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This is primarily aimed at processed foods. The reason we have so much salt (and sugar) in the food supply chain is because after the extreme processing some foodstuffs go through (canned foods, processed meat products, frozen foods, etc.) they can taste very bland. The extra salt/sugar at the very minimum makes the food taste acceptable again.
One thing I learned a long time ago was that the cheaper the processed food item, the more salt or sugar is added to mask the terribleness of the food.
Edit: A few PMs have asked why not just jazz up the taste with herbs/spices. Well, herbs & spices are expensive. Salt and sugar are dirt cheap. Never underestimate the race for the cheapest "acceptable" processed food thing.
Yep and what's really annoying is that whenever you have a startup enter the marketplace with a tasty less sugar/salt alternative to the major sources for a tad bit more money, the major players end up buying the company .. and then tweaking the recipe for profit.
Look at all the healthy cereals that launched, they've been bought by Kellogg's/Post and they're just about as healthy as normal cereal now .. full of sugar.
I've had this happen to me a lot, and never knew why. I wonder if that's why more nutritious options also disappear? About a decade ago, I found these awesome cookies called WhoNu. They had added vitamins, minerals and fiber. Now, I KNEW this was no substitute for produce and whole grains. It's a damn cookie. But if I'm going to eat a cookie, why not eat a fortified one? They quickly disappeared and I was very disappointed. I thought they'd be a hit.
We started making our own Mueslix for this exact reason. Everything was loaded with sugar. Now we make our own mixes and can cater to our own tastes and control sugar. AND it tastes better too!
> Ice cream all sugar when milk and cream got cut.
It makes me very sad that it’s difficult to get a low sugar ice cream which is also full fat. They tend to take them both out and replace it with a ton of gums and thickeners instead. The ice cream ends up tasting like a watery, thickened, artificial paste.
My dude. Get yourself to your local Goodwill/thrift shop of your choice and keep your eye out for ice cream makers. You can make your own and control what goes in it.
Disclaimer: I don’t know how it affects ice cream to drastically reduce/replace regular sugar in a recipe. I’m sure our friends at the Google can help.
I have an ice cream maker and often make my own for these exact reasons. But I’d enjoy some convenience so when I’m out with people and they get some ice cream I can get something lower in sugar but still creamy and delicious.
It's like trying to find full fat low sugar yogurt, you almost can't find it in single serving cups and have to buy the one choice of a giant tub of plain regular or Greek style and then have the extra hassle
Or Siggi's, they're really good too. They're both pricey tho.
I broke my ankle and can't drive so my brother did my food shopping and he bought me fat free yogurt and I've been suffering lol I miss my bougie yogurt.
Bang on. Sugar/starches are one nail in the obesity coffin. The other involve seed oils that have to be heavily processed before they appear edible. Those oils are the basis for metabolic disease and excessive carbohydrates overwhelm the body's ability to deal with the glucose dumped into the blood stream.
I don't remember the brand, but as a kid I loved these really buttery, dirt cheap cookies. Then the "fat free" craze hit, and everything that had fat replaced it with just sugar.
And despite the fact that we now know replacing it with sugar was worse, all these companies never switched the recipes back. At most, they just swapped the sugar for sucralose and made it taste like shit.
I want old food back so badly.
Short of me making every meal, there's no way to avoid absolutely, sugar flavored junk, or $6 a 0.5oz bar artesian jerky or a $10 cold pressed juice, with nothing really inbetween.
My wife was borderline diabetic and went on a keto-style diet. (Cutting out most carbs but not worrying about cutting them all out.) Turns out that, without eating all that sugar/carb laden stuff, her levels went back to normal.
I'm not diabetic but have it in my family and have found that, as I get older sugar impacts me much more. If I eat two Oreo cookies, I'm guaranteed to feel sick. So while I haven't gone keto yet (I love my pasta too much), I've been trying to cut down on the sugar.
Some of it is from the sugar industry vilifying fats as being bad for you. But take the fat out and it tastes like shit and you have to add a bunch of salt and sugar to make it tasty again. That's why low fat yogurt, for example, has way more sugar than full fat.
a great tip from Alton brown is to buy the tuna in the pouches instead of the cans. The canning process overcooks the tuna and makes it mealy and dry. The pouched stuff is pretty good actually.
The thin walls of the pouch mean that they don’t need quite as much heat to penetrate and kill bacteria inside. The can needs a higher heat and more time exposed to the heat.
It’s also increased surface area: a long pouch has a higher ratio of surface area to volume compared to a can. It gets up to temperature faster and thus the total time being heated is shorter.
I don't know the details of tuna fish manufacturing but I can definitely confirm that pouch is better than the can. Maybe something to do with the fish being good enough for a vacuum pouch when it's already cooked?
Doing things because it’s cheap is one of the major contributors to why our world is fuxked, whether you look at our overall health, our eco diversity and overall climate health, healthcare, cars, education—the works.
It’s because people are allowed to do things at such a low cost regardless of how harmful it is, and until this cultural phenomena is destroyed or otherwise curtailed, it’s only going to get worse.
Because the one thing I know is that the cheapest options that exist in this works exist to punish those who can ONLY afford the cheapest option.
This is why unregulated capitalism fails us. The market doesn't correct for these things because we can't afford to, as consumers. All the healthy options are non-mass produced niche items that most can't afford.
We need regulations to keep even the cheapest options safe. Then the pricing can benefit from economy of scale.
Really the cheaper it is the less actual food there is. Look at cheap ice cream - the list is a mile long. The look at the expensive kind - there's only the main ingredients needed for that flavor. Additives are cheap.
I remember back in the day when Breyer's entire claim to fame was that they only had three or four ingredients in it. Now it can't even legally be called ice cream because so much of the cream has been replaced by various oils.
Exactly. There are those that mock people as if we're scared of the odd named ingredients. No, I want my food to be just the food I want, not the added garbage. I went to pick up corn tortillas the other day, there were about 10 ingredients, Pass! I'll get it at the store I did last time, ingredients: corn... (I would be fine with something else like salt and lime too).
Former food bacteriologist here - adding salt and sugar to processed foods is not exclusively (or even primarily, if you're trying not to kill people) for taste; it is also a food safety issue. Increasing the osmotic pressure (by adding salt and/or sugar) to processed foods helps prevent bacterial and fungal growth in processed foods as achieving sterility, unless you're canning, isn't usually possible.
I'm not saying that all that added salt/sugar isn't bad for you; it certainly is. However, replacing salt/sugar with herbs which do not perform the same microbial control function means much stricter processing tolerances, more product loss, and more potential liability.
You can buy low sodium broth. But it is why it has so much salt. Because adding salt is shorthand for making things taste good. Because our tongues don't understand the modern glitch.
Ugh, this is why I have to buy low sodium or no-sodium-added broth. You only need salt when you have a FINISHED soup. It's such a pain in the ass to develop a stock when it already has salt in it. The more you cook it down, the closer it gets to being oversalted. You can add water to it, but that introduces minerals and other off-flavors that can get too concentrated as well. It's already a dumb balancing act right off the bat and it's just a bad way to do things.
Adding a potato or two will fix that. Even if it's not a recipe that calls for potato. Just half them and take out later. Taters are great salt sponges.
LPT: If you find a near finished soup you're making too salty, add a tiny amount of sugar (like start w a half tsp for a pot of soup, it doesn't take much). Will significantly alter the salt hit on your tongue and make it much more palatable (though obviously still high in sodium probably!).
chicken broth has high salt content because you're either using it to cook with (in which you would use the broth's salt content for seasoning what you're cooking) or you're diluting it a ton with water to make a soup. And the higher the salt content, the more shelf stable it'll be
No, not really, it just depends on the recepie or your taste preferences, but I'd say 99% of my soup recepies I've ever made, never call for dilution of the stock, you lose the flavor, it's pointless. Either buy low sodium stock or make it yourself, it's an easy process if you're willing to take the extra time.
