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I personally never add salt to any food after cooking (with the exception of popcorn). I use salt (sometimes) during cooking, but a lot of that is lost during the cooking process (e.g.: in pasta water). There are many, more tastier ways to add flavour, chilli and herbs for example.
That is exactly what I mentioned in my above post - to limit salting to "almost nil".
Most products you are buying today contain salt/sodium - the food manufacturers add salt/sodium into everything in order to make your taste buds happier. Sugar and salt kills you..
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/salt-reduction
No, lack of sugar and salt kills you. It's this kind of simplistic wrongheaded sloganizing that drives me mad. Both salt and sugar are
essential to normal body function. Your body ultimately converts all the carbohydrates you ingest to sugars. Your body cannot extract energy from carbohydrates until they have been converted to sugars, specifically glucose. This is so fundamental that your body starts converting carbohydrates into sugars the second you put them into your mouth - by secreting saliva that contains the enzyme ptyalin. The idea that sugar is fundamentally bad in itself is wrong. Consuming your carbohydrates as sugar in anything more than small quantities is probably a bad idea, we evolved on a diet low in simple sugars, so much so that we evolved ptyalin and you mess with evolution at your peril. But the populist idea that "sugar is bad" is fundamentally wrongheaded.
The fuss about salt is somewhat misplaced too.
Some people most definitely
are sensitive to excess salt intake - there very much is such a thing as salt sensitive high blood pressure, but they are in the minority
and the size of the effect is less than one is led to beleive. Excess consumption of salt, for most people, will not lead to high blood pressure. For most people excess salt is simply excreted. If you define salt sensitivity as a change of 3 mmHg in blood pressure between normal (roughly 100 mmol/d = 2.3g Na = 5.8 g/d NaCl) and high (200 mmol/d = 4.6 Na = 11.6 g/d NaCl) sodium intakes then about 40% of the population are salt sensitive. Note that 3 mmHg in the context that high-normal blood pressure is 120 mmHg and the bottom of 'high blood pressure' is 140 mmHg - so a normal versus high salt intake only accounts for 15% of the margin between normal and high blood pressure - much less if you take the margin between the centres of the two bands - when it's only 5%. It's also worth noting that for a small minority this cuts the other way, there are people who have abnormally low blood pressure (symptomatically so) unless they have high levels of salt in their diets. Thus making a medical intervention (low/zero salt diets) on the whole population is clearly wrong headed. If you're going to go down that route where do you stop? If you're going to treat the whole population when only 20% might be affected (40% salt sensitive times 50% with high blood pressure) what about 10%? That level would mean that we should start treating everybody with asthma drugs.
Nobody knows why the population is getting fatter. If they did we would have stopped it by now. It is pretty clear that there is something in the modern diet or environment that is messing with homeostasis but no one has yet figured out what it is.
Ascribing it to a simplistic energy intake <=> expenditure balance is wrong. If you consume the energy equivalent of one small packet of crisps/chips a day or a large biscuit/cookie (100 kcals) more than you expend in energy you will gain weight at the rate of 1 kg every 35 days. If you did that for 10 years you would gain 105 kg. This does not happen (except in such extreme cases that they feature on 'reality' TV). The truth is that most people who are fatter than they ought to be
stop gaining excess weight at some 'set point' which varies from individual to individual, but is usually in the 10-30kg bracket. If energy intake <=> expenditure imbalance was the cause they would just keep getting fatter, not stop at some point.
The fundamental problem here is that there is a lot of "we don't know" in public health combined with a lot of pedalling simplistic easy to understand public health messages. Worse still, working doctors seem to work on the basis of receiving a simplistic message rather than a more nuanced one and give every impression of treating individuals on this basis. It's so prevalent in medicine that it's earned it's own catchphrase
"Treating the numbers rather than treating the patient".
One thing we do know, and the numbers add up at the epidemiological level, is that people who get significant physical exercise don't seem to get fat and don't get high blood pressure. Being sedentary is most definitely bad for you (he said sitting at his arse in front of a computer). The amount of exercise by the way is nothing like the amount that would be needed to burn off excess calorie consumption - it's just that people who take significant exercise seem to have better regulation of homeostasis.