Doctors screaming at us about Sodium are uh...Follow

I did read your post. It was pretty much a bizarre rant about how sodium levels that the doctors recommend are absurd because if you eat nothing but iceberg lettuce you can achieve them, but would have to eat like a hundred servings of it to meet them. Then you listed off a bunch of foods that were all pre-processed foods and showed how they all had so much sodium that no way could you possibly keep your sodium level to what the doctors recommend.

So yeah. My response was that you ignored a pretty massive range of foods in between the processed foods you mentioned and the iceberg lettuce that you mentioned. Dude. I can only respond to what you actually write. You didn't do anything like list off a set of healthy meals you prepare and cook for yourself and the amount of sodium they have in them, and then make any sort of argument based on that. If you had, then you might have some kid of vague point about the doctors being absurd. But... well... you didn't.



I'm not baffled at all about the subject. The only thing baffling here is your posts. Maybe switch to decaf?

I've never seen someone so consistently dead wrong on such a broad range of topics.

Really; you should be in Guinness Book or something.

I thought I answered this already. Avoid processed and preserved foods and you should be able to eat pretty much any combination of foods without exceeding the 2.3g (that's 2,300mg for the math challenged) of daily sodium intake that's recommended for adults. Seriously, that's it. If you want a guide, try looking at this page. It's got a decent list of food items and how much sodium they have. One of the things that should immediately leap out at you is that most "natural" foods are pretty low in sodium. It's only when you start adding stuff like salted butter, stuff packaged in brine, and well... salts, that you get into trouble.

This is why, for example, canned ham is 1250mg, while grilled pork loin is only 70. Note, that the measurements are per 100g of item, so some of the measurements seem a bit "off". You're never going to put 100g of salt on your food, or even close to it (a "dash" is a tiny fraction of that), and those bullion cubes, while high in salt, are still "only" around 700mg of sodium per cube (you should really use actual stock, but in a pinch you can use these as long as everything else is not high in sodium). Also note that some of these are "finished foods", and make some assumptions about what is in them.

So a typical day for me might be a omelette (which, for me, isn't 1030mg as listed, since I'm using unsalted butter, two eggs, and just a dash of salt and pepper and some milk added to the eggs plus onions, peppers, and probably the highest sodium item; a small amount of diced ham inside, so probably more like 500mg or so (I could probably cut that in half by not putting the ham in there, but it's yummy so whatever). A side of toast, even with butter maybe adds another 50mg maybe (I make my own bread so there). A piece of fruit for lunch (i usually don't eat much for lunch), so that's negligible. Dinner might be something like pan herb crusted pork loin (some salt sprinkled on it so maybe 200mg or so here?), a side salad (the vinaigrette has some salt as well, but very little per serving, so maybe 50mg there?), and a rice pilaf (butter, rice, onions, celery flakes, turmeric, and stock, so probably the heaviest sodium item but still probably less than 1000mg in one serving). So I'm looking at somewhere around 1750mg of sodium for the day. Even buffering that a bit for possible additional sources I'm missing is still not putting me anywhere near the danger zone.

I'm honestly not sure what your issue is here. Avoid pre-packaged processed foods, and it's pretty easy to stay at or under the daily recommended amount of sodium. I could list off meals I make regularly, but it would all pretty much be the same. Pasta, chicken, steak, potatoes, rice dishes, heck, even "heavy" dishes like meatloaf or lasagna isn't going to tip you over if you're making it from scratch instead of buying it in the frozen food section and heating it up in the microwave.

Just... you know... cook.

Double-post, sorry. Four additional foodstuffs here. Lay's Classic Chips, which I might not have mentioned but they were here from my momma, who like me has mostly lived in utter poverty. Surprisingly healthy. If Mr. or Mrs. Lay's were a real person, I'd add them to my fetish and ************ list. We have secrets.

But no secret could deny "Idaho" sour-cream and chives instant taters. [eta: about $1.00 per, and 440 calories given. Very efficient, and also tastes good. And unlike also efficient mac-and-cheese, doesn't require milk and butter, though butter makes it yummier. And by butter I don't mean the cows gbaji has suckled himself as calfs and then squeezed their teats and then I don't know what happens between cow teat milk and butter but gbaji is surely involved and chastizing anyone in poverty for not doing that for themselves.]


