Salt depraves sense of taste

Salt causes a decay of the sense of taste until it is no longer capable of appreciating the final delicate flavors of foods and loses its power of discrimination. The use of salt, the same as the use of spices,etc., depraves the sense of taste and weakens or utterly destroys our powers of discriminating between the various food substances eaten. Salt is used in many eating places in unusually large amounts with the object of concealing lack of flavor in inferior or spoiled foods. The one who habitually uses salt does not relish his food if no salt has been added. It is true, also, that the longer the use of salt is continued the more salt is required to produce the desired effects. Salt disguises the natural taste of food, thereby, hindering the precise adaptation of the digestive juices to the nature of the food eaten. It cannot, in any true sense, improve or aid digestion, as is often claimed. Rather, ft interferes with the normal action of the digestive organs and impairs their powers and sensibilities. It always, in proportion to the freedom with which it is used, diminishes gustatory enjoyment.
The sense of taste is not only a very important and necessary factor in adapting the digestive juices to the food eaten, but it is also a guide to the amount of food to eat. A perfectly normal taste is a perfect and reliable guide as to when to cease eating, providing one is eating natural unseasoned food. A perfectly normal taste is rare. If, however, the taste is "stimulated" and confused by rich spices and condiments, dressings and flavorings, it cannot serve this true function. Salt is an equal offender in this respect with these other articles.
Although the writer was once addicted to the heavy use of salt,and did not enjoy his meals without additions of salt crystals, he has not used salt for over thirty years and does not relish food containing even small quantities of salt. My wife and children do not employ it,the children never having tasted it. I do not feed it to my patients in my institution. 
When patients are first deprived of salt they have the same experience I had when first I discontinued its use - the food tastes flat, insipid, dead. Only a short time passes, however, and then the foods yield many fine, delicate flavors, which taste a thousand times better than salt.
Salt is said to make foods more palatable. It is said that “unsalted or feebly salted foods are extremely insipid. Only those who are compelled to eat such foods for a considerable time can realize how indispensable ordinary salt is to all of us. In the case of patients whose appetite is already affected by illness, severe restriction of ordinary salt becomes a fearful hardship. Sooner or later it undermines the patient's desire for food and he may be seized by an unaccountable aversion to eating and at times may decline any food."
It is said by those who eat conventional foodless foods prepared in conventional ways that the amount of "natural salt? contained in foods are not sufficient to render these foods palatable. Therefore sodium chloride must be added. This is not the fault of nature's products, but of the manufacturer's and the cook's arts. It is folly to rob the foods of their tasty, usable, organic salts and then add to them a useless irritant.
One author tells us that "one reason for the universal use of salt for seasoning foods is that it sharpens the sense of taste and therefore brings out the characteristic flavor of different foods and thus gratifies the palate." It would be difficult to put more fallacy into one short sentence than this author has succeeded in getting into this sentence. Salt is not, and never was, universally used to season foods. It does not sharpen the sense of taste, but blunts it. It does not bring out the flavors characteristic of the various foods, but smothers them. The salt eater tastes the salt rather than the food. Salt does not gratify the palate of any save the man who has cultivated the salt-eating perversion. Adding salt to apples, cantaloupes, watermelons, tomatoes, cu-cumbers, celery and other delicious foods, as is done by many salt eaters, smothers the fine delicate flavors in these foods - flavors that are as superior to that of salt as day is to night - and serves no useful purpose.