Ask the Food Fairy!

Fear of salt is almost as common as fear of fat. Neither is necessary, and neither makes for interesting food. Food researcher/writer Jeffrey Steingarten has written that salt is only a health hazard for the small group of people who have a sensitivity to it. In their case, it can drive up blood pressure; for most people, it is nothing more than a useful nutrient. (One study showed that people could lose their sensitivity to salt by exercising regularly – which is a great tool for all of us!)

Steingarten rhapsodized about the purpose of salt in cooking. There’s a reason that “salt of the earth” is a compliment; salt “is indispensable to good food and good cooking. It sharpens and defines the inherent flavors of foods and magnifies their natural aromas. Salt unites the diverse tastes in a dish, marries the sauce with the meat, and turns the pallid sweetness of vegetables into something complex and savory. Salt also deepens the color of most fruits and vegetables and keeps cauliflower white. Salt controls the ripening of cheese and improves its texture, strengthens the gluten in bread, and can preserve meat and fish, while transforming its texture. Cooked without salt, most dishes taste dull, lifeless, and lacking in complexity; in some, flavors are unbalanced and sweetness predominates.”

Quite a ringing testimonial. He also quotes American Episcopal priest and author Robert Farrar Capon as saying that “to undersalt deliberately in the name of dietary chic is to omit from the music of cookery the indispensable bass line over which all tastes and smells form their harmonies.”

Dietary chic? Isn’t too much sodium bad for you? Doesn’t it raise your blood pressure and cause heart attacks?

There’s a bit of a link to health crises in there, but not from salt itself: from the highly processed, prepackaged foods that are such a large part of our diets in industrialized parts of the world. They have a lot of salt (as well as a ton of sugar and chemicals, and few nutrients) and so people whose health is affected by the low-nutrient diet with lots of these overprocessed foods are also eating a lot of salt.

But it’s a case of the logical fallacy “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”: “(X happened) after this, therefore it was because of this.” Even eliminating all preprocessed foods and refusing to salt foods leaves us eating two or three times the recommended daily allotment of sodium, because – as Steingarten pointed out – salt is integral in the making of bread and cheese as well as inherent in a lot of vegetables, which take it in as they grow. If salt caused hypertension and heart attacks, we should all be having them. Instead, an estimated 20% of Americans have hypertension – that is, blood pressure at or above 95% of the expected range for them.

Studies have been done around the world, for decades, trying to establish a link between salt intake and blood pressure. The closest they have come is to show that if rats eat a diet that is 8% salt, their blood pressure will rise. To get the human equivalent, eat two cups of salt a day. (Seems to me that if we ate two cups of salt a day, high blood pressure would be the least of our worries.)

There is one real link in the human world. 8% or so of the population has a sensitivity to salt; in these people, salt does lead directly to high blood pressure.

If you have high blood pressure – easily measured at most drugstores – you might be sensitive to salt. You can start testing yourself by measuring your blood pressure, cutting down on salt as much as possible for a week, and measuring it again. For salt-sensitive people, salt means not just high blood pressure but bloating, puffiness, and shortness of breath. On the bright side, it’s pretty awesome to be able to control such a large part of your health by simply avoiding salt.

So for a few of us, salt does cause dietary harm. But for the other 92% of the population, it really is “dietary chic” to avoid it – meaning that we tend to hear that something is bad for some people and assume that it is best avoided by all. It’s another logical fallacy – a “guilty by association” sort of argument. As Steingarten put it, “It’s like making everybody wear eyeglasses just because a few of us need them.”

Second only to knowing that you can use salt comes knowing how to use it. Here are some kitchen-sciency tips:

* Salt your cooking water. Pasta water, water for vegetables, even water for beans – the whole “salt makes beans split and harden” thing is a myth. (In “Heat”, Bill Bryson’s lengthy memoir of working in Mario Batali’s famous kitchens, he mentions that one of their “secret ingredients” is making cooking water ocean-salty. I made mashed potatoes this way last week and they were incredible – almost perfectly salted while cooking, without that slightly bitter aftertaste that you can get from plain salt.)

* Salt before cooking, except fried foods and salads. Okay, salads don’t generally “cook”. But french fries and fresh leafy greens have one big thing in common: they’ll get wilted and soggy if you salt them too early. A little salt tossed on either one before serving adds crunchy zest to the dish. (Chopped fresh herbs also make a great, surprising, and flavorful twist to either one.) Salting meat before you cook, on the other hand, helps the surface caramelize, developing great flavors.

* Salt more if a dish will be served cold. Weird but apparently true. This begs for experimentation. Maybe I’ll go eat a cold and a hot dish of mashed potatoes side by side to see if one of them begs for more seasoning.

* Add salt when food tastes flat. Add both before and after cooking, because it has different effects in each case. If you wait till after you cook to add the salt, you’ll get a bland dish with a salty punch instead of the flavorfully blended ingredients you deserve. When it comes to salting the finished dish, taste it before you salt, because people have wildly different standards for what is too salty.

* Acidify! If you’ve already added salt and your food still tastes like it needs a little something, add an acid. Citrus juice, balsamic vinegar, zest, or a little tomato or tabasco sauce all work.

