you'll find, the beautiful thing about our native food is that you're going to get a real taste of Country – so when you're out along those coastlines and you're eating those beautiful coastal succulents, because of the salty water, because of the sea spray, you're going to taste that beautiful salinity coming through – that natural salt that sits in those environments.
Lee Tran Lam: You’ll hear more from the author of Karkalla at Home: Native Foods and Everyday Recipes for Connecting to Country in our next episode.
I’ll be honest, I once thought people were being snobs when they specified which salt to use – but the mineral does vary in shape, size and impact.
Kosher salt was originally used by butchers to arrange meat according to Jewish dietary customs. These larger crystals tend to melt like snowflakes, while table salt can bounce “off foods and settle into cracks,” Serious Eats, an American website notes. “Professional cooks tend to prize kosher salt’s thicker, coarser texture, which makes it easier to pinch and sprinkle over food.” Kosher salt is harder to find in Australia, although it’s available at some specialty shops and barbecue stores.
You might’ve heard health claims about Himalayan pink salt or specialty sea salts, but sodium chloride in ANY form, shouldn’t be consumed in high amounts.
Dylan Jones: Obviously a bag of chips, you have to decide to eat that in moderation.
You're not going to get a green tick from your doctor on Japanese curry chicken salt ever. So yeah, this is definitely something we would suggest that you use in moderation.
Lee Tran Lam: Let’s talk about the health impact of salt.
Peter Breadon: I'm Peter Breadon. I am the health director at Grattan Institute. It's a non-profit think tank that developed public policy in the interests of all Australians.
My earliest salt memory, I suppose it might be, you know, going to get fish and chips and you see them get the salt shaker and give a generous shake over it. That's probably the first time I sort of thought, ‘oh yeah, ah what's that going on there? And ‘I can't wait for my chips!’
Lee Tran Lam: Salt is essential for our bodies – it helps our nerves and muscles function and you’ll notice it in your sweat and tears.
In the book Salt, Mark Kurlansky writes: “An adult human being contains about 250 grams of salt, which would fill three or four salt-shakers, but is constantly losing it through bodily functions. It is essential to replace this lost salt.”
Peter Breadon: Well, it's true we do need salt, but the amount we need is very, very tiny, you know, or it's a lot smaller than the amount that we eat. There's many uses of salt: so it can be used as a preservative to keep food safe to eat. It's obviously used as a flavour enhancer, it can make food tastier. But in terms of getting the minimum amount of salt, no one in Australia is at risk of missing out. So it's a much bigger problem with having too much rather than too little.
Lee Tran Lam: Along with colleague Lachlan Fox, Peter co-wrote the report, Sneaky Salt: How Australia Can Shake Its Salt Habit, (which you can read at the Grattan Institute’s site).
Peter Breadon: We eat far too much salt. So we eat on average in Australia, almost double the maximum recommended by the World Health Organization. And that excess salt intake is linked to an estimated 2500 deaths every year. This is from things like heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, and so on. And you know the problems associated with high blood pressure in particular.
But it's also linked to 5,000 strokes a year, which can be really debilitating, even if people are fortunate enough to survive.
So [there’s a] really big health impact from eating too much salt.
Lee Tran Lam: Peter and the Grattan Institute aren’t alone in making this call. Data from The George Institute for Global Health, Griffith University, UNSW and Johns Hopkins University reveals we could prevent “40,000 cardiovascular events” (such as heart attacks and strokes), 32,000 new cases of kidney disease and up to 3,000 deaths over a decade by implementing the World Health Organization’s sodium targets on Australian packaged foods.
The Conversation website reveals that around 1.9 million deaths worldwide are linked to overconsumption of salt.
So how much salt does an Australian consume on average?
Peter Breadon: The figures are, it's about 9.6 grams a day is what we eat. So that's nearly 10 grams a day. The recommended maximum intake is five grams a day. And you know ideally, you probably want to have a little bit less than that for many people. So that's the kind of amounts we're talking about.
Lee Tran Lam: The recommended amount of salt a day is one teaspoon of salt.
You might think, I barely sprinkle any salt on my food, I'm fine. But the main culprit is hidden salt.
Peter Breadon: That's right, three quarters of the salt that the average person eats is coming from manufactured foods. So although our kind of salt memories and when we think about salt, we think about adding it in the kitchen or we think about you know sprinkling it on food, that's not really the main culprit for most people. It's these manufactured foods and many of them can be really high in salt.
You know, so there can be single serves of food you buy – like, you know, two-minute noodle or a prepared pasta meal at the supermarket. That can have half your entire daily salt intake right there.
Lee Tran Lam: A meat pie and sauce alone be around half your daily salt intake. And a ready-made beef ravioli from the supermarket has even more sodium.
Salty foods have been linked to stomach cancer and ideally should be consumed in small amounts.
Some sodium-rich staples don’t even taste salty. Like sweet biscuits made with baking powder, aka sodium bicarbonate.
Peter Breadon: And things people might not think about, like bread is about 10 per cent of the salt we eat. And a lot of those breads you can buy can be quite high in salt.
Lee Tran Lam: Is this true of all bread, though?
Peter Breadon: Well, it depends on the bread, but there can be quite a bit of difference according to the recipe that people are using.
Lee Tran Lam: The same types of bread – wholemeal sourdough, tortillas and wraps – can appear on both high-salt and low-sodium lists. It really depends on the brand and it pays to check.
Peter Breadon: But what's interesting is, you know, they've done a lot of studies about this. And if you reduce the salt in bread by quite a bit, people can't actually taste the difference. So you can really get some gains there without sacrificing flavour.
