esides being full of chemical preservatives and artificial everything, there's one real drawback to most processed food; the salt. Virtually everything you buy in a package or can is loaded with salt, to the point that it's all you can taste in some things. True, some salt is required to give the cooked and canned food any taste at all, (when you compare canned food to fresh you can hardly believe the difference) but most products have so much that a person can very easily exceed their daily required salt with every single meal and most snacks during the day. This way hypertension lies...

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October 22, 2002

you ever read the ingredients on prepared food? I don't really recommend it, it's pretty depressing.  The unhealthy nature of what you're shoveling down is brought home quite clearly, and you'll feel guilty next time you just gobble a can of anything, or have a bag of chips, rather than making a salad or a baked potato.

The culprit tonight was biscuits.  Just a regular roll of them, 10-pack, store brand, homestyle.  10-13 minutes on 400º.  The nutrition info informs me that each serving has 100 calorie and 360mg of sodium, which is a whopping 15% of my daily recommended intake.  That's not so bad, until you notice that a serving size is 2 biscuits.  Be serious, the whole container is 7.5 oz, so 2 of them is 1.5oz.  Yeah, that's really going to fill you up.

So the whole roll (Which I just ate, minus one biscuit that I fed, uncooked, to the rats.  They go insane for raw dough.) is 500 calories and 75% of your daily salt.  And that's just the dry biscuits; no one eats them like that.  I had them with a light spread of margarine and some Raspberry preserves.  The margarine I have is crap store brand, soybean oil, and it's low on salt, but has a whopping 100 calories and 15% of my daily recommended fat per serving size.  Oddly the raspberry preserves have no added sugar (despite tasting like raw sucrose) and just 36 calories.  I go very light on margarine/jam, so probably just one serving of each total, over the absurdly-classified 5 (4.5) servings of biscuits.

And that's just something I had for a snack.

Canned goods are really bad, check out the sodium on them some time.  A 14.5oz/411g jar of Green Giant cut green beans has 20 calories but 17% of the daily recommended sodium.  Not so bad until, you guessed it, you check the serving size.  The can contains, "about 3 1/2 servings".  Which is about two bites per serving, once you drain off all the water.  I used to eat a big baked potato with green beans (and some chopped onion, and lots of red/black pepper, and melted sharp cheddar) almost every day, and I'd often go two cans of beans with a really big spud.  Just one can is 60% of your daily salt intake.

Two annoying things about canned goods.

You can get the low or no salt versions, but they never seem to have those in the big economy size containers (or in the 12 packs I get at Price Club), and they cost more!  Why the hell would it cost more to put less salt in?  It's not like they have to add other ingredients as preservatives.  Salt costs money, in theory. It should be cheaper with less of it, as well as to encourage people to eat healthier.  Is the salt industry run by the mafia or what?

The other canned good thing that sucks is can size. Forever, the standard can was 16oz.  About 6 or 8 years ago, one of the major brands in the US elected to change to 14.5oz cans, and lowered the price slightly.  This was an obvious scam, since they actually raised the price per ounce, while giving you less product.  But it was cheaper, so you had one brand in cans that looked identical (they changed the size by making them have slightly less circumference, keeping them the same height, since if they were shorter you'd notice they were smaller with the naked eye) to the others, and cost like five cents less.

Consumers, being the idiots they (we) are, bought more of the smaller ones, despite the other brands trying to hold at 16oz for a while. I remember Del Monte (or someone) having "Still 16oz!" in big letters on their cans for a while, before they gave in.  Once every brand was 14.5oz, the prices crept back up to what they were previously, back in the 16oz glory days, despite being 11% smaller.

Things like that make you wish for communist style market control, at times.

Anyway, my point is that processed and canned goods has a ridiculous amount of salt and fat, in most cases. You can think you're eating healthy, can 'o corn for lunch, maybe some chips, and bang, there's 150% of your salt for the day.

How about soup?  Campbell's soup is like 70% salt, it's unbelievable.  One 10.5oz can of Vegetarian Vegetable, taken from my own pantry, has 80 calories, almost no fat, but ouch, 36% of the days sodium.  It's just a tiny can of soup, how many servings can it have?  Try 2.5!  Yes, you mix it 1 to 1 with water, but that's just 21 oz of soup; you can drink that much in about a minute if you're in a hurry (trust me).  You eat the whole can, which everyone but children do, and that's fricking 90% of your daily sodium for less than a meal.  Instant noodles?  Those cheap little $.15 packets of Ramen are 2 servings at 190 calories/18% of your saturated fat/34% of your daily sodium each.  If you have a cup of instant noodles mixed with a can of vegetable soup (which I used to do all the time) you're hitting 150% of your daily sodium.  Throw in some crackers and you're pushing 200% sodium, just with lunch.

The irony is that I think most foods taste painfully salty.  I never add salt to anything I cook, other than FFs once in a while, and then it's just a little shake. I can't eat most corn chips without scratching off some of the salt, most places I end up shaking off their FFs, and I can't eat movie popcorn; it's just ridiculously salty.  Last movie I went to my mom got a big bag of it and we had to take it back after about 10 bites; it was just inedible.  (For us; everyone else seemed to be chowing down pretty enthusiastically.)

I would estimate that the average fast food eating American probably exceeds 1000% of the daily salt recommendation every day, and if you are the type of person who adds salt to everything pre-ingestion, you're doing even better. Is the sodium a bad thing?

Excessive salt consumption poses a threat to health, and is associated with hypertension, or high blood pressure. High blood pressure increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, and affects as many as twenty-five percent of adult Americans. Because high blood pressure does not usually cause pain or discomfort, many people with high blood pressure don't know they have it.

Hypertension isn't the only sodium-related health problem. Excessive sodium in the diet can also exacerbate kidney problems, and can greatly increase water retention, thus causing swelling, or edema.

It's funny that this article was the first return on my google search for salt-related health problems, since it covers most of what I've just been writing about for the last 15 minutes here.  I do wonder why manufacturers put so much salt on everything.  I mean 75% of your daily in biscuits?  Who puts salt on biscuits?  It's not like anyone uses it as a seasoning on them.  Baking requires salt in the recipe, to help them rise or something, but I'm sure they could use a lot less than they do.

The oddest thing is that really salty stuff, like corn chips, might not be that salty after all.  Bag of Kirkland Signature Tortilla Strips I have here, from Price Club, has just 4% sodium per serving.  Sure, it's a ridiculously small serving size (9 chips) but even if you have a quadruple serving, that's still less salt than 1/3 of a can of soup.  But chips taste like they are drowning in salt, so it seems like more.  People will cut back on chips to avoid salt.

It reminds me of at work, with cotton candy.  People will refuse to get their kid one since it's too much sugar, or will get one for like three kids to share.  Meanwhile every kid has a box of Cracker Jacks and a large Coke. As I recall, a 12oz can of Coke has like 8 teaspoons of sugar.  If you ball up a whole cotton candy, it will make a round ball about the size of a golf ball. That's 99% sugar, but you can dissolve that in a Coke and not taste any difference.  We've dissolved 5 or 6 cotton candy's in a medium cup of soda and the person drinking it hasn't noticed any difference in taste at all.  When we make the stuff, the machine takes about 2 big cups of sugar mixed with a sprinkle of flossine.  That will make 25 or 30 cotton candies, depending on how big you are going and how light and fluffy you make them.

Parents happily let the kid eat a box of Cracker Jacks and drink 40oz of soda, yet balk at a cotton candy, which would be maybe 1/40 of their sugar for the evening.  It's all perception, much like the seemingly healthy can of peas, vs. a bowl of corn chips, and the peas actually have 10x the salt.

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