Salt Shaker And Casket

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".