Most salt we eat does not come from chips and other snacks

[Fanatical Meat]

yup bread has tons of salt in it

Agreed by the fact homemade fresh bread lasts 2 or 3 days max before its stale/moldy bread from the store can last 2 weeks.

 

[BoberFett]

Goddamn you people are ridiculous.

Oh for fuck's sake, it's just a generally used term, you knew damn well what he meant. It's very common to do that with the English language ya know, everyone knows what processing something means. You literal people crack me up.

Organic canned food is processed too. Learn how words work, then rejoin the conversation.

 

[BoomerD]

Food manufacturers learned a long time ago..."If you can't make it good, make it salty."

Salt (in small quantities) enhances the flavor of most foods.

Salt in bread is important...not just for flavor.

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/professional/salt.html

Once I started paying attention to salt/sodium levels in food because of HBP, I was shocked at how much salt and sodium is in prepared foods of all kinds. (not just the things you'd expect to be salty, but almost everything.)

 

[Carson Dyle]

Ignoring the underlying question of the healthfulness, or lack thereof, of consuming a lot of salt, what I want to know is, who are these alleged people that eat so much bread on a daily basis? I certainly don't and in all honestly, I don't know anyone else who does either. I do, on the other hand, know quite a few people who eat at least a bag of chips per day (and I'm not talking about those tiny little so-called "snack size" things) as well as purchased, prepared food at lunch time (and often breakfast), much of which is quite salty...

Nobody said it was just bread, although I know many people who eat bread or rolls or biscuits with every dinner, plus sandwich bread, tortillas, pita breads. Just about a part of every meal. But there are also soups, pizza, cold cuts, cured meats, pasta dishes. And yes, all of those prepared foods. Put those all together, I know many people who eat a LOT of it. While I know they exist, I personally don't know anybody who eats a whole big bag of chips or pretzels daily.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yet my point on how eating healthy is pretty much more complicated than rocket science. No one study or findings agrees with the other.

I will just continue to eat with a "everything in moderation" approach until some scientists come up with the perfect diet.

I had left over pizza for lunch, hard boiled eggs and steamed veggies for supper, and just finished eating a bowl of chips, chocolate, and I'm almost done my pop, and still have a banana to eat. You can probably find a study saying that these things are healthy and another study saying they are unhealthy. Though I don't think any study says pop is healthy, so I can probably mark that one off as being clearly unhealthy. But take eggs for example, some say you should not eat the yellow, some say you should.

Most of the stuff we eat now days is generally unhealthy though due to being processed or having some kind of pesticide or being GMO etc. So what can you do.

 

[Mike64]

Use calcium chloride instead of sodium chloride: "Extremely low sodium per serving!" (Cost/flavor...?)

Dunno about the cost differential (or about any potential long-term or cumulative effects of ingesting large amounts of CaCl2), but it wouldn't do anything for the flavor, or nothing we'd perceive as "salty", anyway. On the other hand, "they" do do that with potassium chloride, which is used in most "low/er sodium" foods. (It's also widely available in granulated form even in mainstream supermarkets these days.) Many people like/have no problem with it, but I think it tastes really nasty (I find it a weirdly sort-of-metallic taste), not to mention that, ironically, excessive dietary potassiium can cause more acute health problems than excessive sodium does. Myself, I find it really annoying that for the most part one can't buy just flat-out "low(er) sodium" processed foods without any sort of added "salt substitute" at all.

But it's a case of trying to buck the average American's preference for extremely salty food. I don't avoid salt for health reasons, I just don't share my fellow countrymen's love for it, so if I could buy stuff (though not at the exorbitant premium so often charged for it), I'd be delighted to buy foods that simply have less salt added to them. It's not like it serves any necessary preservative purpose these days anyway, it's just there for the flavor...

You can find some stuff - canned tomatoes, tortilla chips, potato chips. and even some chicken broth, among others - that has neither a lot of NaCl or KCl, but stuff like canned soup is almost impossible to find without either a lot of added sodium or potassium chloride. I can and do live with the NaCl-salty versions, but would prefer the taste with much less of it...

 

[Mike64]

Nobody said it was just bread

Well, the article linked in the OP seemed to be making a rather big deal about bread, which I just found kind of odd, I guess since bread as such isn't generally eaten quite as copiously here in the Northeast as it is elsewhere...

I personally don't know anybody who eats a whole big bag of chips or pretzels daily.

I didn't mean the "big" (let alone "party size") bags, but what used to be the "normal size" chip bags has now become more of a "medium" size bag, with really tiny (to my mind) bags being sold as "snack size", presumably both to camouflage price increases as well as "manipulate" the nutritional information on the labels (like "100 calorie" packages of snack foods that very few people actually eat just one of...)

 

[who?]

Potassium chloride stops the heart in lethal injection executions.