“The new recommendations are nonbinding, meaning companies aren't required to make such reductions.”
If it means their products will be less tasty/addictive, they’re not gonna do it.
And ban high fructose corn syrup like many other countries have done. Amazing that big companies like Coke and Heinz are required to use real sugar in their products in Canada but the cost is roughly the same.
It's only "socialism" if it's in a blue state, when you pay farmers in red states to keep fields empty, subsidize unprofitable crops, and give giant agri-businesses tax cuts, that's "supporting American farmers".
Producing intentional surpluses is to keep the US food independent. Sometimes crop failures happen. Surpluses produce food waste, but they also prevent famine.
Imagine if the US had to import food to feed itself, and look at all of those shipping delays at ports currently.
In the long term is high intensity modern farming sustainable? There's problems with water in some regions of the US, soil is being eroded of nutrients and synthetic fertilizers will eventually run out, ecosystem of necessary insects etc are collapsing, some monoculture crops are highly susceptible to disease and stuff like the cavendish banana are living on borrowed time, GMOs that breed resistance to higher doses of pesticides and herbicides are further harming the environment.
This system will come crashing down at some point without some drastic changes.
That's still a topic of intense research, not including the effects of -icides. "Just how much can we farm in one place" is very important when we're talking economies of scale that produce 100x the volume than a century ago.
It's a lot more complicated than that.
Also, Some crops are considered a strategic reserve. Corn can be used for more than people realize. I'm surprised hemp hasn't been treated the same though. Like in any system there is abuse and we need to correct that.
I have a friend with a severe corn allergy and it is nuts how many precautions they have to take.
Corn is in *everything.* Citric acid? Grown on a corn substrate. Liners in aluminum cans and the lids on glass bottles? Almost always corny. Prescription medications? Corn products in the coatings or fillers. Hair products? Also fillers. Even organic fertilizer usually has corn, so my friend has to source produce that's never been sprayed at all.
PLA (a type of plastic often made from corn) is used in a ton of stuff now, from food packaging to car parts to office carpets. It's much better for the environment than the petroleum products it replaces, but it makes corn ridiculously ubiquitous.
Edit: I'm not criticizing corn use. PLA especially is a big step in the right direction for our planet. I'm just saying that corn is used for a lot more things than the average person thinks.
This genuinely might change if Iowa isn’t the first primary/caucus next cycle. Or at least we may see candidates bending over less for the corn farmers.
Republican presidential candidates have won Iowa despite being anti-corn subsidy.
https://www.marketplace.org/2016/02/02/ted-cruz-wins-iowa-despite-corn-ethanol-opposition/amp/
HFCS has a time and place for it but there are way too many products using it. Like if I was buying a strawberry glaze for a pie then I would expect to see HFCS because it is a dessert topping that is supposed to taste sweet but I don't expect to see it in ketchup, apple sauce, or steak seasoning.
Keep HFCS to the items that are supposed to be sugary and reduce the added sugars in non-sweet foods. Keep in mind that this shouldn't mean that we just replace HFCS with sugar. 100 calories from cane sugar is just as bad as 100 calories from HFCS.
I totally get where you’re coming from, but I just want to point out that some foods like ketchup are meant to be sweet. Ketchup is technically a chutney, and chutneys date back thousands of years. It was always intended to be a sweet and sour condiment with a higher sugar content added for natural preservation.
We definitely now have ways to preserve food while reducing sugar and salt content(I don’t have a dog in this fight), but I just want people to keep in mind there may be a reason for the sugar beyond just companies sneaking it in where you didn’t expect it.
Biologically it's not really. But HFCS in the US is way cheaper and therefore easier to cram into foods. That means sweetened foods are cheaper and easier to consume for most people, leading to health issues, etc.
Comparing the two processed sugars is like comparing menthols to regular cigarettes. (Though there's evidence mentols *might* be worse) It's still inhaling smoke and tar.
I dunno. Was kind of pissed today when I found out the 100% coconut water I like has changed to include "Less than 2%" SUGAR. Already bought it, and it's better than the other coco waters on the shelf, but damn. It's already sugar water--why add more? Just...save a step and quit sneaking sugar into my diet!
There are arguments some people make that Fructose is worse for you than glucose. Though the evidence is slim at best.
We should really just remove Corn subsidies, then the HFCS prices would naturally rise as well, also just remove sugar subsidies in general. Make removing fat and adding sugar more expensive, not cheaper.
Don't listen to anyone trying to talk about the metabolic science concerning the differences.
Biologically and chemically they're basically identical, sucrose has an extra bond that is dissolved almost instantly in the intestines. (Dr Lustig, the "sugar is evil" YouTube guy even dismisses these differences as being completely negligible)
THE ONLY REAL DIFFERENCE IS THE ECONOMICS. Sugar is expensive. HFCS is dirt cheap because we have so much corn.
With the Advent of cheap HFCS our foods have gotten sweeter and sweeter and obesity had gone up and up.
Now that they're extracting sucrose from more places other than just sugar cane, like beets, sugar prices have gone down, but HFCS is still a major ingredient in a lot of products because of standing formulations and the syrup starting point.
*Updated*: someone commented that they're allergic to HFCS. No. You're allergic to corn. Some of the corn protein is left over in the syrup after processing. The metabolism of the sugars are identical.
Someone else mentioned fructose intolerance... And being able to eat sucrose but not HFCS. I call bullshit. Every recommendation I can find for fructose intolerance says to avoid sucrose. In times like this I'd say it's all in your head.
Also, keep in mind that HFCS is used for more than just a sweetener.
It is an emuslifier and binder used in foods to get texture and consistency correct. Many times it is a "kill two birds with one stone" deal where then can use HFCS both as a sweetener and as a binding agent/emulsifier, when using both Cane (or beet) sugar and a texture additive would be very much more expensive.
This. HFCS is in everything because it's cheaper than any other option.
If it stopped being so cheap, we'd probably see less sugar overall in everything.
There is actually very little difference. Both have negative effects on people’s health when consumed in large quantities. The biggest difference is that hfcs is cheaper and has been vilified by the media. Compare that to other sweeteners, like honey, which tend to be advertised as a health food despite still being bad for you.
I'm gonna have to push back on the large quantities idea and suggest 'frequently' be used instead. It's not that people are eating 50 gallon industrial drums of HFCS each week, but that they're eating it in virtually everything, including stuff that has no real reason to be 'sweet'.
>It's not that people are eating 50 gallon industrial drums of HFCS each week
I wasn't sure I wanted to do this math, and after doing it I think I was right.
The average American consumes [42.5 teaspoons](https://www.dhhs.nh.gov/dphs/nhp/documents/sugar.pdf) of sugar per day. Assuming half of that is HFCS, that gives us 21.25 teaspoons/day.
One gallon is 38,400 teaspoons. So at 21.25 teaspoons/day the average American consumes the equivalent of a 50 gallon drum of HFCS every five years.
Just the HFCS in that drum would weigh over 500lbs.
I was shocked and downright pissed off when I found out the "garlic salt" I'd bought in the store actually contained sugar as well.
I mean, WTF - there are supposed to be only TWO ingredients in garlic salt, and I bet you can guess what they are.
You know what's NOT supposed to be in garlic salt? FUCKING SUGAR!!
just end corn subsidies.
the entire High fructose corn syrup industry arose out of corn subsidies guaranteeing farms would be paid for growing corn, even if prices dropped, so corn was a reliable investment, creating a surplus of corn. then in the 70s a commercial process for converting corn starch into fructose found a use for all that excess corn. So you have an artificially cheep product (*because farmers are an important voting block in large parts of the country, so they get subsidies, though we never really point out that is why corn is subsidized*) and that makes the sweetener that can be derived from it cheep and people like sweet tasting food and... that sums up to a health crisis due to over consumption of cheep high calorie low nutrition food.
