Decrimalising Salt

1 Jun 2011

During my teenage years, my mother decided, based on what she would have read, that salt and sugar were the root causes of most health issues and they were effectively banned from our household.

No salt was added to any cooking, and she even went so far as doing the bottling without sugar.

It was a belief system totally imposed on a generation, and was part of a time when there were many warnings about food. As I recall we were also only supposed to have 2 eggs a week also - to avoid our arteries getting clogged up.

And yet over the same intervening period, the range of packaged, industrialised foodstuffs that we now have to choose from, and which has become an increasingly large part of many people diet, grew exponentially.

We encounter it often in the cookschools, people looking for alternatives to fat becos they believe its bad for them, and not wanting to use salt.

it is not my place to discuss medical science becos I am no expert, but it has always made intuitive sense to me that food in itself won't be bad for you if you have a little of what you fancy and keep a varied, natural diet. ( Presupposing of course, that you don't have an allergy to something. Thats a whole seperate issue.)

I've always been suspicious of the reasoning that pushes the line that it is more healthy to buy industrialised food stuff than one in its natural state, for instance the butter / margarine argument.

There is a city councillor in New York who believes so fervently that salt is killing everyone, that he wants to introduce legislation banning restaurants from using it in their food preparation. And the scary thing is that he is serious.

So an article like this one makes perfectly logical sense to me on every level, I read it with relief,  and  will quote it in the cookschool today, should anyone comment adversely on the duckfat that Rick  happens to use....

In a nutshell:

The tendency of scientific studies to isolate parts of our foods and determine whether or not they are good or bad obfuscates a clear picture of the larger processes involved in eating and metabolizing in the human body. It also complicates something that shouldn't be complicated: eating real, whole foods as they exist in nature. Isolating and demonizing certain aspects of real, whole foods -- like fat and salt -- only confuses the public

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