TheAgitator.com
Here Come the Sodium Wars
Monday, June 30th, 2008Nanny State trailblazers in the U.K. have a new plan to combat sodium intake: fewer holes in salt shakers. The idea is voluntary, for now. Though towns are using taxpayer money to manufacture the new shakers, in the hope that local restaurants adopt them.
and fill them with rock salt…ha!
The really amusing thing is that this policy assumes not only that we are too stupid to manage our own salt intake, but also too stupid to figure out how much salt is coming out of the shaker. This goes beyond treating us as children and approaches treating us as chimps.
First they came for the smokers… then they came for the fat people… then they came for those salt fiends…
If there’s anything people like more than freedom, it’s being told what to do.
I can understand (though not support) laws like this meant to discourage smoking. There really isn’t much good to be said for tobacco smoking.
But salt is necessary in a fundamental way and it is what makes food taste good. Plus, this is just a stupid idea.
And this is supposed to LOWER people’s blood pressure?!?!?
It is necessary, but how much salt is necessary, even for taste? For some perspective, the amount of salt in a single chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-a is about 55% of your RDA of sodium. The sandwich is only about 400 calories. Sodium levels in most of the food you eat out and get prepackaged in grocery stores are very, very high. This, not obesity, is probably why we have most of the heart disease issues we have now.
I think this is a hard issue. There is a lot of food out there which has WAY too much sodium in it, but the market hasn’t really responded to any group that wants to cut back on food consumption with lower sodium in normal products. However, if the FDA’s behavior is any indication, they’d probably take out too much salt, and we’d end up risking food poisoning from frozen foods. It’s really a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario right now with the way that food packaging companies are selling their goods.
Personal responsibility surrenders.
Again.
This is aggressively stupid for a lot of reasons, but the one that jumps out at me is the fact that it aims at what is the probably the least problematic source of sodium in your diet: the salt shaker.
As MikeT points out, there is a hell of a lot of sodium in processed and prepackaged foods. If this is all you eat, it doesn’t matter what you do with the salt shaker. Conversely, if you eat mostly fresh food you can shake away and probably not encounter much of a problem.
Not that any of this is the any of the government’s damn business. But if you are going to be paternalistic about public health, the least you could do is try to do stuff that will actually impact public health.
Christ, you couldn’t pay me enough to move to England these days.
Controlling sodium intake is nothing but hysteria. It does have a measurable but small effect on blood pressure. It might be useful for people who are prehypertensive to lower there blood pressure to the normal range, but by itself it is no cure.
The government has to stop protecting stupid people from themselves and allow evolution to work its magic.
We don’t usually salt our food at our house, and the one salt shaker we have already has only one hole in the top. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken a math class, but [see me count on my fingers here] fewer than one is …
As long as they don’t mess with our potassium (which is number one potassium in the world. All other countries have inferior potassium).