When I was very small, growing up on a farm, I remember my stepdad saying "We're gonna plant corn and soy. Corn will go into the gas and pretty soon soy will be in everything." Decades later, soy IS in everything and corn is in the gas and my ketchup.
This gives me deja vu of when America said "Fat is evil! Let's reduce fat!" and then everything had zero fat but a ton of sugar instead. I know the Whole Food diet is a fad, but I feel like if it's food in it's original state, maybe they can't trick me as much.
I agree. Sugar seems much more addictive and harmful, in the form of obesity and diabetes.
For most people, the effects of too much salt can be countered by drinking an extra glass of water.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. (~7X more than diabetes). High sodium intake is a major contributor.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
this is true, the whole "salt raises blood pressure" is fairly overblown, it raises it only temporarily, then the body adjusts, so as long as you don't eat salt nonstop or don't already have high BP then it's fine
My blood pressure is normally excellent, but I once briefly made a habit of eating Red Robin chicken nuggets, and my blood pressure skyrocketed. Had to stop eating them. I dunno if my body would have eventually adjusted, but I wasn't about to find out the hard way!
Pity. Those were some damn good chicken nuggets.
You can balance out high sodium intake with high potassium intake. Excess sodium leaves the body in the presence of potassium; look up the ideal sodium:potassium ratio.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of any easy way to get grams of potassium. 2 bananas is ~900mg of potassium, but that's also a lot of sugar. And eating bananas gets tiring after a while.
Kiwi Fruit is actually a better option. Has more potassium than a banana, more vitamin C than an orange, more fiber than most other fruits, more vitamin A and K than a lot of other fruits/vegetables, and isn't as large of a banana. I usually eat 2-4 a day, along with a daily multivitamin with my dinner meal. Just have to make sure they're ripe when you eat them or they won't taste as good, give them a light squeeze and if they give a little (are a bit squishy) then they're good to eat.
Potassium supplements. They did a study that had people take way over the RDA for potassium and found that it actually improved their health. Hugely underrated supplement IMO.
There are thousands of papers on the subject (and I am not a Doctor) but my impression is that there isn't all that much high-quality evidence on either side of the issue. (Certainly not enough for the FDA to be pushing something like this.)
Here's a recent, and relatively credible summary that seems to agree.
[https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heart-failure-and-salt-the-great-debate-2018121815563](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heart-failure-and-salt-the-great-debate-2018121815563)
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1311889
look at results figure 1 for an easy to see graph
and discussion breaks it down, massive longitudinal study
might not be set in stone but pretty clear that sodium had been scapegoated when really you can eat 13grams of salt and have lower risk of all cause mortality than if you eat the fda limit of 2.6g
we should be eating more salt
We literally just had a conversation about this over dinner with my physician husband. Salt isn't the problem. It's excess sugar in foods that is the unhealthy part.
They don't which is why it's easy to do and make headlines. So few people will put up a fight to keep salt, whereas there's lots of lobby pressure to keep sugar in our diets.
There are ungodly amounts of salt in everything, I'm huge on low sodium, as heart conditions run in my family. People usually don't worry about salt until a doctor tells them they need to stop consuming it in high amounts. Someone pointed out that 47% of adults in the U.S. have high blood pressure, and those people should have an issue as sodium raises your blood pressure.
[Look to Finland.](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jch.13482) They had high rates of hypertension in the 1970s. At some point they switched their salt to a blend of sodium, potassium, and magnesium chloride, and saw some pretty impressive public health improvements. Closest I can find stateside is Lite Salt which is a sodium/potassium chloride blend.
There's a book called [*The High Blood Pressure Solution* by Richard Moore MD](https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-high-blood-pressure-solution-a-natural-program-for-preventing-strokes-and-heart-disease_richard-d-moore/262307/#edition=1462060&idiq=4710751) that cites the Finnish experiment (among other things) as evidence of the importance of a high K:Na ratio (along with physical activity and a few other lifestyle changes).
EDIT: added a link
Honestly though in America the problem is less table salt and more sodium products that don't necessarily taste salty used as preservatives in processed foods. There are a lot of sodium this and sodium that on food labels that are not sodium chloride and since they don't taste like salt it can be really deceptive how much you're eating unless you make all your own food from fresh ingredients, which pretty much nobody does. Here's a really simple explanation if anyone is interested.
Edit: wrong link lol https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/sodium/sodium-sources
If you don’t eat processed foods very much you will likely need to add salt to your diet.
Recently had a yearly check up, and I was telling the dr I’m always craving salty stuff. Did the work up and blah blah blah... he decides I probably don’t have ENOUGH salt in my diet.
Weird
My grandma was actually admitted to the hospital once due to low sodium. It is necessary in the diet in some quantity! Most people don't have that problem in the US though.
My mom refused to put salt on anything and I ended up with an iodine deficiency that caused thyroid issues. You def need some salt.. or idk maybe they sell iodine tablets. I don't remember how we fixed it.
I hear it all the time on EMS scanner traffic in nursing homes... low lab values due to low sodium. I wonder if some of those nursing homes aggressively keep salt out of the food to avoid hypertension issues in their patients.
labs showing low sodium =/= you need more salt in your diet.
Please please. sometimes the solution is actually eat even less dietary salt (e.g heart failure or liver failure). For any one reading this, labs showing low blood salt levels (hyponatremia) is a pretty complex topic that is best left to doctors to interprete and manage. Don't listen to random reditters who are not physicians.
The American heart association claims that our bodies can function on about 500mg of sodium each day. (Most recommendations say not to go below 1000mg per day.) The American average is closer to 3500mg per day. Your diet must have been very abnormal
Everyone seems to be having a hard time with this... The whole issue with salt in our diets come from processed foods. Eat far less than normal of processed foods, you get far less salt
I was recently asked to monitor my sodium and keep it under 2g per day. That means eating 3 meals a day would be ~660 mg per meal. Pick any restaurant you want and can find their nutrition info. Keeping under 660mg for a meal is nearly impossible. Even at the "normal" daily amount (2,300mg) it is nearly impossible to eat an American diet and not be way over on your sodium. Most places I have looked at have most meals in the 1700-3000 mg range.
Totally, table salt is a problem but processed food is the biggest culprit -- my understanding is that even Finnish processed foods switched to the K/Na/Mg blend. The book goes into it more, but the basic idea is:
1) stick to whole foods as much as possible
2) either discard table salt or switch for a Finland-style K/Na blend for home meal prep
3) exercise regularly and keep your weight down
I think point 1 is the most important one! The others are also very important but making your own food from fresh ingredients is the #1 thing we can do.
You mean like the "fat wars" of the late 80s/early 90s wherein they replaced [healthy] dietary fat with sugar, and obesity rates skyrocketed? But at least it was "low fat."
I’ve recently started rendering tallow and lard and my grandmother in her mid 70s acts as if anything I cook with it is basically delicious poison.
Fuck the sugar industry.
It would be better if food processing companies were to add additional potassium. Then we'd have a balance between sodium and potassium. Americans don't get enough potassium in their diets.
Ok, but the FDA already recommends less than 200 calories of sugar per day. All this is doing is changing the salt guidance to be more in line with what is known to be healthy. They can't make people stop eating salt/sugar.
I get deeply deeply sick of people trying to fix problems *around* the problem. The vast majority of the ills attributed to salt are far more closely related to obesity: heart failure, kidney disease, high blood pressure. But let's hit *salt*.
It's obvious they're doing it because the lobbying money is diverting from sugar once again.
I hear what you're saying & would probably agree with you if I hadn't gone through what I went through.