* Beware over-salting. This most commonly happens at the table, for the reasons given above. If you over-salt at any point and end up with that bitter or just too salty taste, try adding a little starch like rice, potatoes, or pasta; a little cream or vinegar; or a bit of sugar. (The flipside of this is that when cooking a soup with pasta, for example, you have to really amp up the flavors because the pasta will suck a lot of the flavor out of the soup!)

As a free introduction to my “love your body” course, “The Best Weigh,” I created a “wellness quiz” you can take to get personalized suggestions for feeling even better in your body.

The way I see it is that first of all, healthcare in my country – where many of you readers live – sucks. It’s expensive, it’s hard for many people to get, and even if you do have it, Western medicine tends to suck. Some folks have awesome, excellent, supportive doctors who are aware of powerful alternative treatments that most patients don’t get offered as an option. Yay for some folks!

But if you’re like me, your doctor takes an “It’s probably not a problem” approach to any health questions you might have, reluctant to order expensive tests, to encourage self-diagnosis, to look at problems that there are no easy answers for or that they personally don’t know anything about, or to do anything about anything if you seem to be more or less okay in general.

Then there are the fatphobic doctors. I’ve had one myself; she gave me medication that we both knew would cause my weight to redistribute around the middle – because she said so! – and then, ages and ages into it, poked my belly, professed to be concerned that it was convex instead of concave, and tried to back herself up by pointing at my weight on the BMI chart – at a spot for people much much shorter than I – and pointing out that it was labeled there as something like “borderline obese”. Isn’t doctoring supposed to involve critical thinking?

More troubling, to me, is the fact that many of us are so used to our everyday aches and pains, tiredness, digestive problems, headaches, or brain fog, that we don’t even think there is anything to be done about them. They become our standard for normal health – and sap our energy for making any changes.

I have my own story about that, but I’ll share that as we go along. The nutshell here is that the quiz has a ton of statements, you click the box next to each one that is true for you, and then you put in your email address and hit submit. And then I review it and (within about 48 hours) let you know if it suggests you have any problems – which are mostly nutritional – like brain chemistry imbalances, hypoglycemia, yeast overgrowth, adrenal exhaustion, thyroid problems – and, most importantly, what simple steps you can take to regain balance, joy, and energy.

I had a blast with it. Some of the things it turned up were obvious to me, like that my stressful day job – at the unemployment department! – is messing up my adrenals again. It also revealed what I had hoped, which was that my brain chemistry (amino acids) were out of balance – which I very much wanted to hear, because I felt like I was going a little crazy at work and I wanted there to be something simple I could do to smooth that out. I already do tons of personal work in 12-step programs, and yet suddenly things seemed to be going downhill. To me, that means that there’s something biological in the works.

What surprised me a little was both how out of balance I was, and that I had low thyroid function. That was something I had looked at a little bit in the past, and sort of toyed with doing something about – and then dropped it when the first thing I half-heartedly tried didn’t work. And yet it seemed so obvious this time. The first follow-up test for it is to take your temperature three days in a row and see if it is low – but my body temperature is ALWAYS lower than normal. Oho!

I’ve been taking l-tyrosine for it, plus now an over-the-counter thyroid support pill, and it is helping me have much more energy at work. That’s just in the past couple of days; I can’t wait to see what the long-term benefits are like. I’m adding in GABA (another amino acid) as a stress preventative or stress support. I think it prevents me from going into that adrenalized place where I start judging and getting huffy and buying into negative thoughts and enter a downward spiral of tension. But I will tell you all more as it develops! In the meantime… check out that quiz!

That’s the big meme, right? If you just eat fewer calories and/or burn more calories, you will lose weight!

By which, of course, is always meant FAT. Nobody cares about muscle except prizefighters. “It’s all muscle” is up there with “I’m just big-boned” as a common escape from fatphobia.

Well, turns out the link between fat and calories isn’t quite as straightforward as people think. My favorite story in The Diet Cure is a little throwaway anecdote about the author’s neighbor, who is constantly dieting and consumes some 1700 calories a day (mostly diet food) to the author’s over 3,000 (mostly protein and veggies). And yet he weighs far more than she does. AND he cares about that, which I’m not sure she does.

Of course, there are plenty of diets that take what you eat into account… no bread, no dessert, no fat, nothing but lemon juice and cayenne, whatever… with wildly varying levels of “success”.

But even if that works for you, it means you can essentially never go back to those foods – which is part of the reason behind the often-quoted statistic that 90% of diets fail.

Plus, dieting focuses on the wrong place. Any goal weight or size is going to be pretty arbitrary – there’s no one right number for any of us that means we’re healthy, attractive, or whatever our real goal is.

I am convinced that what we should really be doing is exploring what it means for each of us to be healthy. Healthy in terms of what we eat, what we do for fun, how we feel about ourselves and our bodies, the whole shebang– and how to get there.

A healthy size or weight is the size or weight we are when we are living a healthy, balanced, joyful life. And it might change as we learn more about what that means, and that’s okay too.

This is going to be a core part of the holistic food workshops I am creating. Check out that link for more information as it develops! And any feedback is very welcome here.