Tuesday 27 September 2011

Good salt and evil salt.

I'm battling my rusty HTML skills at the moment, trying to set up a writerly website. It's going to work like this: I set up the site with a rough index page, links to other pages and places etc and then I'll give it all to someone who knows what the hell they're doing and they'll do it properly. Most likely from scratch, using mine as just a guide image.

It's easier than trying to explain where I want things to be. Even so, it takes time.

That's why I haven't been browsing for fury-inducing news stories this evening, but a tip by Giolla in Email gave an interesting article on salt. It's not as bad as it's claimed to be.Well, who would have guessed?

Like everything else in the ban-sights, the Terrible Thing is based on one dodgy study carried out many years ago. Commenters fall into 'See, I told you' and 'No, no, no, salt is evil and will kill you and so your intake must be controlled' groups. As with everything else.

The author is 'in the pay of the salt industry' - hmm, sounds familiar - and anyone who does not agree that salt is the new Satan is 'in denial'. Which also sounds familiar.

The drones don't even realise they are using exactly the same techniques for anything they want banned. They really are that dim.

I say, encourage them to remove all salt from their diets. Entirely. Show them how to soak everything in water overnight to get the salt out before they eat it. They will be delighted with their new low blood pressures and I will join them in being delighted when they reach zero.

Oh, and sea-salt is really, really good for you but salt is evil. Just as nicotine in a Pharma inhaler is perfectly safe but nicotine in Electrofag will kill everyone within a five-mile radius. Those extra elements in sea salt aren't available anywhere else, you see, and the sodium in sea salt is good sodium. This will surprise a few chemists, but there is good sodium and evil sodium, and there is probably even a Satanic periodic table to be found somewhere. In reverse, most likely.

It's just laziness to use the same handbook for everything and it is now no more than utter stupidity to believe that the same handbook applies to everything.

Faced with that level of stupid, how can anyone resist pushing the limits, just to see how ridiculous you can get before they stop believing?

I have not yet found the limit. I don't think there is one.


17 comments:

Anonymous said...

For a very short period, a few years back, there started to be studies published in MSM claiming coffee and caffeine was bad for you and should be banned, restricted, controlled, etc.

Then about the same time Starbucks voluntarily banned smoking in all their coffee shops worldwide, even in areas where no bans existed and posted signs on their stores saying they are committed to a smoke-"free" world, then all the studies claiming caffeine and coffee was bad for you evaporated from the MSM and it was then said it was all just a big mistake and for everyone to go on drinking coffee, same as before.

Maybe something similar will happen in the war on salt and they'll retract it if salt-makers agree to support some other ridiculous claim instead and print it on their packaging, then health-fasicsts will ease up on that industry.

It's as if mafia is alive and well again, only it's operating entirely in the field of health-fascist-self-righteousism, particularly in the anti-smoking industry - which it is an industry too.

Anonymous said...

There is another side to this - as a libertarian surely everyone should be able to choose how much salt to have in their food. Most of the efforts at banning stuff seems to be trying to get manufacturers to stop adding useless sodium to their products to bulk up the weight of your steak (brine) or claim a better taste. You can simply add more salt yourself if you want.

Anyway, the problem is not really with sodium chloride per se but with the ratio of sodium to potassium. If you want to add a lot of NaCl to your food, you should add even more KCl and your kidneys will deal with everything properly. Sodium does raise your blood presure, but usually your kidney gets rid of excess. What real scientists believe to be the case anyway, which you don't hear in the newspapers, is that over many years, having excess Na+ in relation to K+ will make your kidneys used to a higher Na+ and therefore excrete less of it, raising your blood pressure over a long period. It is definitely true that high blood pressure causes heart attacks and strokes, while the cause of high blood pressure is not known exactly, and salt is only one of the things people are still looking at right now. But of course any sort of "science for the layman" will treat things as foregone conclusions.

Anonymous said...

What is the "salt industry"? Are these people completely out of their tree? I live by the sea, should the need arise I can produce my own, reasonably pure, utterly free of charge sea salt. Easy, ancient technology that any moron with half a brain could use (and some do marketing it as magical, natural salt sooo much better than that nasty chemical stuff NaCl). So who, what and where is the salt industry?

Macheath said...

A thought - inspired by anon @ 7.07; where, in the eyes of the Righteous, does all this leave Gandhi and his Salt March?

Did the Mahatma poison his people by procuring them ample supplies of this evil substance? I think we ought to know.

David Davis said...