 

[tortillasoup]

At this point, isn't it pretty much agreed that salt/sodium isn't the evil dietary boogeyman that it was once made out to be?

-KeithP

No.

 

[WelshBloke]

Organic canned food is processed too. Learn how words work, then rejoin the conversation.

So? You can make anything unhealty by processing the crap out of it then adding a ton of salt and sugar.

 

[ControlD]

Oh please. I'm not getting into some stupid internet argument over semantics. There is a huge difference between a typical frozen meal or fast food meal and the chicken roast/salad toucan make with a chicken and some vegetables in the produce section. If you want to get in some ridiculous argument on what I mean by "processed", have fun with yourself.

You didn't eat Sam did you??

That poor unprocessed bastard.

 

[vi edit]

Yeah it can be as high as 200mg of sodium per slice. My wife was a on a 1000mg a day sodium restriction on her first pregnancy. Two slices of bread and she was between 1/3 and 1/2 way there.

We had to resort to making our own sans the salt.

 

[KeithP]

No. Doctors still tell people with high blood pressure to restrict their salt intake and first thing I see practically anyone say with regards to hearing someone diagnosed with HBP to limit their sodium intake.

Yeah, and for the most part they would be wrong. An individual might have an unusual sensitivity to sodium but as a rule...no.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt/

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

And there is a lot more stuff saying the same thing. The research isn't hard to find.

-KeithP

 

[vi edit]

My wife's job is dealing with heart failure treatments and drug dosing people with various stages of heart disease and before/after heart attacks/transplants.

Her thoughts on salt are this:
If you don't have signs of heart failure excess salt doesn't do much.
If you are in the beginning stages of heart failure (a & b) sodium restriction helps prevent it from getting worse..
If you are already in severe heart failure (c & d) restrictions don't do much because that patient population is already on lasix and any excess fluid retention is getting flushed out from that.

 

[PricklyPete]

Organic canned food is processed too. Learn how words work, then rejoin the conversation.

How about you stop putting words in my mouth. I never said organic or canned. Obviously you have some pre-loaded hatred for people who tout themselves as healthy. I have no idea why you've blocked me into this group...I didn't allude to my eating habits in any way.

As I already said, there is a huge difference in the processing of your typical frozen meal or fast food item than a meal you cook from a basic meat and vegetables from the butcher and produce aisles.

Is there healthy food that has been processed...sure. Is there unhealthy food that you could pull straight out of the ground...of course. If you are eating a highly processed food, is there a good chance that it is unhealthy for ... probably so. Will it immediately give you a heart attack...obviously not...unless you've been eating that same shit everyday for 40 years...than maybe it will.

Almost none of us grow our own food, so nearly every bit of food we eat is processed to an extent (I think everyone with a functioning brain understands that). It is common knowledge that when someone refers to "processed food", they are referring to food that is made up of many ingredients and rarely resembles the original ingredients. No one bothers to qualify that just like no one tries to qualify the meaning of "fast food" in a flippant discussion (like an internet board).

Stop being such a fuck'n word fascist and argue the actual point...not some ridiculous semantic rabbit hole.

 

[HomerJS]

People love to hate on "processed food". Do those people ever stop to think about what those words mean? Or is it just a convenient phrase to throw around and pretend that you're a better, healthier person for not eating it?

Go home and mash fresh tomatoes into paste. Congratulations, you've just created processed food.

Pasteurized milk is processed food. How is that whole raw milk thing working out for people?

To me processed food is chicken nuggets, deli meat, kraft mac and cheese hot dogs.

 

[ControlD]

To me processed food is chicken nuggets, deli meat, kraft mac and cheese hot dogs.

I agree, and I'm pretty sure that was the original intent here as well.

 

[LTC8K6]

I'm having difficulty finding sandwich bread with a lot of sodium in it.

I generally eat Nature's Own Wheat or Honey Oat, and two slices is about 200mg of sodium, which is less than 10% of the RDA.

I don't eat that much bread, overall.

I suspect that deli meats are a big source of sodium for a lot of people.

 

[CZroe]

To me processed food is chicken nuggets, deli meat, kraft mac and cheese hot dogs.

I agree, and I'm pretty sure that was the original intent here as well.

McDonald's Chicken McNuggets are just ground up white meat chicken sliced off the breast and fried with batter/seasonings. It's a waste of perfectly good chicken, IMO, but it's no more "processed" than ground beef. On the other hand, sausages and deli meats are as processed as hot dogs and yet we demonize hot dogs and behave as if some Jimmy Dean sausage or an organic salami is significantly less processed.

Yes, there are chicken nuggets that are significantly more processed and made from recovered bits of scrap chicken meat, but to use "chicken nuggets" in general as a more processed form of chicken than, say, a chicken tender, is just wrong. The difference is sliced versus ground (two different belt equal "processing" steps).

