[russholmes]

A significant minority are quite sensitive to salt. I fixed my high blood pressure by reducing salt intake. I got it down to hunter-gather levels - less than 1 g per day and combined with lots of fresh fruit and vegetables for potassium. It took a week before I started to notice my BP falling. Came down from 135/85 to 115/70 over a period of 12 weeks. Also cut out alcohol, anything more than a glass of wine raises my BP for a day or so afterwards. Of course, you can't eat any pre-prepared food this way as it has way too much salt. No bread, cheese, butter etc. Food begins to taste much better after a couple of weeks on a low salt diet as salt dulls the sense of taste.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Can confirm. I cook a salt-free cuisine for my relative [1] who has kidney disease and must aggressively control their blood pressure and I can go entire months without eating anything with any salt at all. There was a bit of an adjustment to be had in the first few months, from what I recall, but I was surprised to what degree my taste buds adjusted after a while. Nowadays, I can't enjoy normally salted food because it registers as very salty. I have particular trouble with cheeses, even cheese like feta or camembert that only have about 1.5 - 2% salt.

Speaking of cheese and bread, most of the internet will say it's impossible, but I've found some evidence online (reddit threads and blog posts and the like) of people who actually make both bread and cheese without salt at all (because of hypertension) and they seemed to be doing fine. This was about half a year ago so I can't find the sources again, but in any case salt-free cheese and bread making is possible. I've made a few loaves of bread without salt myself and they're OK, though they taste a lot better when they're made wth sourdough (which is a pain to maintain) rather than dried yeast, because the sourdough adds taste and the dried yeast only air!

What's the problem with butter? I can find both salt-free and salt-full in most countries in the EU that I've visited.

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[1] well... I cook for the entire household :)

[russholmes]

Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough for butter. I was mainly using it for cooking and ended up using olive oil for most things. I used to have a bread machine, and bread seemed to bake just fine without salt. Store bought bread without salt was impossible to find.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Well, olive oil is supposed to be better anyway. Although it seems to me that everytime I find a study that claims health benefits from olive oil consumption it's conducted by a Spanish or Greek university (I'm Greek btw, so made of ~80% olive oil).

I can find salt-free bread from local bakeries in Greece. Also, salt-free rusks (popular in Greece) seem to be a trend, there's three or four different brands that sell them in supermarkets.