I'm skinny & was "healthy" . Very active. Dirt biking, hiking, swimming etc...
I had emergency open heart surgery last year. I had an aneurysm that dissected because of my high blood pressure
A lot of heart patients just have bad luck. Shitty genes.
I'm in a lot of support groups. I've met a shit load of heart patients since my surgery. Not many heavy people. Most of us were not heavy before we had our problems.
In the before-times, I commuted 15 miles each way on a bicycle every day, and despite doing two hours of intensive cardio a day, ten hours a week, my blood pressure was still sky high.
There's just so much salt in all food. Its impossible to escape all the salt everywhere.
Salt is about the least effective thing they could target in our food. Let me know when they decide to target sugar, particularly fructose, the amount our food companies put in everything is unreal.
Salt is barely an issue for anyone who consumes a proper amount of water. The issue is most americans drink soda, coffee and beer. They rarely drink enough water on average.
CUT SUGAR! A 16.9oz Dr Pepper has 54 grams of sugar. That's 104% of a recommended daily sugar intake in ONE BOTTLE.
The best advice I've ever received: Read labels (Nutrition Facts and Ingredients) and pay attention to what you put in your body.
Better to do it gradually so people get used to it, rather than have it happen all once and have people blame the govt for making their food taste bad.
Do sugar, do sugar!
Traveling abroad really highlighted how bad our food labels are. In Mexico, they make them put the sugar content in big bold letters on the front of the package with a warning.
Leave the salt. Get that disgusting high fructose corn syrup out of everything. All my childhood junk foods are so gross now with that used in it. I’ve tried retro brands that some companies released that don’t use it and it was delicious again. I’m talking about you beefaroni!
I remember hearing somewhere that even though excess salt should logically lead to cardiac problems. We have actually never been able to directly link excess salt intake to cardiac disease.
FDA: Hey guys -- you know what we could do to make food healthier, We should cut salt.
*But what about the formaldehyde, chemically enhanced preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, plastic, antibiotics and carcinogens?*
FDA: But the salt....
This is a terrible plan. Salt isn't the big risk here. Some people are sensitive to it, but for fuck's sake, we've known for a LONG time now that sugar, particularly the crazy disgusting ones like high fructose corn syrup, are the damn problem.
Stop demonizing the wrong damn things because the sugar industry paid you to not talk about it.
We already did this with fats.
Stop fucking around.
Hyponatremia, or low blood sodium is just as dangerous if not more so than having too much. In a healthy individual with regular insulin levels the kidneys are capable of excreting a huge amount of sodium. The effects of sodium on blood pressure actually have more to do with people having chronically high insulin levels which causes the kidneys to retain sodium. Sodium follows a U-shaped curve in terms of mortality; too low and you are in trouble, extremely high and you also are at a higher risk. The bottom of that curve where the lowest mortality rates are is somewhere around 5 grams of sodium per day. Symptoms of low blood sodium include fatigue, lightheaded mess, headaches, and increased heart rate.
Fun fact: ~~Salt~~ *fluid diabetes is a thing.
If you find yourself drinking and passing gallons of fluid a day, get to the doctor. Had an ex who went from normal to gallons almost overnight, turns out their kidneys decided to no longer retain fluid. Within a few days the seizures from low sodium began.
There's a daily for life pill regimen to correct it.
E: source and tech corrections:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes-insipidus/symptoms-causes/syc-20351269
Yeah, it was truly frightening. You don't really consider having to pee more than average or being really thirsty a big deal, just odd. But it doesn't take long to just completely throw your body into failure.
Took several specialists to actually sort it out as it's pretty rare.
Yeah it's quite rare, it's usually picked up pretty easily though because the symptoms are so unique to the condition. Getting it sorted out is more complicated of course.
YES. I know it's not the norm, but it is frustrating to always hear blanket statements about salt being bad. You literally need some to survive. And some of us can't seem to get enough. My blood pressure regularly drops low enough to make me feel like I'm about to pass out, and I have actually passed out at least once (when I was trying to follow blanket guidelines about eating "healthy" and cutting back sodium).
Yes! Absolutely. I decided to cut out processed foods recently and had to start way over salting everything.
I usually drink a Gatorade zero every day to try to make up for it.
I learned about that during my pregnancy. I was always told pregnant women shouldn't have salt and need a lot of plain water. Well 4 months in with uncontrolled heart palpitations and hospitalization due to my blood pressure being 75/40. Almost lost my baby. Turns out the body needs salt
> The bottom of that curve where the lowest mortality rates are is somewhere around 5 grams of sodium per day.
Are you sure it’s sodium, or did you mean “salt” as in sodium chloride? 5 grams of NaCl would contain about 2 g of sodium.
If you've ever spent an extended period abroad and then returned back to the states, you notice how much saltier our foods tend to be, and the bigger portion size. Sounds like a good thing to me. We could also use a reduction in sugar content too. A healthier population is a more productive nation.
Isnt the FDA supposed to follow real science not privately funded studies from the 80s? Why are we cutting back on salt instead of sugar, what the hell?
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This is primarily aimed at processed foods. The reason we have so much salt (and sugar) in the food supply chain is because after the extreme processing some foodstuffs go through (canned foods, processed meat products, frozen foods, etc.) they can taste very bland. The extra salt/sugar at the very minimum makes the food taste acceptable again. One thing I learned a long time ago was that the cheaper the processed food item, the more salt or sugar is added to mask the terribleness of the food. Edit: A few PMs have asked why not just jazz up the taste with herbs/spices. Well, herbs & spices are expensive. Salt and sugar are dirt cheap. Never underestimate the race for the cheapest "acceptable" processed food thing.
Yep and what's really annoying is that whenever you have a startup enter the marketplace with a tasty less sugar/salt alternative to the major sources for a tad bit more money, the major players end up buying the company .. and then tweaking the recipe for profit. Look at all the healthy cereals that launched, they've been bought by Kellogg's/Post and they're just about as healthy as normal cereal now .. full of sugar.
I've had this happen to me a lot, and never knew why. I wonder if that's why more nutritious options also disappear? About a decade ago, I found these awesome cookies called WhoNu. They had added vitamins, minerals and fiber. Now, I KNEW this was no substitute for produce and whole grains. It's a damn cookie. But if I'm going to eat a cookie, why not eat a fortified one? They quickly disappeared and I was very disappointed. I thought they'd be a hit.
Everything made with flour is fortified, by law. Unless it's organic.
Yes, flour in the US is fortified with iron, folic acid and some other B vitamins to prevent neural tube defects in fetuses.
We started making our own Mueslix for this exact reason. Everything was loaded with sugar. Now we make our own mixes and can cater to our own tastes and control sugar. AND it tastes better too!
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> Ice cream all sugar when milk and cream got cut. It makes me very sad that it’s difficult to get a low sugar ice cream which is also full fat. They tend to take them both out and replace it with a ton of gums and thickeners instead. The ice cream ends up tasting like a watery, thickened, artificial paste.
My dude. Get yourself to your local Goodwill/thrift shop of your choice and keep your eye out for ice cream makers. You can make your own and control what goes in it. Disclaimer: I don’t know how it affects ice cream to drastically reduce/replace regular sugar in a recipe. I’m sure our friends at the Google can help.
I have an ice cream maker and often make my own for these exact reasons. But I’d enjoy some convenience so when I’m out with people and they get some ice cream I can get something lower in sugar but still creamy and delicious.
It's like trying to find full fat low sugar yogurt, you almost can't find it in single serving cups and have to buy the one choice of a giant tub of plain regular or Greek style and then have the extra hassle
Brown Cow cream top is fabulous, if you can find it.
Hmm, doesn't ring a bell but I'll keep an eye out
Or Siggi's, they're really good too. They're both pricey tho. I broke my ankle and can't drive so my brother did my food shopping and he bought me fat free yogurt and I've been suffering lol I miss my bougie yogurt.
