>The advice to add salt is unnecessary and not very paleolithic. It takes
>2-3 months to get used to unsalted food, about a year for fish.


In that case, the Plains tribes didn't follow a very paleo diet.  "Salt was
the seasoning of choice, scraped from natural salt beds or condensed from
salt springs." ("Indian Tribes of North America" by Josepha Sherman, 1996,
p. 59)  I was told by a friend that "Dr. Weston Price does document the fact
that Plains Indians would send small parties that would travel upwards of
250 miles to harvest salt."  I find it difficult to believe that a
population would exert so much effort merely to satisfy a junk food
addiction.  Perhaps the hunter-gatherer groups who didn't add salt to their
diet ate more seafood than did the Plains tribes.  Could someone more
knowledgeable than I confirm or refute this hypothesis?

The same friend who cited Dr. Price's study also claimed that American
studies tend to show that salt is unhealthy, whereas the English studies
indicate that it is safe.  I'm just beginning to review the literature, but
haven't yet assembled the information needed to verify or contradict this
statement.  I'm a little concerned that most studies use sodium excretion to
estimate sodium intake, and that it is sodium excretion which is correlated
with hypertension, etc.  How could a study detect cases where an individual
eats a lot of salt, but doesn't excrete much (because he needs it)?  Also,
most of our salt is found in processed foods, so a high-sodium diet is
correlated with junk food consumption, unless the subjects' diets are
controlled by the researchers.

By the way, how do we know that our paleolithic ancestors didn't eat much
salt?  Does anyone know whether blood is saltier than meat?  This could be
important, since hunter-gatherers frequently drank blood.

Personally, I have learned that a high salt consumption is a critical
component of my diet.  I dramatically increased my salt consumption at the
same time that I switched from a vegetarian to a hunter-gatherer diet.  If I
don't eat large amounts of sea salt with every meal, I quickly become sodium
deficient and have trouble retaining water.  Perhaps my situation is
abnormal, but, from what I've read and heard, the people who do well on
low-carb diets tend to be the same people who need extra salt.  Therefore,
I'm somewhat confused by the continual vilification of salt on this list.

Cheers,
-- Aaron Wieland