According to long running statistics on our health, the leading cause of death in the US is still that winner of all winners, heart disease. Whether that's from heart attacks, stress, high blood pressure, high cholesterol or whatever, I don't really know.
One thing I do know is that my doctors want me to watch what I eat, especially with regard to the sodium content in my food.
Now, I've been doing this for a number of years, and I've been meaning to write about it somewhere, too. Have you ever even looked at the sodium content in your foods, especially the pre-packaged foods you buy at the supermarkets, or the frozen dinners that are quick and easy to pop in the microwave and gulp down while you try desperately to get through that other thing you're doing at the same time?
If not, you really need to start.
Most doctors will tell you that the average person with an average diet should be consuming a daily maximum of around 2300 milligrams of sodium. That's 2.3 grams. A gram is a fraction less than 1/28 of an ounce. That's not a lot.
The number one contributor to the sodium content in most foods is probably salt - sodium chloride. (Another more insidious one is monosodium glutamate, or MSG, which is a sort of salt-sugar "flavor enhancer" that most Chinese restaurants now advertise as not using - it's a recognized carcinogen, and it's in more food than you think.) One would think that saltier food probably has higher sodium, but that's not always true. Some salts taste saltier than others.
Something to consider is the virtual absence of sodium in most natural foods. How many fruits and vegetables do you know of that are naturally salty? No fair counting salt-water fish, which, except for anchovies, you're supposed to rinse in fresh water before preparing to eat.
But let's get back to the major products of our times: prepackaged and frozen foods.
I used to love Swanson frozen chicken dinners. They taste good, contain those great staples of the American diet, corn and mashed potatoes (two high carbohydrate foods and I won't even get into how genetically modified corn has contaminated the entire planetary corn supply, including organics, here), a nice little dessert (more carbohydrates), and the main dish - breaded (carbohydrate), fried chicken. I'd go for the Hungry Man variety because it was bigger and better satisfied my appetite.
This particular meal has 2869mg of sodium in it - way too much. Don't believe me, go look for yourself: http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-swanson-hungry-man-dinner-classic-i115930.
Lest I forget, the chicken breading also contains MSG - one reason it tastes so good, or used to.
Now maybe you don't do Swanson, or chicken, or frozen dinners. Good for you. Chicken is another whole area of worsening bacterial contamination, hormones, failing antibiotics, breeding for large breasts (yes, even in our chickens - no kidding) and savage, unsanitary breeding conditions. Some other time....
But massive doses of sodium are elsewhere, too.
Have you ever seen one of those commercials for Campbell's soups? "Soup - it does a body good!"
I won't dispute that even though I no longer believe it, but it's important to know that one can of Campbell's ordinary condensed soup is at least 2 servings, each of which contains anywhere from 600-900mg of sodium, usually at the higher end. So if you ever enjoyed a whole can of soup (properly diluted with water or milk or both) for a meal, you just consumed most of your RDA of sodium in one 20-oz. mug. Just like that.
To their credit, Campbell's also offers a low-sodium variety - in only a few flavors, but at least their sodium content is about half the "regular" variety. They also do a "Select Harvest" line that is lower yet and comes in mug-sized cans that don't need dilution - 410mg of sodium per serving, 2 servings per can.
Progresso soups tends to be worse - their range is more like 800-1000mg of sodium per serving, two servings per can, undiluted. Except for their low sodium line, which still contains more than half the sodium of the regular line, their soups are potential mugs of heart trouble.
Well, fine, you say, I'll stick to salads and sandwiches.
Check your salad dressings. I like Wishbone's fat-free Chunky Blue Cheese and Kraft fat-free Italian Caesar. In two tablespoons, these contain 280 and 470mg of sodium, respectively. Most full fat dressings are around the same sodium content range. Add that to my salad, and a mug of soup and - whoa - more than half my RDA of sodium, and I haven't even gotten to the sandwich yet!
Ah, the sandwich - two slices of bread (120-180mg of sodium per slice), some mayo (a little more sodium, less if you use mustard instead of mayo, and lower fat, too) and a couple slices of turkey. I happen to like Costco a lot, and their Kirkland brand sliced turkey contains about 460mg of sodium per 2 slice serving. Most sliced turkey you buy contains more like 700-800mg of sodium per slice (take a look next time you buy). You can get lower sodium lunchmeats, but most of them are pressed slabs of plasticky, chewy rubber that tastes roughly like turkey with lots of salt. (Kirkland turkey actually tastes like rel turkey and has a meat texture, as opposed to other options.)