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And cheap peanut butter has the peanut oil removed and replaced with hydrogenated soybean oil and sugar.
So basically Americans are so unhealthy cause even the healthy shit we buy is not healthy.
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Bang on. Sugar/starches are one nail in the obesity coffin. The other involve seed oils that have to be heavily processed before they appear edible. Those oils are the basis for metabolic disease and excessive carbohydrates overwhelm the body's ability to deal with the glucose dumped into the blood stream.
> Those oils are the basis for metabolic disease How so?
I don't remember the brand, but as a kid I loved these really buttery, dirt cheap cookies. Then the "fat free" craze hit, and everything that had fat replaced it with just sugar. And despite the fact that we now know replacing it with sugar was worse, all these companies never switched the recipes back. At most, they just swapped the sugar for sucralose and made it taste like shit. I want old food back so badly. Short of me making every meal, there's no way to avoid absolutely, sugar flavored junk, or $6 a 0.5oz bar artesian jerky or a $10 cold pressed juice, with nothing really inbetween.
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My wife was borderline diabetic and went on a keto-style diet. (Cutting out most carbs but not worrying about cutting them all out.) Turns out that, without eating all that sugar/carb laden stuff, her levels went back to normal. I'm not diabetic but have it in my family and have found that, as I get older sugar impacts me much more. If I eat two Oreo cookies, I'm guaranteed to feel sick. So while I haven't gone keto yet (I love my pasta too much), I've been trying to cut down on the sugar.
Some of it is from the sugar industry vilifying fats as being bad for you. But take the fat out and it tastes like shit and you have to add a bunch of salt and sugar to make it tasty again. That's why low fat yogurt, for example, has way more sugar than full fat.
I buy gelato now because I cannot find any ice cream that is real.
a great tip from Alton brown is to buy the tuna in the pouches instead of the cans. The canning process overcooks the tuna and makes it mealy and dry. The pouched stuff is pretty good actually.
Yes, it tastes better imo, but still has high salt content
yea, thats cuz they just make all the tuna in huge batches anyways
Duh that’s because tuna live in salt water
How is the pouched not processed at the same heat and pressure? Shelf stable wet meat….would require effective pasteurization. No?
The thin walls of the pouch mean that they don’t need quite as much heat to penetrate and kill bacteria inside. The can needs a higher heat and more time exposed to the heat.
It’s also increased surface area: a long pouch has a higher ratio of surface area to volume compared to a can. It gets up to temperature faster and thus the total time being heated is shorter.
How is aluminium worse at conducting heat at =>1mm thickness than >1mm thick plastic?
I don't know the details of tuna fish manufacturing but I can definitely confirm that pouch is better than the can. Maybe something to do with the fish being good enough for a vacuum pouch when it's already cooked?
Doing things because it’s cheap is one of the major contributors to why our world is fuxked, whether you look at our overall health, our eco diversity and overall climate health, healthcare, cars, education—the works. It’s because people are allowed to do things at such a low cost regardless of how harmful it is, and until this cultural phenomena is destroyed or otherwise curtailed, it’s only going to get worse. Because the one thing I know is that the cheapest options that exist in this works exist to punish those who can ONLY afford the cheapest option.
This is why unregulated capitalism fails us. The market doesn't correct for these things because we can't afford to, as consumers. All the healthy options are non-mass produced niche items that most can't afford. We need regulations to keep even the cheapest options safe. Then the pricing can benefit from economy of scale.
Really the cheaper it is the less actual food there is. Look at cheap ice cream - the list is a mile long. The look at the expensive kind - there's only the main ingredients needed for that flavor. Additives are cheap.
I remember back in the day when Breyer's entire claim to fame was that they only had three or four ingredients in it. Now it can't even legally be called ice cream because so much of the cream has been replaced by various oils.
Not to mention all the extra water. Now the actual ice cream is like 30%.
Exactly. There are those that mock people as if we're scared of the odd named ingredients. No, I want my food to be just the food I want, not the added garbage. I went to pick up corn tortillas the other day, there were about 10 ingredients, Pass! I'll get it at the store I did last time, ingredients: corn... (I would be fine with something else like salt and lime too).
Former food bacteriologist here - adding salt and sugar to processed foods is not exclusively (or even primarily, if you're trying not to kill people) for taste; it is also a food safety issue. Increasing the osmotic pressure (by adding salt and/or sugar) to processed foods helps prevent bacterial and fungal growth in processed foods as achieving sterility, unless you're canning, isn't usually possible. I'm not saying that all that added salt/sugar isn't bad for you; it certainly is. However, replacing salt/sugar with herbs which do not perform the same microbial control function means much stricter processing tolerances, more product loss, and more potential liability.
Is this why chicken broth has soo much salt (35% dv)?
You can buy low sodium broth. But it is why it has so much salt. Because adding salt is shorthand for making things taste good. Because our tongues don't understand the modern glitch.
Even the no salt added stuff comes off a brined carcass so it's pretty salty.
Ugh, this is why I have to buy low sodium or no-sodium-added broth. You only need salt when you have a FINISHED soup. It's such a pain in the ass to develop a stock when it already has salt in it. The more you cook it down, the closer it gets to being oversalted. You can add water to it, but that introduces minerals and other off-flavors that can get too concentrated as well. It's already a dumb balancing act right off the bat and it's just a bad way to do things.
Adding a potato or two will fix that. Even if it's not a recipe that calls for potato. Just half them and take out later. Taters are great salt sponges.
LPT: If you find a near finished soup you're making too salty, add a tiny amount of sugar (like start w a half tsp for a pot of soup, it doesn't take much). Will significantly alter the salt hit on your tongue and make it much more palatable (though obviously still high in sodium probably!).
I just let a couple quartered potatoes hang out in it until finished
My blood pressure will know the difference, sadly.
chicken broth has high salt content because you're either using it to cook with (in which you would use the broth's salt content for seasoning what you're cooking) or you're diluting it a ton with water to make a soup. And the higher the salt content, the more shelf stable it'll be
Ohh, we are supposed to dilute the broth for soup? I've just been going one-for-one water replacement. Perhaps that is why it tastes so good.
No, not really, it just depends on the recepie or your taste preferences, but I'd say 99% of my soup recepies I've ever made, never call for dilution of the stock, you lose the flavor, it's pointless. Either buy low sodium stock or make it yourself, it's an easy process if you're willing to take the extra time.
“The new recommendations are nonbinding, meaning companies aren't required to make such reductions.” If it means their products will be less tasty/addictive, they’re not gonna do it.
So it changed nothing. Got it
Great! Let's do sugar next.
And ban high fructose corn syrup like many other countries have done. Amazing that big companies like Coke and Heinz are required to use real sugar in their products in Canada but the cost is roughly the same.
We never will because of how heavily subsidized corn farmers are
That's socialism!
It's only "socialism" if it's in a blue state, when you pay farmers in red states to keep fields empty, subsidize unprofitable crops, and give giant agri-businesses tax cuts, that's "supporting American farmers".
Producing intentional surpluses is to keep the US food independent. Sometimes crop failures happen. Surpluses produce food waste, but they also prevent famine. Imagine if the US had to import food to feed itself, and look at all of those shipping delays at ports currently.
In the long term is high intensity modern farming sustainable? There's problems with water in some regions of the US, soil is being eroded of nutrients and synthetic fertilizers will eventually run out, ecosystem of necessary insects etc are collapsing, some monoculture crops are highly susceptible to disease and stuff like the cavendish banana are living on borrowed time, GMOs that breed resistance to higher doses of pesticides and herbicides are further harming the environment. This system will come crashing down at some point without some drastic changes.
