Blood Pressure

Food producers are taking a new tack in their long-running effort to sell products with less salt. Instead of offering foods labeled as low salt that few people eat, they are gradually reducing the salt from some of their most popular menu items – but not making a point of it on the lable. Source Wall Street Journal.

This is finally a good step in the right direction and none too soon.

Why not taper the salt content to zero? We’re past the days when it was needed as a preservative. If someone wants the stuff, they can always add it.

This is a great idea. By a slow reduction in salt content people will adjust to it without cutting back on purchases of the product. That will allow producers to make further cuts in salt content until we reach a more healthful level. Unfortunatley restaurants will need to make reductions as well.

The elimination of salt in most prepared food products would be a welcome development. I note with interest that so called chefs on cooking shows seem to use entirely too much salt in preparing their dishes. I have cooked salt free for my entire adult life and find my food as flavorable as any other food preparations. Salt is far from the only effective seasoning. The use of proper herbs and other non-salt spices can provide a tasty and enjoyable
palate.

But what about the sugar?

It matters not to me how much salt is removed from prepared foods. They can remove all of it as far as I’m concerned. I can always replace it, and then some, at home. But I can’t remove the sugar that food manufacturers add to foods that normally would not require sugar at all. That is, I don’t know of any recipes that call for putting sugar in tomato soup. But Campbell’s sure adds it. And so do almost every other soup and prepared food manufacturers. And it can’t be removed when you bring it home. I’m much more concerned about the arbitrary addition of sugar and other sweeteners to prepared food. And not only healthwise. It just ruins the taste of otherwise reasonably good food.

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High Blood Pressure  in Ancient Egyptian?

According to this report clever folk are challenging longstanding assumptions that heart disease is mainly a malady of modern societies found evidence of hardening of the arteries in Egyptian mummies dating as far back as 3,500 years.

Where did it come from? Researchers don’t know for sure. Mummies by the very nature that they have been privilidgd to be mummified will be members of upper-class Egyptian society, and their diets included meat from cattle, ducks and geese. In addition, because there wasn’t refrigeration, salt was commonly used to preserve meat and fish, raising the possibility that some of these Egyptians had high blood pressure. Whether anyone was obese couldn’t be determined by the CT scans, but tobacco wasn’t part of the pharaohs’ lifestyle.

Heart disease is the world’s leading killer, and it is increasingly common in developing countries such as China, India and in Latin America. The growing prevalence of the disease is often attributed to urbanization, fast-food diets, smoking and sedentary lifestyles characteristic of Western societies.

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