Category: Food

Salt

Table of Contents

Open-ended

This post is dated 2018. It has been written to be updated.

Salt

Salt

Salt (sodium chloride) is a chemical agent used to cook or process food. Saltiness is regarded as one of 5 main tastes. (Scientists have not, as of 2018, identified a distinctive taste receptor for salt.)  Sodium is an essential nutrient, but consuming more sodium than the minimum has no health benefits.

Mark Kurlansky’s excellent book Salt: a World History (2002) tells of the uses of salt to brine or pickle soybeans and vegetables in China (>700 BCE), to cure hams by the Celts (Gauls and Germans) and Romans (>100 BCE),  the fermentation of fish to make Garum (Greek, Phoenician, Meditaranean, Roman fish sauce >900 BCE ) and oriental fish sauces ( China >2000 BCE ). The production of salt may have started about 8,000 years ago. Until the invention of canning and refrigeration, salt was used to preserve food.  Salt was and still is used to control or kill bacteria or yeast to preserve food (salting, cure, brine or pickle).  Some foods were to heavily salted they had to be soaked to make them palatable. Salt is use also to manage the activity of “good” yeast and bacteria.

Modern Food

Food processing includes:

  • harvesting, drying & milling raw plant products including grain, beans, vegetables and fruit;
  • raising, slaughtering and butchering animals;
  • processing agricultural products to commodies used to “make” food – e.g. flour, powder and syrop;
  • combining processed commodities to manufacture food product including products that can be served after adding water, or warming them with appliances;
  • packaging a product for transportation and sale
  • (pre)cooking food into heat and serve meals.

Sodium and Health

Sodium

Sodium is an essential nutrient but excessive sodium consumption is a health risk.

The upper limits for sodium intake, in milligrams, per day:

These numbers are not stated in ranges for body type, or weight.  The limits are stated as a single number for an “average” adult and a second, lower number for persons diagnosed with hypertension, or defined by age or other statistical risks. The 2,300 milligram figure is the sodium in 5,700 mg. (5.7 grams) of salt – about a teaspoon (the unit of volume). Exceeding the upper limit is risky and harmful.

Other sodium compounds added to processed food: sodium bicarbonate, sodium citrate, sodium phosphates, sodium pyrophosphate, monosodium glutamate.

Salt, Sugar, Fat

Processed foods used chemical additives – for instance as a binding agents – e.g. to make starch and water into a pudding. In Salt, Sugar, Fat (2013), investigative journalist Michael Moss looked at those ingredients as additives, and at aspects of the food industry:

  • financial and market constraints; investor and corporate governance
    • selling more product is the main goal;
    • input costs are already controlled; the costs of getting goods in front of customers is the main production cost,
  • marketing and social engineering:
    • the quasi-science of flavour,
    • consumer expectations: convenience, flavour, texture;
  • product development and financial engineering:
  • the politics of getting the food industry to state the contents of its products.

Michael Moss reported on his interviews with personnel at Cargill, a major supplier of salt to the food processing industry in his 2010 New York Times article “The Hard Sell on Salt” and in Salt, Sugar, Fat. Without salt:

  • The Cheez-It was not palatable. The colour faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was medicinal;
  • Corn Flakes tasted metallic;
  • Eggo waffles evoked stale straw;
  • The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no butter, disappeared;
  • Many products, including meat products, develop what food industry people called Warmed Over Flavour, described as cardboard or damp dog hair.

Salt, Sodium and Public Heath

Public health campaigns in the 1980’s concentrated on avoiding sprinking salt on prepared food by the (with a salt shaker/salt grinder).  Then public agencies set limits and compelled food processors to put salt on product labels.  Disclosure of sodium in product labels for processed foods is required by law in North America and Europe. Campaigns moved on to changed limits, better labels, more information, labels on menus, etc. 

The food industry wants to identify whatever it produces and sells as safe, nutritious, and authentic or wholesome. The food industry considers labelling and public health information represents the foot of government on the throat of free enterprise. In part it promotes scepticism about the science that says excess salt is bad. Michael Moss looked resistance from food manufacturers and processors in the Salt section of his book Salt, Sugar, Fat. Marion Nestle has provided commentary on the Food Politics web site.  (Search Salt in the search bar or search for posts tagged Salt).  Scientific American published one article in July 2011 “It’s Time to End the War on Salt” discussing the inconclusiveness of clinical trials.  A week later, Scientific American published an inteview with Marion Nestle who said:

But if you do a clinical trial where you try to put large amounts of people on a low-salt diet, you just don’t see much difference between the people who say they eat a lot of salt and the people who say they don’t eat a lot of salt. In clinical trials the relationship doesn’t show up. Two reasons: One that it’s impossible to put a population of people on a low-salt diet. Roughly 80 percent of the salt in the American food supply is in foods before people eat them—either in processed food or in restaurant food. Because so much salt is added to the food supply and because so many people eat out, it’s impossible to find a population of people who are eating a low-salt diet. They basically don’t exist.