Ham, chicken and (if you're still eating it) beef tend to be higher in sodium, but there are exceptions.
So, an average salad, soup and sandwich lunch runs around 2500mg of sodium, unless you have a really tiny salad, a half-cup of soup and half a sandwich. You still have to figure around 1200mg of sodium - low enough to eat one more, slightly smaller meal for dinner, no breakfast, no snacks, nothing.
How about restaurants? Not the sleazy fast food variety, a classy one, like my two (former) favorites - Cheesecake Factory and Red Lobster. I'm picking on these two because they recently had the courage to publish their nutritional content booklets and deliver them to every table, at least at some of the local stores around here.
I don't really remember the details, except that most every meal they both serve has near or more than the RDA of sodium and close to the same level of just plain calories in each meal. My favorite at the Cheesecake Factory was their Cobb salad, and I loved it until I saw the content - I vaguely remember that the sodium content was around 1600mg and the calorie count was over 2000, but that's from months ago when I used to be able to afford the financial cost of such meals. That doesn't include the salad dressing. When I scanned the menu looking for anything that wasn't over the top in sodium and calories, only a few of the smaller appetizers had little enough to eat as a meal and run home for safety for the next several days.
I use safety loosely here - see above.
By the way, Red Lobster had similar issues with sodium (and calories), and I bet most restaurants do, unless you go to the health food varieties, especially vegetarian and/or vegan. Personally, I've found that most of the latter two overspice their foods, which makes them virtually unpalatable to me. Your mileage may vary.
Before I let the fast food industry off without a detailed mention, I'd like to present some facts from an article I just got in my email this morning, the one that triggered this blog entry. I'll just list the items - they're all for breakfast - along with their sodium and calorie content:
Carl’s Jr Breakfast Burger: 780 calories, 1460mg sodium
McDonald’s Big Breakfast with Hotcakes: 1150 calories, 2260mg sodium
Burger King Biscuits and Sausage Gravy Platter: 680 calories, 2350mg sodium
Burger King Double Croissan’wich with Sausage Egg and Cheese: 680 calories, 1520mg sodium
Hardee’s Double Sausage Egg n’ Cheese Biscuit: 830 calories, 2100mg sodium
Hardee’s Loaded Breakfast Burrito: 760 calories, 1380mg sodium
Hardee’s Low Carb Breakfast Bowl: 620 calories, 1380mg sodium
Jack in the Box Steak and Egg Burrito : 821 calories, 1616mg sodium
Jack in the Box Extreme Sausage Sandwich: 690 calories, 1356mg sodium
Chick-fil-A Sausage Biscuit: 590 calories, 1250mg sodium
Chick-fil-A Chicken Egg and Cheese Bagel on a Sunflower Mutligrain Bagel: 530 calories, 1330mg sodium
(source: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/11-scary-fast-food-breakfasts.html)
So what does all this mean?
I'm not into conspiracy theories, but if I were, this would make a good basis for a theory that all the major food production corporations are conspiring to poison us. But that makes no sense - killing off your own consumers?
Of course, it doesn't make sense, but neither does paying your employees so little that they can't even afford to shop in your own store (a la Wal*Mart), or making it illegal for the US government to use its purchasing power to bring down the cost of pharmaceutical products for the elderly (Medicare Part D) or veterans, or anyone, really, so that Big Pharma can maximize their already obscene profits.
It doesn't make sense, but it makes lots of dollars if you see it for what it is: short-sighted short term profit above all other factors bar none, and the way we get ripped off every day by the less than 1% of our society that owns 70+% of everything, including us, most commonly known as the rich and powerful. What do they care if we die in ten or twenty years, impoverished, sick, in pain (or better yet, torture, official US policy these days) and totally at their mercy until then? They're rich and powerful and have their fourteen mansions and yachts and getaways in the Caymans or another tax-sheltered country, and they'll be dead long before we do anything about it, probably from too much sodium.
Unless you can read and are willing to act.
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