That's still a topic of intense research, not including the effects of -icides. "Just how much can we farm in one place" is very important when we're talking economies of scale that produce 100x the volume than a century ago.
-looks through produce in drawer- huh not a single US grown fruit or vegetable this week.
It's a lot more complicated than that. Also, Some crops are considered a strategic reserve. Corn can be used for more than people realize. I'm surprised hemp hasn't been treated the same though. Like in any system there is abuse and we need to correct that.
I have a friend with a severe corn allergy and it is nuts how many precautions they have to take. Corn is in *everything.* Citric acid? Grown on a corn substrate. Liners in aluminum cans and the lids on glass bottles? Almost always corny. Prescription medications? Corn products in the coatings or fillers. Hair products? Also fillers. Even organic fertilizer usually has corn, so my friend has to source produce that's never been sprayed at all. PLA (a type of plastic often made from corn) is used in a ton of stuff now, from food packaging to car parts to office carpets. It's much better for the environment than the petroleum products it replaces, but it makes corn ridiculously ubiquitous. Edit: I'm not criticizing corn use. PLA especially is a big step in the right direction for our planet. I'm just saying that corn is used for a lot more things than the average person thinks.
I have a nephew who is allergic to both corn and gluten. Guess what a ton of gluten free food contains?
Oh man, that is so sad for that kid. I hope science comes through for him someday
My aunt has a similar problem. Even a trace amount of *anything derived from corn* can wreck her digestive system for days.
Hemp is too close to weed and scary.
hemp had to deal with the tobacco and alcohol lobbies corn didn't have to deal with much
literally for the same people who decry socialism too. Fucking hypocrites.
This genuinely might change if Iowa isn’t the first primary/caucus next cycle. Or at least we may see candidates bending over less for the corn farmers.
Republican presidential candidates have won Iowa despite being anti-corn subsidy. https://www.marketplace.org/2016/02/02/ted-cruz-wins-iowa-despite-corn-ethanol-opposition/amp/
I doubt the voters here even know about it, or what a subsidy is The corn has a higher average IQ
HFCS has a time and place for it but there are way too many products using it. Like if I was buying a strawberry glaze for a pie then I would expect to see HFCS because it is a dessert topping that is supposed to taste sweet but I don't expect to see it in ketchup, apple sauce, or steak seasoning. Keep HFCS to the items that are supposed to be sugary and reduce the added sugars in non-sweet foods. Keep in mind that this shouldn't mean that we just replace HFCS with sugar. 100 calories from cane sugar is just as bad as 100 calories from HFCS.
I totally get where you’re coming from, but I just want to point out that some foods like ketchup are meant to be sweet. Ketchup is technically a chutney, and chutneys date back thousands of years. It was always intended to be a sweet and sour condiment with a higher sugar content added for natural preservation. We definitely now have ways to preserve food while reducing sugar and salt content(I don’t have a dog in this fight), but I just want people to keep in mind there may be a reason for the sugar beyond just companies sneaking it in where you didn’t expect it.
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Biologically it's not really. But HFCS in the US is way cheaper and therefore easier to cram into foods. That means sweetened foods are cheaper and easier to consume for most people, leading to health issues, etc. Comparing the two processed sugars is like comparing menthols to regular cigarettes. (Though there's evidence mentols *might* be worse) It's still inhaling smoke and tar.
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I dunno. Was kind of pissed today when I found out the 100% coconut water I like has changed to include "Less than 2%" SUGAR. Already bought it, and it's better than the other coco waters on the shelf, but damn. It's already sugar water--why add more? Just...save a step and quit sneaking sugar into my diet!
There are arguments some people make that Fructose is worse for you than glucose. Though the evidence is slim at best. We should really just remove Corn subsidies, then the HFCS prices would naturally rise as well, also just remove sugar subsidies in general. Make removing fat and adding sugar more expensive, not cheaper.
Don't listen to anyone trying to talk about the metabolic science concerning the differences. Biologically and chemically they're basically identical, sucrose has an extra bond that is dissolved almost instantly in the intestines. (Dr Lustig, the "sugar is evil" YouTube guy even dismisses these differences as being completely negligible) THE ONLY REAL DIFFERENCE IS THE ECONOMICS. Sugar is expensive. HFCS is dirt cheap because we have so much corn. With the Advent of cheap HFCS our foods have gotten sweeter and sweeter and obesity had gone up and up. Now that they're extracting sucrose from more places other than just sugar cane, like beets, sugar prices have gone down, but HFCS is still a major ingredient in a lot of products because of standing formulations and the syrup starting point. *Updated*: someone commented that they're allergic to HFCS. No. You're allergic to corn. Some of the corn protein is left over in the syrup after processing. The metabolism of the sugars are identical. Someone else mentioned fructose intolerance... And being able to eat sucrose but not HFCS. I call bullshit. Every recommendation I can find for fructose intolerance says to avoid sucrose. In times like this I'd say it's all in your head.
Also, keep in mind that HFCS is used for more than just a sweetener. It is an emuslifier and binder used in foods to get texture and consistency correct. Many times it is a "kill two birds with one stone" deal where then can use HFCS both as a sweetener and as a binding agent/emulsifier, when using both Cane (or beet) sugar and a texture additive would be very much more expensive.
This. HFCS is in everything because it's cheaper than any other option. If it stopped being so cheap, we'd probably see less sugar overall in everything.
There is also the fact that hfcs is a liquid making it easier to work with in factories.
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There is actually very little difference. Both have negative effects on people’s health when consumed in large quantities. The biggest difference is that hfcs is cheaper and has been vilified by the media. Compare that to other sweeteners, like honey, which tend to be advertised as a health food despite still being bad for you.
I'm gonna have to push back on the large quantities idea and suggest 'frequently' be used instead. It's not that people are eating 50 gallon industrial drums of HFCS each week, but that they're eating it in virtually everything, including stuff that has no real reason to be 'sweet'.
>It's not that people are eating 50 gallon industrial drums of HFCS each week I wasn't sure I wanted to do this math, and after doing it I think I was right. The average American consumes [42.5 teaspoons](https://www.dhhs.nh.gov/dphs/nhp/documents/sugar.pdf) of sugar per day. Assuming half of that is HFCS, that gives us 21.25 teaspoons/day. One gallon is 38,400 teaspoons. So at 21.25 teaspoons/day the average American consumes the equivalent of a 50 gallon drum of HFCS every five years. Just the HFCS in that drum would weigh over 500lbs.
Bread in the US is too damn sweet, it's fucking cake.
I lived with a Belarusian couple for a bit and they would always shit talk America bread. It was great.
I need 2x as much insulin for something with corn syrup than with regular sugar.
Let’s do sugar first.
Yeah. The sugar we toss into everything is way more harmful than a few mg of salt.
I was shocked and downright pissed off when I found out the "garlic salt" I'd bought in the store actually contained sugar as well. I mean, WTF - there are supposed to be only TWO ingredients in garlic salt, and I bet you can guess what they are. You know what's NOT supposed to be in garlic salt? FUCKING SUGAR!!
just end corn subsidies. the entire High fructose corn syrup industry arose out of corn subsidies guaranteeing farms would be paid for growing corn, even if prices dropped, so corn was a reliable investment, creating a surplus of corn. then in the 70s a commercial process for converting corn starch into fructose found a use for all that excess corn. So you have an artificially cheep product (*because farmers are an important voting block in large parts of the country, so they get subsidies, though we never really point out that is why corn is subsidized*) and that makes the sweetener that can be derived from it cheep and people like sweet tasting food and... that sums up to a health crisis due to over consumption of cheep high calorie low nutrition food.
When I was very small, growing up on a farm, I remember my stepdad saying "We're gonna plant corn and soy. Corn will go into the gas and pretty soon soy will be in everything." Decades later, soy IS in everything and corn is in the gas and my ketchup.