And people have found that across a range of different kinds of food. If it's in the supermarket, you can take a look at the back-of-pack nutritional information and you can probably see that there's some choices there with pretty high levels of salt. And there are some ones that are gonna be healthier.
Lee Tran Lam: Salting foods heavily made sense in a pre-refrigeration era.
Now, we have things like Vegemite made with 40 per cent less salt and honestly, it tastes just like the original version.
In 2011, Vegemite marketed a kid-friendly version that was criticised for having nearly 15 times the sodium levels of a low-salt product. So we’ve come a long way, right?
Peter Breadon: But we've also seen very, very slow progress. So while you might see some of these products that is a salt substitute, reduced salt and so on, and that's great to see, the saltiness of our manufactured foods just isn't going down the way it is in those countries that have tougher policies.
Now you've seen in the UK, a 20 per cent reduction in the salt in these foods after the introduction of this policy. And what's interesting is we have a similar policy here. Now it's voluntary in Australia and they set these limits.
It's also voluntary in the UK. But what was a bit different there is that the targets were tougher, they were broader, they covered more foods.
Here, it's not enough to just have a voluntary scheme.
In South Africa, for example, under a mandatory scheme, they’ve made even faster gains, really, which will flow into a big effect for the health of the population. So that's why we need to toughen up our rules. They are a joke. Not only are they voluntary, they apply to fewer foods. The targets are so weak that most products met them before this voluntary scheme was even introduced.
Lee Tran Lam: Changes in Japan and Finland have lowered the average salt intake by around 4 grams a day.
Over a 14-year period, Australia’s voluntary salt limits have resulted in our salt intake dropping by just 0.3%, Peter noted in The Conversation.
One thing that can make a difference is heart salt. It’s also known as low-sodium salt and potassium salt.
Peter Breadon: Yeah well, it's the sodium in the salt that's, you know, the harmful part, when we have too much.
So if you switch out that sodium and you have instead potassium chloride, then you don't have those health downsides. There might even be further upsides because on average, Australians don't have enough potassium – so you might get some other health benefits, but the key thing is they're reducing the sodium and that takes the harmful part out. There's lots of other things manufacturers can do – so you can get a saltier taste for a lesser amount of sodium.
But there are also salts you can buy off the shelf, which have, you know, a proportion of it is potassium chloride instead of the sodium and that will be healthier if you're adding it at home.
Lee Tran Lam: In my pantry is potassium salt containing half the sodium levels of regular table salt. Like the salt-reduced Vegemite, it tastes pretty similar to the real thing.
Potassium-enriched salt isn’t suitable for a small part of the population – like people with advanced kidney disease. Alternatives include replacing salt with spices, herbs, vinegars and citrus or even experimental electric cutlery – currents from the Kirin Salt Spoon from Japan can apparently make food taste 1.5 times saltier.
As a policy, reducing sodium is good for us.
Peter Breadon: But the best part about it is, it's a policy that almost comes for free. So you can save these lives and have all these families not having a funeral in a given year. But the cost is is very small. So these companies regularly change the formulations of their foods. But even if you assume they have to do it all from scratch – it's not part of a broader, regular process they do – you know, the cost at the most that we would estimate you know for a weekly household shop is about the order of 10 cents, right.
And that is a very conservative estimate. That's like kind of the upper range of what the impact might be. So there's really very, very little cost here. I mean, this is sort of low-hanging fruit – by the way, probably healthier to eat than a lot of the things we've talked about – that governments can introduce, companies can do at very low cost, even if they pass all those costs on.
[There’s] very little impact for consumers. So it's kind of a free kick in making Australia healthier.
Lee Tran Lam: And while we can shift our diets, Peter believes governments should take action.
Peter Breadon: Well, we really need policy change here. In Australia, we put too much of the burden of this stuff on individuals. It's pretty hard when you're rushed to the supermarket checkout to check these tiny labels on the back and understand the options available to you.
Lee Tran Lam: Is it better to cast your eye over the nutritional content of what you buy at the shops rather than stress about the grains of salt you’re sprinkling over your food?
Peter Breadon: You know, switch out for that healthier salt with potassium in it and then try without it. You know, try using less. You might be surprised that you don't need as much as you're using. And over time, we know that our tastebuds do adapt as well. So if you reduce the salt you're putting in, in time, you really won't even notice it.
Well, if there's one thing you can do, just moving away from ultra processed foods is probably the best bet, rather than worrying so much about your cooking at home.
For most people, that's where most of the salt that they eat comes from.
Lee Tran Lam: Can Peter still enjoy fish and chips, like he did as a kid, or does he forensically dust the salt off his fries?
Peter Breadon: Look, I think as an occasional treat, it's obviously totally fine. We've done all this research, like I know where that hidden salt is. So I'm a bit less worried actually about the salt you can see. I'm more worried about the salt that sneaks in that you can't see.
Lee Tran Lam: Should You Really Eat That? is an SBS podcast. It’s written and presented by me, Lee Tran Lam. Thank you to the SBS Audio team, Max Gosford and Joel Supple for their contributions and guidance. A major shout-out also goes to Caroline Gates for helping launch the show. The brilliant artwork is by Grace Lee and the theme song is Sydney Sunset by Yuin artist Nooky. The email address for the show is audio@sbs.com.au.
On the next episode of Should You Really Eat That?, we’re savouring bush lollies and stir-frying with saltbush. Follow on your favourite podcast app and if you liked this episode, why not leave a review in language that’s hopefully not too salty for us to share.
