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Sugar can make you stupid and margarine makes you aggressive and salt gives you high blood pressure, right? Wrong.

Nutritionists used to tell us that salt would raise our blood pressure, cause hypertension and increase the risk of premature death, but that argument has always been controversial and difficult to defend.

In the June 3rd edition of the New York Times, Gary Taubes quotes researcher Drummond Rennie as saying that the eat-less-salt message had "made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts."
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A new eight year long European study concludes that salt consumption is not dangerous and may in fact be GOOD. This is certainly contrary to advice from American Medical Association, American Heart Association and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which says higher sodium consumption can increase the risk of heart disease. It’s not unusual to see differing opinions, but what are we ordinary folks to make of the controversy?
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When the farmlands of California and Australia are facing a drought, what can they do? They could continue producing food if they could only irrigate their crops with saltwater.

Now an international team of scientists has found a way to do just that. They have developed salt-tolerant plants using a new type of genetic modification, which enables the crop to contain the salt in parts of the plant where it does less damage.

Australian researcher Mark Tester says, “Salinity affects the growth of plants worldwide, particularly in irrigated land where one third of the world

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Most people consume far too much salt, and researchers are trying to figure out why we crave it. It might put us in a better mood (but there are other things that do this as well).

Psychologist Kim Johnson found that when rats are deficient in sodium chloride (common table salt) they shy away from activities they normally enjoy, like drinking a sugary substance or pressing a bar that stimulates a pleasant sensation in their brains. Johnson days, “[This] leads us to believe that a salt deficit and the craving associated with it can induce one of the key symptoms associated with depression.” (Who would have guessed it? The last food we heard was good for depression was chocolate).
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