… There’s a proportion of people in the population who are sensitive to salt—if you lower their intake of salt, then their blood pressure goes down. There’s another (probably larger) percentage of the population who doesn’t respond. They are people who can eat as much salt as they want and still their blood pressure is low.  So you have this curious anomaly where whenever you do a clinical trial you get these complicated, difficult-to-interpret results that don’t show much of an effect. But everybody who works with patients who have hypertension think they do better [on a low-salt diet].

Scientific American, July 14, 2011, The Salt Wars Rage On: A Chat with Nutrition Professor Marion Nestle

The food industry has created some products that are made without adding salt and other sodium compounds.  It’s a niche – another diet option. “Healthy” (whole grain, high fiber, low-fat, and organic)  products often are as salty as anything else, or more (e.g. low-fat mayonnaise in a product line may have 150-200% the sodium of the regular mayonnaise). Reduced” or “low” sodium statements by manufacturers are generally mere puffery. “No added sodium” generally means no sodium, but not always.

Living without salt means learning to taste differently.  It does not mean that everything is going to be bland.  People get habituated to the amount of salt they normally consume:

A group of young adult subjects was placed on self-maintained, low sodium diets for 5 months. Taste responses to salt in solutions, soups, and crackers were determined both during the 2 months preceding diet initiation and during a 5-month period when subjects lowered their sodium intake. Taste responses were also determined in a control group with ad libitum salt consumption throughout the same period. Perceived intensity of salt in crackers increased. The salt concentrations of maximum pleasantness in soup and crackers fell in the experimental subjects but not in the control subjects. These results demonstrate that the preferred level of salt in food is dependent on the level of salt consumed and that this preferred level can be lowered after a reduction in sodium intake. The implications of these findings for the maintenance of low sodium diets are discussed.

Bertino, Beauchamp & Engelman The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 36, Issue 6, 1 December 1982, Pages 1134–1144

Also “Effect of dietary sodium restriction on taste responses to sodium chloride: a longitudinal study”, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 44, Issue 2, 1 August 1986, Pages 232–243

High Sodium Foods

Food products high in sodium:

  • Bread;
  • Sandwich spreads, condiments and salad dressings;
  • Processed meat, cold cuts, charcuterie;
  • Cheese;
  • crackers,
  • pickles, olives,.
  • Processed (flaked/puffed or shaped and toasted) breakfast cereal;
  • Tomato juice, vegetable juice and tomato-clam (some very high);
  • Processed spaghetti sauces and tomato sauces (very high);
  • Pizza – bread topped with tomato sauce, cheese, and whatever else (most very high);
  • Canned soups (monstrously high);
  • Soy sauce, hoisin sauce and fish sauce; miso paste (monstrously high).

Hypertension

I had a stroke in January. I was unconscious for a few days, hospitalized for a couple of weeks and off work for a few months.

I was hypertensive.

I thought I had been cooking healthy i.e. not using more salt than a recipe required etc.

My blood pressure dropped with medication during my recovery. My blood pressure got into a good range when I eliminated salt by switching to no sodium added broths and vegetables in cooking,baking bread in a bread machine on a lower salt formula for the recipes I was using and avoiding fast food, processed meats, cheese and processed (factory cooked) products.

Appliances

Since my move to Victoria, I have tried out and adopted some appliances and discarded others.
I started with a new set of Paderno stainless steel pots – purchased cheaply in 2006 when Canadian Tire dropped the Royale sets. I have added another sauce pan and the steamer and double boiler (not Royale but who cares). Capital Iron carries Paderno in Victoria. I expect the saucepans and the dutch oven to last for a while. The coated frying pans are standing up well although I think the coating in those pans will break down long before the pans wear out.
I bought a larger enameled cast iron dutch oven at Capital Iron which has become one of my favorite pots.
I started with some decent knives – some with the Superstore house brand and some of the midrange Wusthof Tridents.. I bought a couple new knives last year – I went to Mac for a 6 and a half inch Santoku and a 10 inch chef’s knife. The steel is superb – it stays sharp enough for ripe tomatoes with a few strokes of a diamond dressing hone.

