I have tried to rationalize this in the past with various reasonable-sounding excuses such as:
-- Food without salt is like dimensionless tripe. Eating tripe is bad enough, but eating dimensionless tripe sounds ghastly.
-- I don't eat processed food so much and it is the "processing" that does you in and not the salt.
-- Salt has added iodine in it. I totally need it for my thyroid gland.
-- True story. I bought iodine-free salt by mistake and my brain stopped working for a week.
- HOW ELSE can I get iodine??! I don't want to eat fishy smelling kelp.
Other dubious excuses have included...
-- It's just salt. At least it's not sugar!
-- I drink a ton of water, surely it must wash it all away
-- Everyone needs to die someway. I choose hypertension.
-- Hypertension has genetic roots and no one in my family has it.
-- Wait, I think one of my grand parents died of a kidney failure. Does that mean there was a possibility there of an incipient hypertensive process at work? Oh well.. shut up. Everyone knows kidney failure is clearly multifactorial.
And some completely bogus ones:
-- Other people also like salt, as do I. It proves that I am not a mutant alien.
-- Salt is like the national food where I am from. It would be so unpatriotic to consume any less. No-one wants to be unpatriotic. I don't! Do you?
But everything really boils down to one truth.
-- Mmmmmm salty... OH SO SALTY!!!!
I don't like pretzels too much. I am not a big fan of peanut-butter either. But around thanksgiving, I somehow acquired a box of Anderson's peanut-butter filled pretzels.
(FINE. I intentionally bought it!).
Because all those perfect crystals of salt on the pretzels were too hypnotizing to resist. Needless to add, not only did I relish the crystals, as a bonus, I also ate the COMPLETE box of nearly 681 grams - all by myself, in ONE week. (That's 1.5 pounds, you non-metric heathen.) You know how much of salt that is? 8000 mg or 8 grams of salt. And of course, I didn't just eat these pretzels the entire week. I also ate other things also heavily laced with salt. And I go through 1 cylinder of salt in roughly 1.5-2 months.
I decided to finally own it and honestly tracked my sodium intake over the past three weeks. Turns out I consume more than 5000 mg (5g) of salt every day. To put it in context, my daily requirement of salt is around 1200 mg ~1.2g. That's more than 4x times over the healthy limit. It is starting to look like I am the druglord of all salt addicts across the planet.
So I guess one of my new year, new decade resolutions would be to cut down on the salt. They tell you to go easy on yourself when you make resolutions. But going easy might still mean around 3x salt consumption. I am going to have to tread the hard path strewn with rocks
Hit by a bus or sucked into a salty blackhole, (e:libertad). ;-)
The salt at the bottom is pretzel dust + salt powder - just not as pure as the stuck on crystals. Now that I think about it, I wonder how they stick them on like that. Maybe the whole process is not very healthful.
Iodine is a big deal. And it's pretty easy to drive it out of the system - so a constant source is important. Good idea about using a herb-mixed salt... but I doubt whether that would reduce the amount of salt I eat.
You see, for me its not about a habit of "shaking on extra salt" that many seem to have. I don't even have a proper salt shaker. As I cook, I salt my dishes directly from the cylinder and I keep adding salt at various stages of cooking till it "tastes right" - and I am finding out that my "tasting right" limit is waaay UP THERE.
I find it interesting how so many people seem to love that herb mix, do you have it at home? Maybe I could taste it at the party? :)
Hehehe @(e:metalpeter). I am make sure (e:mike) is in between you and me! He LOVES chips I think.
Also a salt/herb mix kind of helps for me. These containers have much smaller holes than a salt shaker and its not pure salt but a mix :::link:::
You Know at the NYE Party I think once the Ball Drops (Assuming you Are there) I'm going to hand you a Bag of Salt & Vinager Potato Chips and have it be the worlds record for breaking a resoulution! HA! Why is it by the way that the salt at the bottome of the bag doesn't taste the same as on the Pretzels????
A lot of times I find myself using salt to replace the savory flavor found in meat, mushrooms, etc. Maybe you are craving that.
I read that iodized salt was particularly important in the great lakes area as our soil is really poor in iodine content. They say now that you veggies come from all over, it is not such a big deal. I wonder if you ate so much local produce that it still matters.
That is a perfect picture for your post Tiny. Unless you get hit by a bus, my guess is that you will outlive all of us. Enjoy your salt for Christ's sake.