When I was a kid I remember being impressed when my baby sitter's husband killed a deer and filled a freezer with professionally packaged plastic sausage tubes (cured with the ends pinched closed with a metallic fastener and everything) and cellophane/styrofoam patty packages of venison (steaks and ground). It looked just like he bought meats from the grocery store except that there were no graphics on the packaging. I later realized that he took it to the Muslim "Halal Meat Processing" place right down the road and that most hunters do this. Most people raising livestock don't butcher it themselves either: for hundreds of years, most take their livestock to a professional butcher for "processing." The thing is, even if you "cut and cure" it yourself, you are still "processing" it.

The main reason I bring this place up is because they had "processing" right there in their business name and that's what the word meant before dainty little flowers like we see in this thread ran away with it and made it a bad word to apply to your food. Processing only means "had a lot of ingredients" if you are using the word incorrectly. Objecting to people pointing this out so that you can go on spreading the incorrect usage of it is a little sad.

The solution is to simply qualify it. Instead of saying "processed," say "overly processed" or "highly processed" or "processed with unnatural ingredients" or "processed with unhealthy preservatives." IOW: say what you mean and don't complain when you are corrected. Take it in stride and modify your behavior or risk looking like an idiot outside of your circle of idiots.

 

[BoberFett]

To me processed food is chicken nuggets, deli meat, kraft mac and cheese hot dogs.

I agree, and I'm pretty sure that was the original intent here as well.

Then try putting more effort into speaking. Personally, I avoid food with HFCS. It disgusts me that when looking through things like BBQ sauce that the first ingredient is High Fructose Corn Syrup. There is a brand I like that actually has tomato paste as the first ingredient and sugar is down the list a ways. They're both still "processed foods" though. Throwing out a blanket statement such as "Processed food is terrible" is imprecise and ignorant, and only increases confusion.

Edit: Ditto to what CZroe said.

 

[Pantoot]

McDonald's Chicken McNuggets are just ground up white meat chicken sliced off the breast and fried with batter/seasonings.

I assumed that McDonald's added a few different chemicals to the ground up chicken mixture to keep it uniform in color, anti foaming, preservative or whatever.

To me that would be heavily processed. Basically anything I wouldn't do at home.

Good for them for not doing that.

 

[johnnywheels]

Then try putting more effort into speaking. Personally, I avoid food with HFCS. It disgusts me that when looking through things like BBQ sauce that the first ingredient is High Fructose Corn Syrup. There is a brand I like that actually has tomato paste as the first ingredient and sugar is down the list a ways. They're both still "processed foods" though. Throwing out a blanket statement such as "Processed food is terrible" is imprecise and ignorant, and only increases confusion.

Edit: Ditto to what CZroe said.

It wasn't until about a year ago that I started looking at the ingredients listed in the majority of the foods I was eating and I couldn't believe how many of them had HFCS in it, completely blew me away. Not only that but all of the preservatives that are included. Now I only buy products with ingredients that I actually know the names of off the top of my head.

 

[CZroe]

It wasn't until about a year ago that I started looking at the ingredients listed in the majority of the foods I was eating and I couldn't believe how many of them had HFCS in it, completely blew me away. Not only that but all of the preservatives that are included. Now I only buy products with ingredients that I actually know the names of off the top of my head.

You do know the name of that one: sugar.

Compare the ingredients list from plain Fritos (corn, corn oil, salt) to flavored Fritos (infinity+1) and then understand that BOTH are highly processed and unnatural. Corn doesn't even exist in nature.

Edit:

 

[CZroe]

Think about how much "processing" is involved to turn wheat into bread, even if you aren't making bleached and enriched white bread with salt as a preservative. Harvesting, separating chaff, separating germ, grinding into flour, mixing with other processed ingredients (oils, dairy products, eggs, yeast, etc), baking, slicing, etc.

It's not even remotely the same thing as chewing on a stalk of grass and yet we'll look at wheat or white bread as being "processed" while ignoring just how much processing goes into that packaged whole-grain organic bread too.

FYI: Cooking is also part of "processing." I think the reason so many people associate "processed" with "highly processed beyond expectations" is because of the government mandating that certain products can't be marketed as cheese where "processed cheese" was an appropriate label (Velveeta, for example).

 

[Red Squirrel]

Usually when people say processed food, they mean food that has gone through a process in which tons of stuff has been added or perhaps removed. Fruit being moved on a conveyor belt and sorted might be a "process" but it's not really processed food. But deli meat being ground up and having all sorts of other stuff added to it then formed into it's final shape, then that is processed food. Basically any food where stuff is being added or removed would be processed. Take something like the Mcrib for example, that's not a real rib, it's just ground up meat based product put through a mold. That's processed as hell but a real rib, not so much, it's the real thing.