Continue reading “Appliances”

Corn is not a Vegetable

Reuters Science News has a new story today reporting that the genome of maize has been sequenced, which reminds me that corn is a grain. It is a starchy carbohydrate. Like rice and wheat it could be cultivated to produce an abundant harvest that would feed villages and cities. It was a miracle food. It has been developed into a fertile, abundant and cheap, food resource. This has presented a business dilemma and challenge for farmers, food processors, distillers, and business people. How much corn can people be led to purchase and consume?
It turns up as an ingredient in processed goods. Michael Pollan provides an interesting and informative explanation of modern corn, corn farming and industrial food processing in The Omnivore’s Dilemna.
In the grocery store, it is presented identifiably in ground corn flour (grits, meal, polenta), as the main ingredient in corn chips, and as a fresh, frozen or canned product. In its raw forms, it is a nutritious and tasty item. It is a starchy grain, though, not a vegetable. Corn chips are fried or baked flat breads or croutons, made of starch and fat, just like potato chips.
A meal of meat, potatoes or rice, and corn, has protein and two kinds of carbs. I was looking at the labels on the (Green Giant) frozen foods in my freezer. Corn has over 150 calories in a 3/4 cup serving. Peas have about 90 calories for that size serving. Beans have about 35 calories. Mixed vegetables with corn, peas, beans and carrots are marked at about 70 calories.
I like corn. I plan to keep using corn as a occasional treat – corn on the cob is wonderful. I think it is a staple, but I have to think of it as a starch course like bread, pasta, potatoes and rice.

In Defence of Food

In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto has received favourable reviews in the LA Times and the Sunday Times (of London), and is a bestseller at this point in time. Michael Pollan is an experienced journalist and writer. He reviews a fair amount of history and science in a short book. He tries to talk about food from a common sense perspective. He is cautious about food science, which is often bad science. He is skeptical about anything the food industry, nutritionists and journalists say about food. All too often, claims about food are made to sell new kinds of processed foods, or to sell books, diet plans, supplements and fads.

His advice for eating well, to avoid malnutrition and obesity is: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” His idea of food is something pretty close to the original plant or animal – fresh, dried, frozen – cooked at home, not processed at a factory. Don’t buy or eat processed and packaged things that claim to produce health benefits or weight loss. If you want to avoid obesity, eat less.

Pollan advocates a natural diet, organic produce and Slow Food. He describes the Western diet as a disaster, and cites the studies of people who return to a traditional diet from a Western diet. He says that there are many traditional diets incorporating indigenous resources and cultural traditions – and all of them are healthier than the Western diet, which manages to produce malnutrition and obesity at the same time. Many of the themes of In Defence of Foods were developed in his previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In Defence of Food summarizes those themes and adds a discussion of the research into traditional diets – many of which are high in fats – and why people who stick to those diets don’t have the same problems with obsesity, diabetes and heart disease as people who eat a high-carb Western diet.

His main criticisms of the Western diet are that it is based on a handful of plants and animals raised under industrial conditions, heavily processed, mixed with chemicals that are not food, and served in gargantuan portions. He suggests that refined white flour, processed in mills with steel rollers is probably the first true fast food. It was the first food processed to the point that vitamins have been added back in to avoid contributing to vitamin deficiency diseases.
Throughout the book, he flirts with the French paradox. The French diet, like the Italian diet features wheat flour, carbs, meat, fat, sugar and alcohol, but it doesn’t seem to produce as much heart disease or other health problems. The French eat small portions at long meals, and to some degree they invest in diverse fresh ingredients.

The problem with food in America is that it is cheap, and served in large portions. North Americans don’t know when they are full or when to stop. The food processing industry has succeeded in securing a supply of cheap ingredients – partly because of government agricultural subsidies, and it sells lots, cheap, with the full force of modern marketing. Medicine, science and journalism don’t provide eaters with valid information, because science is too fond of trying to refine the idea of food into the idea of essential ingredients. The problem is that the science never gets it right. Science has not identified all the key nutrients and the idea of adding vitamins back in to make food healthy is, in his view, ridiculous. It isn’t completely ridiculous, but he makes a very good point about the marketing of processed food on the basis of health claims. Food should be nutritious – nutrition shouldn’t have to be a marketing point.