Not quite relevant, but talks about the same kinds of people.....A few years ago I heard on the wireless a strange woman articulating the following:-

"HONEY'S GOOD FOR YOU BECAUSE IT'S PURE, BUT SUGAR'S VERY BAD FOR YOU 'COZ IT'S REFINED".

The notion that substances could be "good" or "evil" was already alive and well then. I blame the 60s-reversion to pre-capitalist-barbarian neopastoralism.

Woodsy42 said...

Look it's obvious. Common salt is horrid nasty chemical stuff, mined from the ground by an industrialised process.
Sea salt is wholly natural, organic and free range and is therefore good for you.

I am Stan said...

Hiya Leggy,

Oh yeah salt, I love it, but not on me puddings, my local chip shop`s run by a Chinese chap, I call him Ken after Ken Hom, its not his real name that`s Qinelo or somthing, anyways when I get home with me fish supper I load it up with vinegar and salt, Ken always asks me if I want it in the shop, "yo wan sore finger?" he asks I always say "no I`ll do that at home mate", "why?" I hear you ask, well and you being a scientist you`ll like this, I always wait so as to keep the chips and fish as crisp as possible, then once back at my abode I load up with vinegar first and then loads of salt, the salt sticks to the vinegar see and the chips and fish are still crispy, genius eh?

He`s a good lad is Ken but he gets chatting and forgets stuff, like my change or me mushy peas.

Love Stan

wcoaphorse2010 said...

Courtesy of DP's blog we se the play book laid bare:

http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.com/2011/09/taxation-taxation-taxation-to-save-you.html

From the UN conference on non-communicable diseases we get Judith Mackay talking about slat, sugar, alcohol and trans-fats:

"With tobacco, we are now legislating so that you don't see packets of tobacco as you come out of the supermarket, in other words they are going to have to be sold below the counter, or they are going to have to be sold in plain packaging. So I think, you know, we need to shift all the other industries in the same direction."

Nobody saw that coming, eh?

Dr Evil said...

we use sea salt...........but wait, where did all those undergrund salt deposits come from? Was it some vast, shallow Jurassic sea that slowly dried up and was covered by sediments over geological time? So Saxa is just recrystallised sea salt after all with no doubt natural iodide salts too. Have these idiots ever tasted blood? as in say a bitten lip. OMG, it's salty. our blood is as salty as the ancient oceans.

You just have to have salt and malt vinegar on fish and chips. Anything else is sacrelage!

Anonymous said...

The BBC has been demonstrating how to use "good" sugar in the recent baking competition programme and yesterday evening began to promote "good" salt in the home cooking programme on BBC2. Its Health pages should get together with its Cookery pages and thrash out some sort of consistency - that will be after they have squared the circle.

Anonymous said...

Sorry--this is right on the edge of the topic but not quite off.

Whenever one of these "studies" is published a number of people appear who do not simply read the stuff and "believe" it , probably for the rest of their lives, with no further attempt to keep up with rebuttals or developments, but they become proselytizing fanatics.

Global warming had many of these useful idiots who could be found prowling the comments on articles on global warming in obscure regional papers.

You could spot them by the endless repetition of "facts", and an obsessive and touching faith in the magical properties of their God called "Peer Review".

I have failed to find any worthwhile stuff on these true believers and what fires them even though I have tried to on Google.
There must be a name for this odd mental condition and even advice on how to deal with sufferers apart from calling them trolls and ignoring them.

Has the condition they suffer from got a name? Has it anywhere been described and explained in medical terms?
PS I don't think I'm a troll.

John Pickworth said...

The Independent printed a nice article today ;-)

Medical contradictions: So bad it's good for you...

-

Anonymous said...

You just have to have salt and malt vinegar on fish and chips. Anything else is sacrelage!

I'm a foodie heretic, I actually prefer the taste of non-brewed condiment.

Uncle Gus said...

Has anyone else noticed? A "metastudy" that *doesn't* support a bansturbatory food scare!

View from the Solent said...

Put down that salt!

Anonymous said...

I experienced the delights of the future when dragged to a fucking Starbucks just after the ban had been announced, but not yet implemented in Scotland.

Oh the joys of trudging down two flights of stairs to have a smoke outside whilst the ex-ex had her Grande Latte enema in peace with the rest of the caffine addicts, I had a second fag outside till she finished, then straight to the smoky pub for us both, happy days...

Anonymous said...

HTML. You may find www.nvu.com useful. It's a free and I've used it for years. Alternatively, if all you want is a very rough format there's Page Breeze that adds in a bunch of templates.

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