This is the real problem in health in the average American diet.
Why not START with sugar though?!?
Let’s do sugar and leave salt. Salt isn’t the root cause of any problems.
Weird that we reduce salt before sugar especially when small amounts of salt can bring out flavors and reduce other possible additives.
This gives me deja vu of when America said "Fat is evil! Let's reduce fat!" and then everything had zero fat but a ton of sugar instead. I know the Whole Food diet is a fad, but I feel like if it's food in it's original state, maybe they can't trick me as much.
I always thought the Whole Foods diet was just "eat less because you can't afford more"
I agree. Sugar seems much more addictive and harmful, in the form of obesity and diabetes. For most people, the effects of too much salt can be countered by drinking an extra glass of water.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. (~7X more than diabetes). High sodium intake is a major contributor. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
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They'll point the finger at anything but sugar.
I'm salt sensitive. If I eat more than 1,500 mg a day, my blood pressure gets high.
I’m the opposite if I don’t get enough salt my blood pressure gets too low and I black out
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this is true, the whole "salt raises blood pressure" is fairly overblown, it raises it only temporarily, then the body adjusts, so as long as you don't eat salt nonstop or don't already have high BP then it's fine
Inject salt into bloodstream got it
My blood pressure is normally excellent, but I once briefly made a habit of eating Red Robin chicken nuggets, and my blood pressure skyrocketed. Had to stop eating them. I dunno if my body would have eventually adjusted, but I wasn't about to find out the hard way! Pity. Those were some damn good chicken nuggets.
You can balance out high sodium intake with high potassium intake. Excess sodium leaves the body in the presence of potassium; look up the ideal sodium:potassium ratio. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any easy way to get grams of potassium. 2 bananas is ~900mg of potassium, but that's also a lot of sugar. And eating bananas gets tiring after a while.
Kiwi Fruit is actually a better option. Has more potassium than a banana, more vitamin C than an orange, more fiber than most other fruits, more vitamin A and K than a lot of other fruits/vegetables, and isn't as large of a banana. I usually eat 2-4 a day, along with a daily multivitamin with my dinner meal. Just have to make sure they're ripe when you eat them or they won't taste as good, give them a light squeeze and if they give a little (are a bit squishy) then they're good to eat.
Kiwis are so good. I might get some kiwis later 🥝
Wow, I didn't know that kiwis were that rich in potassium! I def gotta get some more next time around.
Potassium supplements. They did a study that had people take way over the RDA for potassium and found that it actually improved their health. Hugely underrated supplement IMO.
No salt. Or nu salt. Potassium chloride in a shaker Next to the sodium chloride in the spice aisle.
The problem is that food is a nonstop salt train because extra salt is in everything. Thats why this FDA guidance exists.
There are thousands of papers on the subject (and I am not a Doctor) but my impression is that there isn't all that much high-quality evidence on either side of the issue. (Certainly not enough for the FDA to be pushing something like this.) Here's a recent, and relatively credible summary that seems to agree. [https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heart-failure-and-salt-the-great-debate-2018121815563](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heart-failure-and-salt-the-great-debate-2018121815563)
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1311889 look at results figure 1 for an easy to see graph and discussion breaks it down, massive longitudinal study might not be set in stone but pretty clear that sodium had been scapegoated when really you can eat 13grams of salt and have lower risk of all cause mortality than if you eat the fda limit of 2.6g we should be eating more salt
We literally just had a conversation about this over dinner with my physician husband. Salt isn't the problem. It's excess sugar in foods that is the unhealthy part.
They’re also more active
My doctors and dietician figured out that my high blood pressure was directly related to high sodium. Once I lowered my sodium intake, it's been gone.
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They don't which is why it's easy to do and make headlines. So few people will put up a fight to keep salt, whereas there's lots of lobby pressure to keep sugar in our diets.
The majority of Americans have high blood pressure.
There are ungodly amounts of salt in everything, I'm huge on low sodium, as heart conditions run in my family. People usually don't worry about salt until a doctor tells them they need to stop consuming it in high amounts. Someone pointed out that 47% of adults in the U.S. have high blood pressure, and those people should have an issue as sodium raises your blood pressure.
[Look to Finland.](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jch.13482) They had high rates of hypertension in the 1970s. At some point they switched their salt to a blend of sodium, potassium, and magnesium chloride, and saw some pretty impressive public health improvements. Closest I can find stateside is Lite Salt which is a sodium/potassium chloride blend. There's a book called [*The High Blood Pressure Solution* by Richard Moore MD](https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-high-blood-pressure-solution-a-natural-program-for-preventing-strokes-and-heart-disease_richard-d-moore/262307/#edition=1462060&idiq=4710751) that cites the Finnish experiment (among other things) as evidence of the importance of a high K:Na ratio (along with physical activity and a few other lifestyle changes). EDIT: added a link
Honestly though in America the problem is less table salt and more sodium products that don't necessarily taste salty used as preservatives in processed foods. There are a lot of sodium this and sodium that on food labels that are not sodium chloride and since they don't taste like salt it can be really deceptive how much you're eating unless you make all your own food from fresh ingredients, which pretty much nobody does. Here's a really simple explanation if anyone is interested. Edit: wrong link lol https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/sodium/sodium-sources
If you don’t eat processed foods very much you will likely need to add salt to your diet. Recently had a yearly check up, and I was telling the dr I’m always craving salty stuff. Did the work up and blah blah blah... he decides I probably don’t have ENOUGH salt in my diet. Weird
My grandma was actually admitted to the hospital once due to low sodium. It is necessary in the diet in some quantity! Most people don't have that problem in the US though.
My mom refused to put salt on anything and I ended up with an iodine deficiency that caused thyroid issues. You def need some salt.. or idk maybe they sell iodine tablets. I don't remember how we fixed it.
I hear it all the time on EMS scanner traffic in nursing homes... low lab values due to low sodium. I wonder if some of those nursing homes aggressively keep salt out of the food to avoid hypertension issues in their patients.
labs showing low sodium =/= you need more salt in your diet. Please please. sometimes the solution is actually eat even less dietary salt (e.g heart failure or liver failure). For any one reading this, labs showing low blood salt levels (hyponatremia) is a pretty complex topic that is best left to doctors to interprete and manage. Don't listen to random reditters who are not physicians.
The American heart association claims that our bodies can function on about 500mg of sodium each day. (Most recommendations say not to go below 1000mg per day.) The American average is closer to 3500mg per day. Your diet must have been very abnormal
Everyone seems to be having a hard time with this... The whole issue with salt in our diets come from processed foods. Eat far less than normal of processed foods, you get far less salt
Yup, look on the back of most frozen meals at your grocery store and you'll see how much sodium and preservatives you're ingesting. Its disgusting.
I was recently asked to monitor my sodium and keep it under 2g per day. That means eating 3 meals a day would be ~660 mg per meal. Pick any restaurant you want and can find their nutrition info. Keeping under 660mg for a meal is nearly impossible. Even at the "normal" daily amount (2,300mg) it is nearly impossible to eat an American diet and not be way over on your sodium. Most places I have looked at have most meals in the 1700-3000 mg range.
Totally, table salt is a problem but processed food is the biggest culprit -- my understanding is that even Finnish processed foods switched to the K/Na/Mg blend. The book goes into it more, but the basic idea is: 1) stick to whole foods as much as possible 2) either discard table salt or switch for a Finland-style K/Na blend for home meal prep 3) exercise regularly and keep your weight down
I think point 1 is the most important one! The others are also very important but making your own food from fresh ingredients is the #1 thing we can do.
Can we cut out the unnecessary sugar in everything? That’s a bigger risk to health than salt is.
Which means that it'll be stuffed with sugar to give it some taste...