The history of food science has been blotted by disasters. Margerine was marketed as a healthy alternative to butter – it has been easier and cheaper to make, but the hydrogenation of vegetable oils has produced a toxic chemical. There is a long history of processed baby foods that prove to be nutritionally deficient. Nothing has come close to mother’s milk.

Pollan doesn’t think that buying fresh food is the answer, because the food industry has already colonized the production of fresh produce. Intensive production and specialized fertilizers grow large vegetables full of water and fertilizer. I was a little surprized – I thought that the people who said that fresh produce was lacking in nutrients were trying to sell vitamin supplements, but it turns out that there is something to that claim. He doesn’t push vitamin supplements though – he suggests finding organic vegetables grown in healthy soil, and he encourages home gardening.

In large part, he encourages investing more money in good real food, more effort in cooking it, and more time enjoying it, eaten slowly, in the company of family and friends, and savored. My main criticism of the book is that his recommendations are aimed at affluent Westerners who can afford to purchase organic produce. He ignores the green revolution – the genetic programs that produced healthy high yield grains and other scientific advances, in favour of a rather Arcadian view of life. He does, in the end, align himself with the organic food snobs, as Rob Lyons’s review in Spiked agrees. But Pollan makes a lot of sense.

Continue reading “In Defence of Food”

Light Exercise

Link to an excerpt from Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, a new book by Gary Taubes, published in New York Magazine, The Scientist and the Stairmaster.
Taubes says that the idea that light exercise is a way to lose weight has been oversold. He agrees that light exercise is a good idea, but light exercise doesn’t burn enough calories to let us eat and drink as much as most of us, in North America, tend to. He also supports some of the criticisms of the dominance of carbs in diet.

Tap Water is Safe Clean and Green

Is the sale of bottled water one of the great triumphs of marketing? When it turns out that Aquafina sells filtered tap water, what is the value of buying bottled water, as opposed to tap water, or filtering your own water?
Buying many high end bottled water brands appeals to snob value – the idea that we should pamper ourselves and that our tastes are more refined than mass tastes. To some extent, that applies to any bottled water. Modern marketing has a way of making everyone feel they are the best sheep in the flock.
“Kick the Bottled Water Habit” is an extract from Tom Standage’s new book, A History of the World in Seven Glasses.
Standage is a little too kind to public water supply. It isn’t always safe, and it often has a smell or taste, associated with the source, or with the level of chlorination, or with sitting in old cast iron and lead pipes before it reaches the tap. Seattle has good water. Winnipeg used to have good water, drawn from the bottom of a Canadian Shield lake, but algae growth in the reservoirs, aging aqueduct and water main infrastructure and chlorination means that in July, August and September, tap water smells like the contents of a leaf filled swimming pool. But you can get rid of that by running it, letting it stand and pouring it into a container for drinking water, or by filtering it. So go figure what the convenience of buying bottled water is worth.
That’s a nice thing to be worried about in the first world. What about the third world? Leaving aside the anti-corporate rhetoric, clean safe water is huge issue. I want to see that movie Thirst some time.

Free Range Chicken Snobs

Mick Hume, editor of Spiked, happily skewered Hattie Ellis, author of Planet Chicken in his review, Stop Planet Chicken, I Want to Get Off. He says that if she is able to view the production of abundant cheap food as a bad thing, her values are off. Ellis is not a vegetarian but she thinks that it is only acceptable to kill and eat chickens if they have lived a full and healthy life. The problem with Hattie Ellis’s viewpoint is that she would let her sentimental ideas about the welfare of chickens and her ideas about natural foods interfere with things that have made it possible to provide affordable nutrition to people who don’t have the time to raise free range chickens or the time and money to buy them.

Continue reading “Free Range Chicken Snobs”

Olive Oil Weekend

My bottle of olive oil became dangerously depleted this weekend. I had run out of burger patties and had spied a box of what I took to be bison burger patties in Thrifties. It was a solid frozen block of ground, and has been in the freezer for 8 months since that regrettable purchase. I thought about using it in a chili, but inspiration took hold on Saturday. I have a venison cookbook by A.D. Livingstone, the food writer for Gray’s Sporting Journal, a magazine for upscale rednecks (think Cy Tolliver in Deadwood). Livingstone had a recipe for venison Moussaka. I used at least a cup of olive oil to sauté two eggplants. Livingstone’s recipe calls for making a sauce with 1 and half cups of milk, and a couple tablespoons each of flour and butter, seasoned with a pinch of nutmeg. If he had said it was a bechamel sauce, I might have passed on the dish as too pretentious, but Livingstone just plugged it into the recipe. Livingstone believes in good food more than redneck values, obviously. My only mistake was using a liberal sprinkle of nutmeg in the bechamel instead of a pinch. It was fair bit of work – slice, dry and sauté eggplant, a cooked meat sauce, a bechamel, and baking it, but not more than baking lasagna.

