Recently I owned up to having acquired the services of a personal trainer, in an attempt to move my body shape out of the column headed "endomorph". There are lots of reasons for my gym habit: guilt, ludicrous ambition, overweening vanity. I'm not ashamed; in a man over 40 a certain amount of vanity is a virtue. But there is another reason, an unexpected by-product. When I exercise I sweat. I don't mean I get a little damp across the brow. I mean I look like I went swimming with my clothes on. I leave tide marks under exercise equipment.

And, of course, when I sweat I lose salt, which is brilliant. Because I bloody love salt. In the age of an ever-shrinking health service budget, admitting to a fetish for salt is akin to fessing up to a smack habit, only it's slightly less socially acceptable. From time to time I get emails from readers complaining about chefs who oversalt food in restaurants and how we all have blunted palates. Two thoughts immediately occur to me. The first is that I hope I never have to break (unsalted) bread with that reader. I also think the blunted palate thing is untrue. It simply comes down to this: food tastes nicer with lots of salt on it.

Offer me something – hell, anything – involving salted anchovies and I'm there. Give me salted capers and properly brined olives. Give me crispy bits of deep-fried pig, and bright crimson chilli sauces from Korea which are as much about their salinity as they are about the heat. Give me dark soy and overpriced hand-cooked crisps and any dessert with a caramel sauce that has been lifted by a pinch of the white stuff. Best of all give me salted butter, mined with crystals that crunch through the soft load of dairy fats. I do not understand why any restaurant serves only unsalted butter with its bread. Sure, it may seem more sophisticated, more cultured, just altogether more refined. But it's nowhere near as nice. Interestingly, in Paris, restaurants very rarely serve unsalted butter. They may cook with the stuff like it's going out of fashion. But at the table they know what it is we really, really want. Ignore what snobs say to you about nuance and subtlety. Salt is the difference between eating in Technicolor and eating in black and white.

So what of the health risks? They are very, very real. A few years back the then US vice-president Dick Cheney suffered a heart attack. A friend of his commented that he had watched Cheney cut up a steak and salt every single side of every single cube individually. I recall my heart leaping in a way Cheney's probably couldn't manage. Whatever you do, I thought, don't bloody stop him. Hidden in the vice president's salt cellar was a way to remove a major obstacle to world peace. Equally, I once roadtested the "ambient" beefy stews from the re-launched British army ration packet. They were the best long-life stews I had ever eaten. The reason? Because soldiering in Afghanistan and Iraq is such hard physical work the recipes could use three times the usual amount of salt, which improved the texture of the beef. That was when I pulled on my running shoes again. Gym work may be painful. It may be the route to an early knee replacement. But if it means eating in brilliant Technicolor, I'm there.