Salt in the diet
Generally speaking, Americans consume way too much salt. One of the things that helped me a lot in losing weight was first to lose salt shakers and other salt sources—and to cook my own foods, since processed foods are often saturated with salt.
Food companies, by the way, know perfectly well that excess salt can destroy your health, but the thing is, excess salt also makes the crap foods they create taste better, and salt (with fat and sugar) triggers an addictive response. Food companies are in business to maximize profits, not to ensure your health. Your health? That’s your problem.
I’m not condemning companies here, just pointing out what is obvious: that with the hypercompetitive capitalism now rampant in the US, your health is the least of a big company’s concerns. If you don’t see that, check out cigarette companies, who are eager to push their products onto people—and who vigorously fight any laws or regulations that hamper their selling to as many people as they can, especially their prime target: the young. The young, once addicted (and it happens fast with cigarettes) willl in all likelihood continue to be loyal customers throughout their (shortened) lives.
So it’s up to individuals to protect themselves from companies. We all get tricked from time to time, but we also can make take action against at least some threats, and avoiding salt is fairly easy once you set your mind to it.
You can also protect your children. Shari Roan reports in the LA Time how giving salty food to babies can create a lifelong addiction to salt with all the health effects that entails:
Feeding young babies solid foods such as crackers, cereals and bread, which tend to be high in salt, may set them up for a lifelong preference for salt, researchers reported Tuesday.
The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggests that efforts to reduce salt intake among Americans should begin early in life.
It is even possible, the authors said, that infancy contains a “sensitivity window” in which exposure to certain foods and tastes programs the brain to desire them in the future.
Americans’ fondness for salt, a source of dismay for health experts, is well known. A 2010 report from the Institute of Medicine concluded that the average intake of 3,436 milligrams a day for Americans over age 2 is more than double what is recommended, and that new government standards are needed to reduce the salt content in processed and restaurant food.
But little is known about the biology behind our love affair with salt. Researchers don’t even know what receptors are involved in tasting it. And though babies are born with a clear preference for sweet foods and an absolute distaste for bitter foods, they appear indifferent to salt in the first few months of life, said Leslie Stein, the lead author of the study and a senior research associate at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
“When you give 2-month-old babies salt water, they have no facial expression,” Stein said. “This could mean that the baby doesn’t detect the salt or just doesn’t give a hoot about it.”
To get at the issue, Stein and her colleagues first gave 61 healthy 2-month-old infants a mild solution of salt water . . .
Continue reading. The experimental results are quite interesting. From later in the article:
“It’s absolutely possible that exposure early on in life could change the way the salt taste signal is transmitted to the brain,” said Dr. James F. Battey Jr., director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, which funded the study. “The brain is very plastic at that time of life.”
