It is the proponents of “moderate” low-salt diets who are misleading the discussion by claiming that a 60% reduction in salt is “moderate.” A 60% reduction is not only not “moderate” — it is unsustainable in free-living subjects.

[Response from SlowFoodFast]
Two or three points, or maybe five:

1. I’m amazed that the president of the Salt Institute should take so much time to respond personally to an individual blogger. And so quickly! Good aggregator software.
2. I’m quite relieved to hear the Salt Institute doesn’t demonize salt moderation. In 2003 Richard Hanneman joined William Kovacs, VP of the US Chamber of Commerce, to coauthor a legal petition to the director of the NHLBI, invoking the Data Quality Act and a mishmash of Treasury and OMB regulations, in hopes that NHLBI could be compelled to withdraw its public health recommendations on dietary sodium from its web site and all its public outreach materials. Hanneman and Kovacs claimed that public health recommendations to lower dietary salt posed a dire threat to the processed food industry and the salt industry and thus the national economy. The Department of Health and Human Services has retained this and the followup correspondence for your enjoyment. I know I’m repeating myself here, but Food, Inc., anyone?
3. The editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Hypertension is the aforementioned M.H. Alderman, who took over as editor-in-chief in 2007 from John H. Laragh, the founding editor and, incidentally, another named advisor to the Salt Institute. I’m not knocking their academic credentials, I’m just not adequately convinced of their objectivity.
   Alderman’s review articles often propose a higher risk of death with very low salt consumption. But he pushes this rare scenario over the overwhelming recent pattern of increasing average weight and blood pressure, more frequent kidney disease, and more Type II diabetes at younger ages than 20 years ago. On top of all that, Americans today eat an average of 3500 mg/day of sodium. Getting too LITTLE salt is really not the pressing health problem.
4. Sixty percent reduction of what, is the question. If your starting point is 3500 mg/day, getting down to 2500 mg/day is only a 30% reduction. Getting down to 1500 mg/day from 3500, recommended if your blood pressure’s above normal, is a 57% reduction, but it’s still quite doable, edible, and inexpensive. If you do it in stages, it gets easier as you go. You don’t need a special prepackaged low-salt diet or a personal nutrition advisor. There are whole guidebooks available–some of them for free, with sample menus and shopping tips and everything.
5. Anyone who takes their health advice from a food industry trade association and expects that association to put the public health ahead of its members’ profit hasn’t got all the sense the law allows.
—DebbieN