The concept put forth here is pure hooey, and its not an American problem. Having traveled, lived and eaten around the world, I can report that there is too much salt in restaurant food most everywhere. Forget about whether its bad for you, but realize that cooks who use too much salt are in too big of a hurry- it heightens the flavor quickly, and means they don't have to spend as much time on slow cooking sauces. It also means that the eater has to drink liters of water afterwards because it creates thirst, which is not a pleasant way to remember a meal. If food is spiced properly it can get heightened, and far more subtle flavors with very little salt.

Commenter "thoughts" is absolutely right, that many restaurants and many cooks use too much salt. A good cook ugsing ood ingredients won't need as much salt for the food to taste good, but it does need SOME salt. I'm in Italy this week, eating wonderful fresh food, very flavorful, that needs very little salt. It's industrial processed food that creates the diseases of an industrial society, not fresh food properly prepared (and judiciously salted).

i do agree with Ronald, too much or much salt is not good for test as well not good for helth.

I am basically foodi person. I am fond of good foods around us, whenever get time hang out with frinds with food, recently there were testing on the small restuarant we participated in & love the food what they had expriment.

Glad you mentioned the excellent Mark Kurlansky book, "Salt." I loved that and learned so much. Agree, too, that it's the industrial processed food that really overdoes the salt, and the sugar, and a lot of other things. Most likely they are making up for the absence of good, but more costly, ingredients. Since I eat little of that stuff, I don't worry about salting my food to taste.

As someone who has to watch salt intake daily for health reasons, I found this article an exercise in cherry-picking data to prove the writer's already determined conclusion. It takes a bit of chutzpah to quote, as your main scientific source, a scientist who works for the Salt Institute - no bias there, surely. Sarcasm intended.
A bit of salt is a good thing - the body needs the sodium - but chefs who overuse it to cover up their own shortcomings won't get my business; I've paid good money for too many god-awful restaurant meals ruined by salt everywhere. A look at the nutrition labels (I give thanks for those every day; i want to know what's in the food I eat) on most processed foods shows the truth behind American food manufacture - just add salt, a LOT of it. And despite the highly selective "facts" in this article, the absolute fact is that too much salt/sodium is NOT healthy.
As to health advice, I'll stick with the Mayo Clinic: ".....limit sodium to less than 2500 mg a day (just for reference, a Big Mac has 1000 mg just by itself, a 20-piece McNuggets, 2240 mg) - or 1500 mg if you're age 51 or older, or if you have high blood pressure, diabetes or chronic kidney disease..."

Ronald is correct that salt isn't inherently evil, and makes a good point about the "prohibitionist mentality" in the United States. But the commenters are right, too. It's not cooking at home with salt that's the big public-health problem. It's the insane amounts of salt in our processed and restaurant food that is. And considering how little most people actually cook for themselves...

Speaking from personal experience here: I have a family history of hypertension, and last fall discovered that my own blood pressure was beginning to go up. I'd already started taking better care of myself a few years earlier (being married to a nutrition student who is now a registered dietitian with an MPH from the UW helped a lot), but this gave me an extra incentive. It's still higher than I'd like, and who can say whether losing 15 pounds or cutting way down on the salty food is more responsible? I think it's both, and I think they go hand in hand.

I'll say this: I don't find well-prepared Italian food "too salty." I've eaten Enza's food before myself! But there are a lot of restaurants whose food I hesitate to call "well-prepared," and there I can certainly taste the difference.

I think what this probably comes down to is, industrial and prepared food isn't so great for you. It also happens to be quite salty. The best thing you can do for yourself — if you can afford it — is to cook for yourself at home as much as possible, with as many fresh ingredients as you can. And when you're doing so, go ahead and use some salt. (Speaking for myself, a layman — not my professional wife or any other healthcare professional.)

The problem is, doing so is often more expensive than buying cheap processed calories, both in terms of dollars and minutes. (And time is money, no?) Monetary poverty, time poverty.

