I can't tell you what my blood pressure is as I can never remember those numbers but I can tell you that every time I go to the doctor and they take my BP they're all like "Wow! It's perfect."
Most of my salt intake comes in Tabasco sauce -- it goes on just about everything I eat. I consume an amazing amount of Tabasco. I could single handedly keep the company in business.
I still sometimes salt my Tabasco.
I guess I'm one of the lucky ones.
@tycoon,
tycoon wrote:jespah wrote:
Excess salt is the enemy of weight loss/control -- even men can retain water if they ingest too much salt.
Let me ask a groundfloor question. Why would the retention of water be so bad, except for the obvious extra weight it means? Carrying extra fluid is quite different from carrying extra fat, no?
It's because of the weight. A pint = a pound. So it can be very discouraging, if you are trying very hard and it doesn't appear like you're losing.
As we speak, I am slow roasting a brined chicken.
I'm not a big salt person, but it does make a very tender boid.
On the salt thing, some are especially sensitive and some are slightly sensitive and some are not at all, at that point in time or maybe for future decades. Presently there is no test to nail that down.
I have hypertension, so far not acute, and my sodium is on testing at the low end of normal, or was that day. I still watch the salt, I don't need bp rising.
I think of salt as part of my old enthusiasm for salty-grease-followed-by-dessert. a kind of eating I've gotten away from. I now, after a bunch of years, find a lot of food way too surgary or way too salty.
I did cook shrimp over a bed of sea salt, one day about a year ago. Gaaaah, no.
It was salt with shrimp flavor.
@dyslexia,
Alton missed quite a few important points. The reason the tongue tastes salt is that it used to be difficult to find in nature. We used to get say 50 - a few hundred mg per day in our diet, and the kidney is designed to hold onto salt. The average American diet gets 2000 to 3000 mg daily easy. In the short term, some extra salt may be ok. But, too much salt is damaging in a few ways: 1) Do you know if you have salt-sensitive high blood pressure? It's really hard to know. 2) He forgot to mention heart disease. Lots of hospital admission for heart failure right after Thanksgiving and Christmas in people w/ salt-overload. 3) Salt has to leave the body, and it drags other electrolytes with it, like valuable Calcium, so high salt diets lead to weaker bones. Yes, salt is fine, but the human body was not designed to eat several grams per day for long periods of time.
@Butrflynet,
Someone should have listed a disclaimer!!! Especially when he started to give medical advice. My doctor can't even use a drug company pen any more!
@dyslexia,
dyslexia wrote:I was watching Alton Brown last nite on his food network show "good eats." I like his show because he uses much of the program to explain foods rather than just dmonstrate recipes. Anyway, last nite his program was about salt, the different kinds of salt and different ways to use different salts. towards the end of the program he made the comment that considering (1) You drink plenty of water (2) your kidneys are healthy and (3) you don't have a pre-disposition (genetic) towards hyper-tension; there is no such thing has eating too much salt and there has never been any valid study to indicate otherwise.
This was to me pretty shocking as I have heard for many years that salt is a major factor in causing hyper-tension. Perhaps salt is a popular food myth without merit.
I was led to believe that whoever takes a lot of salt
retains more water and bloats his girth.
@boomerang,
Congratulations!
I too have always had very good blood presure.
David