But this is completely irrelevant to all, and even so much that a gbaji would come in like a rabid beast. So my final post here I guess. I quit smoking last October and want to stay healthy. I'll keep my little health sheets of affordable foodstuff, rather than growing one's rabbits or Saudi princes in one of my 300 side houses.

Uh, and , again last post...


And no pressure on answers, but my experience is in dollars and cents being all one has and deciding whether keeping the heat on or a phone. Deciding and calculating calories/dollars if having to pay one of those bills. How to get family to survive. So...and I mean for decades on that. Not your trip to Tibet or other poseur safaris upon the destitute. And millions of black families have had black kids trading dope, some even selling ***...due to zero alternative income, including from the only Western nation in the world that doesn't have Universal Health Care, etc.

Ehhhh







I out-HTMLed all you suckers! Including gbaji, who thinks instead of buying a 2/$4 Sweet *** chef Boyardee me and my mama could eat and enjoy, thinks instead we should have our own tomato farm and cows or goats or whatever that "meat" in it is, and wheat farms.



Edited, Jun 24th 2018 1:41am by Palpitus1

Sucks, doesn't it.

Possibly both.

Thanks gbaji, and lolgaxe and others.

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

Can't we just agree you're both wrong?

Salt doesn't bring out the flavor in any food because there is no such thing. Salt tastes like salt. Humans evolved to enjoy the salt due to its previous rarity. From a flavor perspective there isn't anything wrong with adding as much salt as you enjoy to the food after it is cooked.

I'm also not aware of salt chemically reacting in any significant fashion with any food outside of the sixth grade salt and vinegar penny cleaning experiments.

But... One of us is more wrong than the other!



There's a few thousand food industry experts who would disagree with that. Strongly.



Yes. Salt tastes like salt. If you eat direct granules of it. It can't taste like anything else in that form. Hence my comments about what you're actually tasting when you just sprinkle salt on the surface of finished foods at the table. When it's cooked into food though, it will taste different depending on the other ingredients in the food.



There's a word for not being aware of something. Why would you assume a simple chemical like salt wouldn't react chemically to other things? That's kinda odd.

This:


is a chemical reaction. And that's just what happens when you put it on your tongue. What do you suppose is happening when you put it in a soup and apply heat? Same deal. Same deal when mixed into your meatloaf, sauce, or whatever.

More info on flavor enhancement:




So basically exactly what I've been talking about all along. This is seriously like the first relevant article that came up with a simple google search, so it's not like this is hidden secrete knowledge or anything. I already knew this. Most people who learn how to cook beyond the basics know this. I'm not making some absurd claim here, but just repeating what is pretty commonly known.

Oh. And the next section of the article details pretty much the same stuff I've been saying about how over salting can lead you to acclimate to the higher salt flavor, leading to more salt consumption than may be healthy. Which leads directly to the issue of people applying table salt to their food because they started doing so as a child (usually) copying mom and dad, have acquired a taste for salt on their food, and now think that's what food should taste like, so they keep doing it.

I'll repeat my earlier statement way back at the beginning of all of this. I'm not the salt police. If you want to shake salt onto your food at the table, that's your choice. I happen to think it's something people should get out of the habit of doing, and perhaps avoid passing that habit on to their children as well. It's one of those things that if you stop doing it, your taste buds will adapt, and over time you wont miss the salt flavor. And you'll be healthier as a result.

Since applying salt to the finished food creates far more "salt flavor" than applying it during cooking (which shouldn't make the food taste salty at all actually), and it's the flavor of salt that we're adapting to here, you really have to knock off doing that in order to achieve results. Again though, that's up to each individual. We all have our bad habits that we know aren't good for us, but that we enjoy. This is no different.

Whether or not salt does stuff before, during, after, cooking aside, salty interacts with bitter differently than sweet and sour. Salt doesn't simply mask bitterness, it inhibits your mouth from sensing it. You add sweet to something bitter, you add a lot to just physically overpower the bitter. You add salt to something bitter, it reduces your ability to sense the bitter, and allows the sweet inside of it already to no longer be overpowered by the bitter.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/11/14/491376510/grapefruit-and-salt-the-science-behind-this-unlikely-power-couple

Pretty sure there was a Good Eats episode about it too. With a "Mary Poppins" and making fun of her "Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."

Edited, Jul 13th 2018 6:52am by TirithRR

Broccoli isn't unpleasant, you heathen.

Heaven, like hell, has several circles.


This is 1st circle food.


Edited, Jul 14th 2018 3:06am by Bijou