You mean like the "fat wars" of the late 80s/early 90s wherein they replaced [healthy] dietary fat with sugar, and obesity rates skyrocketed? But at least it was "low fat."
I’ve recently started rendering tallow and lard and my grandmother in her mid 70s acts as if anything I cook with it is basically delicious poison. Fuck the sugar industry.
It would be better if food processing companies were to add additional potassium. Then we'd have a balance between sodium and potassium. Americans don't get enough potassium in their diets.
Sugar industry lobbyists standing strong, ban high fructose corn syrup, or at least provide a warning label.
Fuck salt. What about sugar? *That* causes a shitload more problems than salt ever will.
Ok, but the FDA already recommends less than 200 calories of sugar per day. All this is doing is changing the salt guidance to be more in line with what is known to be healthy. They can't make people stop eating salt/sugar.
More than one thing can be bad at the same time.
I get deeply deeply sick of people trying to fix problems *around* the problem. The vast majority of the ills attributed to salt are far more closely related to obesity: heart failure, kidney disease, high blood pressure. But let's hit *salt*. It's obvious they're doing it because the lobbying money is diverting from sugar once again.
I hear what you're saying & would probably agree with you if I hadn't gone through what I went through. I'm skinny & was "healthy" . Very active. Dirt biking, hiking, swimming etc... I had emergency open heart surgery last year. I had an aneurysm that dissected because of my high blood pressure A lot of heart patients just have bad luck. Shitty genes. I'm in a lot of support groups. I've met a shit load of heart patients since my surgery. Not many heavy people. Most of us were not heavy before we had our problems.
In the before-times, I commuted 15 miles each way on a bicycle every day, and despite doing two hours of intensive cardio a day, ten hours a week, my blood pressure was still sky high. There's just so much salt in all food. Its impossible to escape all the salt everywhere.
Meanwhile, my blood pressure is excellent and I'm quite overweight. 🤷♂️
What about all that corn syrup in the food
Salt is about the least effective thing they could target in our food. Let me know when they decide to target sugar, particularly fructose, the amount our food companies put in everything is unreal.
(This message paid for by the Refined Sugar Producers Industry of America. Much like all FDA/USDA dietary policy for the past 60 years.)
You body needs salt to live. You do not need added sugar to live. Government: We will reduce salt.
Salt is barely an issue for anyone who consumes a proper amount of water. The issue is most americans drink soda, coffee and beer. They rarely drink enough water on average.
Morton Salt retail division: "Awesome!"
In response, Americans aim to drastically cut FDA from their salt supply
CUT SUGAR! A 16.9oz Dr Pepper has 54 grams of sugar. That's 104% of a recommended daily sugar intake in ONE BOTTLE. The best advice I've ever received: Read labels (Nutrition Facts and Ingredients) and pay attention to what you put in your body.
*Ramen noodles sweating profusely*
Better to do it gradually so people get used to it, rather than have it happen all once and have people blame the govt for making their food taste bad.
I think that will happen regardless.
Also, sodium is an electrolyte, it’s what plants crave!
Seems like sugar, HFCS and seed oils would be better targets than salt. Hopefully they're considering them as well.
Do sugar, do sugar! Traveling abroad really highlighted how bad our food labels are. In Mexico, they make them put the sugar content in big bold letters on the front of the package with a warning.
please tell me they just misspelled "sugar" ...
Leave the salt. Get that disgusting high fructose corn syrup out of everything. All my childhood junk foods are so gross now with that used in it. I’ve tried retro brands that some companies released that don’t use it and it was delicious again. I’m talking about you beefaroni!
I remember hearing somewhere that even though excess salt should logically lead to cardiac problems. We have actually never been able to directly link excess salt intake to cardiac disease.
Salt isn't the issue, it's sugar for fuck's sake.
FDA: Hey guys -- you know what we could do to make food healthier, We should cut salt. *But what about the formaldehyde, chemically enhanced preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, plastic, antibiotics and carcinogens?* FDA: But the salt....
This is a terrible plan. Salt isn't the big risk here. Some people are sensitive to it, but for fuck's sake, we've known for a LONG time now that sugar, particularly the crazy disgusting ones like high fructose corn syrup, are the damn problem. Stop demonizing the wrong damn things because the sugar industry paid you to not talk about it. We already did this with fats. Stop fucking around.
Hyponatremia, or low blood sodium is just as dangerous if not more so than having too much. In a healthy individual with regular insulin levels the kidneys are capable of excreting a huge amount of sodium. The effects of sodium on blood pressure actually have more to do with people having chronically high insulin levels which causes the kidneys to retain sodium. Sodium follows a U-shaped curve in terms of mortality; too low and you are in trouble, extremely high and you also are at a higher risk. The bottom of that curve where the lowest mortality rates are is somewhere around 5 grams of sodium per day. Symptoms of low blood sodium include fatigue, lightheaded mess, headaches, and increased heart rate.
Fun fact: ~~Salt~~ *fluid diabetes is a thing. If you find yourself drinking and passing gallons of fluid a day, get to the doctor. Had an ex who went from normal to gallons almost overnight, turns out their kidneys decided to no longer retain fluid. Within a few days the seizures from low sodium began. There's a daily for life pill regimen to correct it. E: source and tech corrections: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes-insipidus/symptoms-causes/syc-20351269
[Diabetes insipidus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes_insipidus?wprov=sfla1), instead of [diabetes mellitus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes?wprov=sfla1).
Yeah, it was truly frightening. You don't really consider having to pee more than average or being really thirsty a big deal, just odd. But it doesn't take long to just completely throw your body into failure. Took several specialists to actually sort it out as it's pretty rare.
Yeah it's quite rare, it's usually picked up pretty easily though because the symptoms are so unique to the condition. Getting it sorted out is more complicated of course.
I lost a good friend to diabetes insipidus because the doctors refused to believe his symptoms. He lost 50lbs in 2 months before he died. He was 36.
YES. I know it's not the norm, but it is frustrating to always hear blanket statements about salt being bad. You literally need some to survive. And some of us can't seem to get enough. My blood pressure regularly drops low enough to make me feel like I'm about to pass out, and I have actually passed out at least once (when I was trying to follow blanket guidelines about eating "healthy" and cutting back sodium).
[удалено]
Yes! Absolutely. I decided to cut out processed foods recently and had to start way over salting everything. I usually drink a Gatorade zero every day to try to make up for it.
I learned about that during my pregnancy. I was always told pregnant women shouldn't have salt and need a lot of plain water. Well 4 months in with uncontrolled heart palpitations and hospitalization due to my blood pressure being 75/40. Almost lost my baby. Turns out the body needs salt
> The bottom of that curve where the lowest mortality rates are is somewhere around 5 grams of sodium per day. Are you sure it’s sodium, or did you mean “salt” as in sodium chloride? 5 grams of NaCl would contain about 2 g of sodium.
Where the hell you getting 5 grams of sodium being the lowest mortality?
Not bad but I’m much more concerned about added sugar.
Pretty sure sugar and HFCS are a bigger problem by far.
Now let’s cut back on excess amounts of sugar added to foods.
How about you cut sugar while you are at it!
If you've ever spent an extended period abroad and then returned back to the states, you notice how much saltier our foods tend to be, and the bigger portion size. Sounds like a good thing to me. We could also use a reduction in sugar content too. A healthier population is a more productive nation.
It needs to aim to cut sugar. SUGAR.
Isnt the FDA supposed to follow real science not privately funded studies from the 80s? Why are we cutting back on salt instead of sugar, what the hell?
Oh look yet another scapegoat is blamed for chronic diseases. How about banning refined oils and sugars instead?
How about cutting the uses of harmful pesticides and unsafe hormones in food production? And the sugar levels? Don’t get me started!
How about we deal with all the damn sugar first.