Salty Mail

I have written before about the diet no-no's health experts talk about. You know, the fat and sugar, the overeating we all seem to engage in now. But there is a new diet evil that is beginning to receive a lot of attention here in the U.S. It is the high salt content in foods today.
I remember in my childhood when eating too much salt was considered to be a mistake all the doctors talked about. But then the anti sugar and fat foodies came out of their closets and starting preaching the evils of those foods, so eating too much salt became a forgotten diet issue. Now it has resurfaced. Experts now say salt is as bad as the other food items we like but are told not to eat. Some cuisine has a lot of salt contained within. For example, Chinese food is so loaded with it I often grimace when eating some of the dishes. I do not overate salt, so I notice when my food is over salted. Chinese food, Italian food and a few others taste salty to me sometimes.
Now I am hearing that my sugary diet isn't so bad for overall health. It seems that we are eating far more than the quarter of a teaspoon of salt that we need each day. Now we are consuming about 2 teaspoons of salt per day. This is causing high blood pressure, kidney disease, strokes and other health problems.
Salt is hard to replace in the diet. In that way I think it is like sugar. Once we get used to eating it nothing else will satisfy our taste for it. Besides enhancing other flavors in foods salt trains the palate, leaving unsalted foods tasting too bland. That's probably why low salt foods don't sell well, and there are few good tasting salt substitutes.
But there is the real problem with cutting back on all that salt people eat. The food industry loves salt and does not want to reduce the amount it puts in foods. Most of the salt we eat comes not from the few sprinkles for a salt shaker we use, but from restaurant and grocery items filled with it. Salt added at the table is a tiny percent of the amount we eat overall. Those processed foods and take-out foods we eat are loaded with salt. Frankly, some of them would taste awful if not disguised with the salt in them.
I read recently that one of those Big Mac Hamburgers contains a half teaspoon of salt, and two slices of pizza from Pizza Hut has a full teaspoon of salt in it. God only knows how much salt are in some of those Chinese food entrees. It would be frightening to know, so I am not going to try to find out.
Because processed and eat-out foods dominate our diets it is hard to cut back on salt intake, apart from just eating less food. Maybe the governments of countries should regulate the amount of salt in foods. But that isn't a particularly realistic scenario, given that salty foods sell to consumers and governments like the taxes from the sales. Why, even soda drinks are loaded with salt. Besides, any food seller that reduces salt content in their foods will see the buyer shift to a competitor who has saltier food. If government mandated slat reduction it would be hard to enforce the rules, and surely there would be some sellers that would cheat.
My suggestion is for government to gradually, slowly, mandate salt reduction in retail foods. A slow withdrawal would not make the consumer notice too much that the salt has been reduced. But for me it is all moot. My blood pressure is low, and I am very healthy. Not eating too much salt may or may not be a reason, but I think I am probably not eating an exorbitant amount of salt and don't fit into the excess salt intake category.
What about your salt intake? What are your favorite salty foods? Do you eat too much salt?
I have salt on my kitchen table, but I surely don't have frozen dog in my freezer! Hehe That can't be said for one Trossingen, Germany woman who found a frozen dog when she opened the refrigerator compartment in her new apartment the other day. The previous tenant was fingered as the dog freezer and has told police that his pet greyhound puppy died of natural causes several months earlier but that he did not have the time to give it a proper burial before moving out of the apartment. Police have charged him with the unpronounceable crime of "tioerkoerperbeseitigungsgesetz".
Uh..in German doggie language that means he failed to properly remove an animal cadaver.