That's the underlying issue here, no?

Cooking at home really isn't that time-intensive, especially if you cook in bulk and freeze things.

Michael Pollan wrote an excellent book, In Defense of Food, in which he cautions against the tendency to identify food villains, and against health claims made for processed food. You know, the "antioxidant" potato chips?

We're now in the third or fourth decade of a national demonization of dietary fat. All this really accomplished was the substitution of carbohydrates, especially sugars and refined flour, for fat. The result has been skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes. Salt was villainized, so now there are problems with salt deficiency in some people. Same with sunlight and skin cancer, the avoidance of which has caused serious Vitamin D deficiencies. The list goes on and on. The truth is so simple: watch your calories, and eat a balanced diet. No one wants to hear it.

Oh, and then we have the vegans and vegetarians. Soy milk. Uh, guys? Watch out for that soy milk, unless you want to grow a nice set of moobs. It's estrogenic. And yes, you can o.d. on tofu. Too much soy in the diet has a whole variety of negatives. Avoid fads.

Then there are the weight loss diets that emphasize metabolism over calorie counting, when in fact there are very few metabolic tricks. Avoiding simple sugars is one of them, but even that can be (and often is) overstated.

The really ironic thing is that weight control was pinpointed with astonishing precision about 90 years ago by two scientists, Arthur Harris and Francis Benedict. Their 1919 book, A Biometric Study of Basal Metabolism in Man, pinpointed caloric requirements based on only three factors: age, current weight, and height. Once you know how many calories to eat without gaining or losing, it's easy to figure out what to do from there. But few people do it. The information is too simple for people to believe, and leaves you with nowhere to hide.

People wonder about the obesity epidemic. It's not a matter of exercise. Sure, it helps to exercise, but its role in weight control is widely exaggerated. Fact is, the calorie consumption of exercise is overstated. The issue is on the intake side. People are eating too much sugar, which includes refined flour. That "low fat muffin" might as well be a big candy bar. It's not the sugar itself that's the villain; it's that when you substitute it for fat, you cause problems. One is you sidestep a natural function of fat, which is to signal the body that you've eaten enough.

Sugars tend to be addictive, while fats tend to be self-limiting. This is why the Atkins Diet (which was unfairly maligned) works for most people who actually follow it as written. There's only so much steak you can eat until you're full, especially if you don't have any bread with it. So, it's not that sugar makes you fat, it's that if you substitute sugars for fats, you'll eat more total calories because sugar doesn't come with the built-in "off switch" that fats have. If you look at official data, you can trace the blastoff of mass obesity to the demonization of dietary fat in the 1970s, and its substitution with sugars.

Calories! It starts and ends with calories! A balanced diet is the way to regulate calories. A really big overlooked issue there is that, every year, you need 8 fewer calories to maintain your weight. Metabolism declines in a straight-line function with age. Harris and Benedict studied the issue, and nailed it. Eight calories a year doesn't sound like much, but in a decade it's 80 calories a day. Two decades, 160 a day, and so on.

What happens if you eat 80 calories a day too much? 80 times 365 equals 29,200. Divided by 3,500 calories per pound of fat, that 8-1/3 pounds of fat from eating one too many slices of unbuttered "light" bread per day. If, at the age of 55, you eat like you did at the age of 35, getting the same exercise, you will gain 17 pounds a year. That, my friends, is why Americans are so fat. Very few people realize that they must eat less as they get older or they'll get fat. This is compounded by the typical income profile in this country. Your starving student days are over, and you get a job. One of the first things you do is eat more. And it doesn't take much, as I've just showed.

None of this stuff gets discussed. It's too simple. I have written a four-page guide to diet and exercize for friends, but who's ever going to make money from a four-page guide that tells you what you really always knew anyway? But I can tell you, applying Harris and Benedict's principles works like the proverbial smart bomb down the smokestack. They nailed it. Ever since then, there truly hasn't been anything new under the sun.