My title indicates that table
salt kills people.
Of course it does --there is no mystery about it.
In the past, traditional
African
people living in the wild did not get
heart attacks,
at least not at any significant rate, but if the same people
took jobs among the white people and ate a "good" Western diet,
they experienced heart disease at the same rate as in the West.
You see, in the bush their diet was mostly plants, along with
whatever animals, large and small, they could catch or kill.
Plant juice is high in
potassium
and animal blood is high in
sodium,
minerals that we need in the right quantities.
But in the Western world, a bit more salt for cooking and a bit
more at eating time makes things tastier. The purveyors of dried,
preserved and pickled foods know this, and so with "progress" comes
tasty, salty food.
You can draw logarithmic lines for amounts of salt and potassium
intake versus time in years, and you pretty well get a diagram of
incidence of heart attacks over the same period. All this
is well known, and the medical people and the "health nuts" agree
in urging us to eat our veggies and to avoid dousing everything
with salt.
As more of us eat out, and as
fast foods
increase, so do heart problems. This can't be ignorance, so it must be
stupidity, or is it perhaps a modern form of
death wish?
Certainly, the old saloon motto in German-American bars is "dead" on:
"Too soon we get oldt, too late we get schmardt".
