The Salt NAZI, and New York State Assemblyman, Felix Ortiz. "No salt for you!"
In high school, I had a class called Food Technology, which was essentially a glorified cooking class. Although, we also spent some time studying the effects of certain ingredients upon the body. Salt was one of those ingredients. At the time, public interest advertisements littered the television, informing people of the health dangers of salt and how it was present in almost every food that we ate. These advertisements were causing a public opinion backlash against the amount of salt that was present inside foods. Most people mindlessly accepted the propaganda, and cheered along the efforts to alter fast foods.
Somehow, removing salt would suddenly make fast foods healthy, and heart attacks would be a thing of the past. Let us not forget about curing high blood pressure, either. Eureka! The problem was no longer the poisons in the fast foods, or even the fact that they are the equivalent of a cardboard diet in regards to nutrition. How convenient this is for the fast food's industry which is no longer to be blamed.
My high school class taught that banning salt would produce just another health problem that would kill more people than the excess sodium in foods. The number of food poisonings would dramatically increase, since salt is a natural food preservative. When those rates did increase, the campaign against salt was silently dropped. Oops....Fortunately, our teachers were not yet too politically correct to avoid informing us of this vital lesson back then.
Whenever members of the medical establishment attempt to save us from something, it always places us at the mercy of something else (usually something worse). We think of it as the price for dealing with the Devil. I had almost forgotten about that British anti-salt campaign until I read that New York is now considering placing a complete ban on salt in all restaurants. The bill reads:
"No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of food for consumption by customers."
Restaurants would be fined $1000 for each violation, but the bill is completely open to interpretation. Is this restricted to sodium, or does it also include potassium salts? If the bill bans sodium, can we also assume that monosodium glutamate and similar additives will also be banned? If so, New York may be the nation's first KFC-free State. While that alone would be a major health victory, it is one that would come at great cost. People need salt, and as we already implied, the meager health benefits of such restrictions will be more than offset by the deadly food poisonings that they will inevitably cause.
The sad part of this story is that unadulterated sea salt is not harmful when taken in moderation. Salt has been made unnecessarily harmful by the chemical industry that provides us with nutritionally deficient, easy pouring table salt. See our article, The Truth About Table Salt and The Chemical Industry for more information. Sea salt should generally be added to foods, as it provides such a wide array of minerals that cannot be obtained elsewhere. Life-giving salt has been demonized for decades, but our rates of heart disease continue to rise apparently uneffected by salt usage.
The truth is that a massive portion of sodium in the diet today is from neither table salt nor sea salt, but from toxic chemical additives. If New York's representatives are really concerned about heart attacks, then perhaps they should explicitly ban , because it is actually known to directly cause heart attacks within hours, at least in part by neutralizing magnesium and the taurine reserves inside a body. Both are critical for a stable pulse. Taurine is a key amino acid.
Fast food really does contain too much sodium, but legislatively banning all salts is a cure worse than the somewhat non-existent disease. (Now where have we seen that before?) Not only would this ridiculous piece of legislation cause restaurant foods to become bland, and directly cause food poisoning cases to rise exponentially, but it would furthermore be a direct assault on the basic rights of people.
Labeling sodium content would be a far more rational option than a complete ban on "salt". Remember, they will likely be leaving in the deadly salt-based chemical toxins such as monosodium glutamate, which really do significantly harm health on a level that is not even comparable to normal salts, and do clearly endanger life. Monosodium glutamate is why high-school athletes have those "mysterious" heart attacks. You've heard the stories of athletes having an "enlarged heart". Now you know.
Related Links
The Truth About Table Salt and The Chemical Industry
New York City's Almost Comical Attempts at Curbing Obesity by Ensuring Corporate Appeasement