How to improve Britain's Healthcare provision

My own suggestions could be boiled down to just one: Tell The Truth About Salt.

We are currently not being told the truth about salt, nor have we ever been. Salt, by which I mean ordinary table salt, sodium chloride crystals, is commonly considered to be a natural ingredient in the meals of human beings, but it is not. If you think about the hunter gatherers who were our forebears, and their food intake which nourished the evolving bodies of homo sapiens, the overwhelming majority of humans at that time and for millennia would not have had access to salt except that low amount naturally present in fresh raw meat, fish, fruit, vegetables and other plants, say. Coupled with that fact, fresh fruit and vegetables and other plants are high in potassium, the nutrient that tends to displace excess sodium from the body. So the diet ideally suited to our bodies would be low in sodium (salt) and high in potassium.

Present-day diets are the opposite to this: high in sodium, chiefly from high-sodium processed foods, and low in potassium because only a small proportion of people in the Western world eat 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. So a typical consumer of typical present-day food would not be an example of eating healthily. Although we are usually told, correctly, that we are eating too much sodium, the implication behind the statement is that we need to have some salt added to our food, but simply less than we presently eat. In fact our bodies do not have a biological need for any table salt to be added to our food at all. The amount of salt our bodies need is about 1.3g salt a day and this is naturally present in fresh food that has not had salt added either in cooking at home or added by food manufacturers in processing food. If you were to eat fresh fruit and vegetables and cook your own meat and fish from a raw state with no salt added by the food industry, you would not be lacking in sodium and your health would greatly benefit.

The low salt or low sodium way of eating takes more planning and more time and effort, but reaps rich rewards in feeling better and having more energy. Furthermore, and this is where my suggestion to tell the truth about salt would improve our Health Service as well as our own personal health, the low salt way of eating would greatly cut down on chronic illnesses that presently take up much of our nation's expenditure on health in terms of cash and personnel, and rob us of many of the productive working lives of so many of our citizens when they are rendered too ill to work because of illnesses related to salt intake. These illnesses include heart disease and heart attacks, most cancers, stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, asthma, obesity and many more.

In summary, improve the nation's health and wealth by telling the truth about salt. - What could be simpler?

Margaret Wilde www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk