Committing Sins

Tabasco sauce. It's my elixir.

I put it on eggs. I splash some in my ramen. I add it to my soup, especially clam chowder. I rub it on my steak before broiling. I mix it generously into my spaghetti and my beef-a-ronis. I put a few drops into roast beef sandwiches (along with horseradish). Anything savory is a candidate for tabasco.

I would eat tabasco ice cream.

Sometimes I drink it straight from the bottle for kicks.

I'm a fiend.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Soluzar

I eat far too much salt. It's going to kill me, I just know it.

Everything tastes better with just a little salt. Only thing is, my girlfriend's reactions to seeing me add salt seem to suggest that my definition of "just a little" is a recipe for bad blood pressure.

Okay, I hate this line of thinking. Get one thing straight: salt is good for you. Salts are what allow your body to rid itself of excess water and related waste products at a cellular level. It is no fluke of nature that the human tongue possesses such a large area devoted to tasting salts; salt consumption is crucial to survival. It's just, you know, poor diets and other factors can result in sodium imbalances and poor salt gets the blame merely for doing its job so well.

Do you want to know the most common reason people get high sodium levels? Not drinking enough water. The recommendation of 8-10 glasses a day isn't an arbitrary number. You will inevitably exhale, urinate and sweat, the body's chief methods of excreting toxins. (Shit is just for solids and fatty wastes.) This liquid must be replenished and most of us don't do it as well as we had ought. I'm pretty sure I don't and that's a shame since I actually understand this whole concept of salt/water ratios.

People who are told to cut back on sodium are sometimes misled into drastically cutting out foods they enjoy. Sure, potato chip and pretzel consumption can be safely scaled back but there's not always a need to eliminate otherwise healthful foods like ham and soups. In many situations, a higher water intake could accomplish results comparable to, say, not eating pre-packaged peanuts for a month.

There really is no true substitute for simple water. Beverages like soda, beer , liquor and sports drinks contain enough sugars, chemicals and additional sodium that they offset the cleansing effect of water. In fact, caffiene is a diuretic and can cause you to excrete too much water, leaving the body with more salt than it can manage. (Note: Gatorade isn't bad for you, per se, but if you're not sufficiently active, you're only pouring more sugars and salts into your body than it may be ready to handle. Obese people should avoid sports drinks.)

So sure, eating too much salt will definitely kill you, but if you eat a normal diet and supplement it with water, your sodium levels shouldn't become too dire. There's no reason you shouldn't be allowed to salt your vegetables or salads.

(As always, genetics plays a role in sodium balance, so don't think water is the end-all to end all. If that was true, it'd be the only diet you ever heard advertised. Also, cholesterol and high sodium are often found together but have mutually exclusive causes. Water isn't going to declog your arteries.)

[/rant]

There's nowhere I can't reach.