Nick Nairn is sitting in the office of his Trossachs cookery school confessing
his former addiction to a deadly white powder. Not heroin or speed, although
the celebrity chef’s manic energy suggests he is running on some kind of
natural amphetamine. Certainly not cocaine, now so ubiquitous that in
middle-class circles it has acquired the sort of status a good single malt
used to have. The way Nairn tells it, his vice was much more dangerous.
“I was a salt junkie,” he says. “I’d eat Maldon salt crystals straight from
the packet. I used a tremendous amount of salt in cooking. My philosophy
was: ‘season to the max.’ ”
These days Nairn, who is self-taught and the youngest chef in Scotland to win
a Michelin star, cooks 99% of his food without any salt whatsoever. He uses
a small amount in bread and on steak. “Steak without salt is a step too far
but I’m talking about the merest pinch,” he says.
He doesn’t allow processed food of any kind in his home. His three-year-old
daughter Daisy has never tasted a crisp, no mean feat in a country where
half of all children consume salty snacks daily. Nairn’s new range of
low-salt rolls, produced with the Glasgow baker Morton’s Rolls, is on trial
in a number of stores. They have been so successful in Waitrose that the
chain has just asked him to develop a complete range of low-salt breads.
There is no shortage of chefs who have swapped the celebrity gravy train for
the healthy eating bandwagon but few are as zealous as Nairn. Salt, after
all, is one of our culinary staples. Our bodies need it to function. It was
so highly prized in the ancient world that it forms the basis of the word
salary. Its miraculous preserving and purifying qualities gave it religious
significance for centuries. For any chef worth his condiments, cooking
without it smacks of heresy.
Nairn’s evangelical approach is all the more remarkable because less than a
decade ago he was not only smoking, he was visiting a hamburger joint every
couple of months for that “instant, monosodium glutamate-starch thing”. He
laughs when I remind him of it. “Those were the dying days of my unhealthy
lifestyle.” The births of his children Daisy and Callum, now 18 months, gave
him an added impetus to change a hectic lifestyle, which he once believed
was set to kill him.
His journey to Damascus came via the M80 when he was invited to a lecture in
Glasgow by Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine at St
George’s hospital, London. MacGregor, the chairman of Consensus Action on
Salt and Health, which next week launches Salt Awareness Week, believes that
if we reduce our salt consumption from the current 9.5g a day to below 6g,
it will result in “the biggest improvement in health since the introduction
of clean water in the 19th century ”.
As The Sunday Times has highlighted in recent years, too much of the food we
buy has significantly high levels of salt, which raises blood pressure and
increases the risk of a stroke or heart attack.
MacGregor says there is overwhelming evidence that a high-salt diet
contributes to medical problems including heart disease — the cause of 50%
of British deaths. A reduction of 3g a day in our intake would, he believes,
save 35,000 people from death by stroke each year. Adults should, he says,
eat no more than a teaspoonful of salt a day. Children considerably less.
“I heard Graham talk and I just couldn’t believe it,” says Nairn. “I didn’t
know any of this stuff about salt. We went for a pint and I asked if he had
the evidence to back up what he was saying. He told me there was plenty.
It’s been known by the medical community for some time. That was it for me.
I went cold turkey. I just stopped using salt.”
For the next fortnight, everything he ate tasted like wallpaper paste. “I was
on the verge of cracking when suddenly, after about 10 days, my palate
started to readjust. After a month I started detecting salt in cereals,
cakes, even ice cream.”
Cutting out salt is not as simple as banishing the condiments and buying
salt-free butter, however. Three-quarters of the salt we eat comes from
processed food. Staples such as bread, cereals, cheese and ham contain high
quantities of salt. “It is very difficult for Joe Public to cut out salt
because it is everywhere,” admits Nairn. “You just can’t escape it. It’s up
to the government to sort it out.”
But do we really want Jack McConnell pontificating on the amount of salt we
sprinkle on our boiled eggs? Nairn, who championed the Scottish executive’s
healthy eating drive, is disillusioned. “I f***ing wash my hands of them,”
he says. “They talk a good game but they don’t follow it through. They pay
lip service and they have done some good stuff but it is all just so
frustrating.”
He points out that when the Scottish executive launched its Hungry For Success
scheme to improve Scottish school lunches, there wasn’t a single mass-market
baker in Scotland producing bread that fell within the recommended salt
levels.
Nairn’s other beef is with the food manufacturers he believes are cynically
boosting profits by loading cheap ingredients with salt and sugar to make
them palatable. But it is not quite that simple. Salt is a preserving agent.
Remove it and you lower the shelf life of the product and raise the threat
of harmful bacteria.
He is sceptical about the Food Standards Agency’s traffic-light plans for
labelling. “The government must set statutory levels,” he says. The fact
that Britain cannot do that without agreement from Brussels infuriates him.
“We didn’t need a UN mandate to go to war but we cannot set salt levels
unilaterally without the agreement of the EU,” he fumes. “Well, let’s just
do it and tell Europe to f*** off.”
Needless to say the Salt Manufacturers’ Association is taking the anti-salt
lobby’s claims with a large pinch of the white stuff. It has thrown
everything it has at the problem — from the benefits of salt in gritting the
roads to a claim that it is mineral deficiency, not sodium intake, that is
responsible for hypertension. It has the backing of some eminent scientists.
“Sodium restriction does not improve life expectancy,” says Dr David
McCarron, professor of medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University in
Portland.
But assuming Nairn and MacGregor are right, isn’t cutting out salt simply a
fad too far? If we highlight multiple problem foods simultaneously, won’t
the healthy eating message simply get diluted? “It’s like smoking,” says
Nairn. “Salt is a really important issue and it’s so easy to fix with a bit
of labelling and legislation. It’s a no-brainer. It kills you. Stop eating
it. It’s that simple.”
He is determined to keep his children on a salt-free diet until they are at
least five. He has been known to snatch party bags from hostess’s hands
before his children can get at them. “Our friends look at us as if we are
from Mars. It’s not easy. You get looks at kids’ parties.”
If he is ever tempted to waver, he only has to recall the food manufacturer
who asked his advice on reducing the salt levels in its baked beans. “We had
a tasting session and the stuff was filthy with salt,” says Nairn. “When I
pointed it out, they just said: ‘You should have seen what was in it 10
years ago.’ ”