That started a Greek theme. I haven’t had a Greek salad in ages, and the idea of a salad without lettuce was appealing. I found a recipe called Dad’s Greek Salad at Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes site. Elise is also a resource for Movable Type fixes. The recipe is larger than I need. I made full recipe of sauce (two tablespoons of lemon juice is the juice of small lemon) and put about 2 thirds in a jar in the fridge, and then used only about one third of the vegetables.

On Sunday I made a simple pasta dish, with chickpeas. A few cloves of garlic, minced, sautéd in olive oil, a can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained, a pile of chopped parsley, fresh ground pepper, all simmered on low heat for half an hour, served on ditali – short macaroni style pasta. I got the recipe from Joseph Orsini’s Italian Kitchen – a nice find in Russell’s (Used) Bookstore.

Everything had left overs – two thirds of the moussaka went in the freezer. Cooking with wine is fun too, if I put the sharp knives away before I open the wine.

Cheesy Goodness

When I traveled to Winnipeg last Christmas, I picked up the January 2007 issue of Discover Magazine, which is the annual stories of the year issue. At number 14, a medical story. In the February issue, Killer Fat. Both stories deal with the health effects of transfats – more precisely trans-fatty acids – and their ubiquity in snack foods manufactured with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.
The Killer Fat article was the first article that I have read that explained the metabolic role of fat. It makes sense that over a few million years of mammalian evolution, body forms that extract and store the maximum energy from available food have tended to prevail. The references to the Wake Forest study where they fed monkeys unsaturated fats and transfats was up to the minute and just scary. I have since seen some references in running and/or cycling magazines to the fact that top athletes have, and need, enough visceral fat to provide energy for sustained performance.
Armed with this knowledge, I have been checking product labels, and avoiding anything with transfats.I was under the impression that transfatty acids were largely artificial, and disappointed to find that all cheeses seemed to have transfat. I had expected cheese to show some saturated fact, but I thought that cheese, in moderation, was a reasonable food choice. It adds protein and calcium, and is better choice for sandwiches and cooking than processed meats and red meat.
The transfats in raw beef, milk and milk products are natural. The US Dairy industry claims that the transfats in milk and cheese are not the same as the transfats created in the partial hydrogenation of vegetable oil. The US FDA distinguishes non-conjugated synthetic transfats from naturally occurring fatty acids with conjugated trans double bonds, such as conjugated linoleic acid in its food packaging regulations.
Walter Willett, a physician specializing in nutritional epidemiology has been a critic of the USDA Food Pyramid. Discover interviewed him in March 2003. He wrote an article for Scientific American Reports’s March 2007 issue on Eating to Live called Rebuilding the Food Pyramid. One of his criticisms of the food pyramid is that promotes the mantra that carbs are good, fat is bad. He thinks carbs in quantity are not good. They turn to sugar, and unused sugar goes to fat. He also points to studies showing that fat from fish and olive oil is beneficial on lowering “bad cholesterol” and suggests that vegetable oils are acceptable except for partially hydrogenated oils. I have the print issue. He says that the item to be avoided is “trans-unsaturated fatty acid”. He says that unsaturated (vegetable oil) fats are to be preferred to saturated fats – lard and animal fat. Oddly, fish oils, which are saturated, are not as bad. He hasn’t expressed an opinion on the differences between natural transfat and synthetic acids.
Food policy is a battleground for moralists, as well as scientists and economic interests. Morality is often driven by personal feelings, and people are disgusted by other people’s food choices. Grease and fat really offend some people, which has probably driven and skewed the medical and nutritional research, and the presentation of information to the public.
We can’t let the food industry – and I would include the organic and alternative industry along with the rest of the marketers – tell us what is safe. They are interested in selling us any damn thing that makes a buck. On other side, the majority of food experts are interested or self-serving players with their own interests, theories and systems – or just god-damned busybodies. As long as our health seems to be good and we are happy with our lives, we tend to ignore the whole subject and eat what appears right by common sense, availability and appetite. People have to be experts on their own health, and we have to be critical about the information we are fed.
I think seafood, olive oil, wine and cheese are on the menu. In moderation.