In ancient times, salt was precious. It was traded as the most valued of all commodities, and having a good supply of salt was as close to life insurance as you could get. Age-old aphorisms like "salt of the earth" and "worth your salt" remind us how important salt has always been.
Life insurance of the ancient world.
So all the modern-day phobias surrounding salt and sodium seems to present us with a paradox: how could something so vital to survival in one era be considered so deadly in another?
The answer may surprise you. The anti-sodium campaign actually began as a commercial movement to sell different foods and snacks, under the guise of being healthier. Much like the low-fat movement, manufacturers care more about selling products than they do about scientific accuracy.
As soon as the low-sodium content advertisements were shown to create dividends, other food and supplement companies followed suit, to the point where consumers started to believe that low-sodium was good, and salt, in general, was bad. People failed to see that they had been internalizing advertising, not actual scientific information.
