It probably wasn't as salty as you think. Salt is very labor intensive to produce, whether by mining or by precipitating salt from seawater. The Scandinavian economy simply wasn't complex enough to acquire much salt during most of the Viking Age, whether by trading for it or by producing it themselves. In the 800s, viking raiders regularly hit the salt pans around Noirmoutier in France, and although our chroniclers weren't interested in the details of why, it seems the salt was more valuable to the vikings than monasteries, which quickly learned to migrate inland every year during the raiding season.

In fact, the average Scandinavian during the Viking Age had a much more easily accessible preservative at hand—a preservative, moreover, which was a waste product made in great quantities at the same time that preservatives were needed. At the beginning of each winter, farmers across Scandinavia would have made hard cheeses to last them through the winter, leading to vast quantities of whey that needed to be used or tossed. (When milk sours, the part that becomes solid is called the curd and the liquid excess is called the whey.) At the same time, they would cull their flocks, killing any animals that they could not or would not feed for the winter. This preserved precious fodder for the animals most likely to bear food, wool, or children in coming years. By coincidence, and perhaps even by preference, they would have preserved these meats by immersing them in the slightly acidic whey, which would prevent bacterial growth. But even if they did this in part out of cultural preference, I suspect that most people get sick of sour-milk bacon long before April arrived with its first spring fruits.

But for any Viking-Age Scandinavians who developed both the taste and the wherewithal to acquire salt, it probably wouldn't have led to cholesterol problems. First, it's my understanding that salt doesn't itself impact cholesterol but rather the foods that we today tend to flavor with salt. Red meats, as noted above, were probably pickled in whey rather than salted. Fish could have been air dried, just as they are among many Native American and First Nations tribes in the subarctic north. And your guess is as good as mine as to how a viking would have liked his eggs.

Second, the life expectancy during most of the early middle ages was a meager 35 years. Again, human health isn't really my specialty, but I'm of the impression that only a diet with extremely high cholesterol levels is likely to cause problems by 35. Certainly, some people lived much longer, but unfortunately, high cholesterol leaves very few clues in the skeletal record, or at least very few clues that modern osteologists have been looking for. And although I've read reports listing obscure degenerate diseases, subtle indicators of violent trauma, and even degenerative conditions as causes of death, I've never seen an early medieval report referencing high cholesterol.

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As you might guess, this isn't an area of much research, although it's a very interesting question. There is a bit more research on early medieval nutrition in general. For the Viking Age diet, I always recommend An Early Meal by Daniel Serra and Hanna Tunberg. Check it out!

There are three nutritional conditions that I have seen afflicting early medieval skeletons that have been studied for evidence of pathologies.

The first is gout, a painful condition caused by eating too rich a diet -- usually too much meat. This condition was rare, as few people in the early middle ages could afford not to mix other kinds of food into their diet alongside meat. I have, however, seen more than one unlucky meat-totalling gout-afflicted persons whose bodies fought back against their rich diets.

More commonly, you see a condition called hypoplasia. This is a banding of the tooth enamel, and it's caused either by childhood disease, or by severe malnutrition during early childhood (starvation around age 3).

The third common nutritional effect is cribra orbitalia. This is a porosity of the skull bone around the eye socket. It's not painful or debilitating, but it does tend to develop as a result of malnutrition, suggesting -- like hypoplasia -- that food was scarce.

The prevalence of these latter two conditions reminds us that early medieval people didn't face the same food challenges we do. We suffer diseases of abundance: high cholesterol, diabetes, obesity, etc. Early medieval people were much more likely to suffer from food insecurity, intermittent famine, and uncertain harvests. Evidence of obesity in the archaeological record is extremely rare.

As a side note, I don't think there's any medical connection between salt and high cholesterol. Were you thinking of salt and high blood pressure? That's the claim that has been made for decades, though I've seen medical research lately that suggests that diets high in sugar (a rarity in the early middle ages) are more likely to blame for our modern metabolic problems.