PASSING ON THE SALT

Weak wills, not sodium-rich foods, the real enemy.

‘Food’s over,” Jerry Seinfeld proclaimed in a new standup routine last week. “We don’t know what to do. Everyone’s confused. We’re at the point now where people are just calling out in the middle of eating, ‘ Can someone take these chips away from me?’”

The joke captures the fatalism that suffuses our modern attitude toward eating. We all know that processed foods are bad for us. But we’re so powerless to resist their lab-concocted, cocaine-like lure that we can’t stop eating them unless they are forcibly removed from our presence. When that’s not possible, other desperate measures are called for: In my case, I’ve taken to keeping a shaker of crushed peanuts (to which I am seriously allergic) to sprinkle on treats reserved for other family members. (It works.)

The cry “can someone take these away from me?” typically is made in half-jest among friends. But the feeling that you can’t stop consuming something — even when your brain is blinking red, telling you to desist — is genuinely frightening. It makes us conscious that we’re all addicts at heart, with burgers, chips and candy serving the role of heroin and nicotine.

That realization, in turn, undermines our ability to make other positive changes in life. If we can’t resist the drive-thru, do we have any hope of mustering the willpower to hit the gym? Food, which should be one of life’s pleasures, instead becomes a trigger for self-loathing, which we then medicate with the cheap high that comes from eating more junk.

How did we get to this point? The explanation is delivered in the pages of Michael Moss’ new book, Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, recently excerpted on these pages. Moss talks to the scientists — most of them now quite old — who staffed the labs where today’s name-brand sugar pops and TV dinners (to use the oldfashioned term) were concocted. Our taste for sugar and fat is the age-old product of evolutionary programming (when you found something sweet or fatty back on the ancient African savannah, you ate it).

But the science of cramming it into cheap, never-go-stale snack foods — that’s a product of 20th-century American food technology.

The most important word in this book is the first one that appears in the title. Like almost everyone I know, I grew up with the knowledge that sugar would make you fat and rot your teeth — and waged running battles with my mom about what kind of cereal I could eat (Corn Flakes, OK; Frosted Flakes, OK . Cheerios, okay; Froot Loops, OK). In my 20s, I witnessed the low-fat craze. And then in my 30s, I fell in with Atkins fad — which taught everyone to count “carbs” (a word that didn’t exist when I was young) and pursue the hallowed fat-burning state of ketosis, my generation’s equivalent of 1960 s-era meditation-induced transcendental bliss. Yet throughout it all, I never once stopped to think about how much salt I was putting into my body, despite the fact that excessive sodium consumption leads to high blood pressure, heart attacks, kidney disease and stroke. (I’m convinced that it also can make you irritable and depressed, though I am yet to see a good study on that.)

We’re all addicts at heart, with burgers, chips and candy serving the role of heroin and nicotine

Sodium content appears on food labels. Yet few people I know — even many health-conscious foodies — track their sodium consumption with anywhere near the obsessive zeal that they track carbs and fat. For most people, the maximum daily recommended intake of sodium is 2,300 milligrams, equivalent to about a teaspoon of salt. But if you subsist on fast food, your daily diet can yield 10 times that amount.

This realization has retroactively destroyed many of my fondest childhood food memories. When I went grocery shopping with my parents, for instance, my father often would throw me a few packs of “Hot Rod” sausage snacks to munch on as I sat, legs dangling, in the front section of

his shopping cart. Even then, no one mistook Hot Rods for health food. But it was, technically, meat after all. (“High in protein” the packaging informs us!) So how bad could it be?

This is a grocery-store practice I absent-mindedly had begun repeating with my own small children until, inspired by Moss’ book, I actually took a peek at the nutritional info on the Hot Rod package. Turns out that five Hot Rod sticks, weighing just 45 grams in sum, contain more than a gram of sodium — 46% of a day’s allotment for an adult, and about 70% for a child or — because of their increased risk of certain diseases — black adult (among salt’s vices is that it is a racist food). Inhale two or three Hot Rod packs at a go, as I did when I was in grade school, and I was blowing through my 24-hour sodium quota in less than five minutes.

Proselytizing about salt’s ill effects makes you a culinary killjoy, since so much of our comfort food is full of the stuff. The feta cheese in your salad is crammed with salt. So is the kimchi that is the supposedly healthy accompaniment to your Korean meat fare. Watch a Teppanyaki chef in action at a Japanese restaurant, and I guarantee a shower of salt will be part of the show — not to mention all the sodium in the soy sauce drizzled over everything.

It’s not just that salt makes food taste better — man, does it ever — it also has an engineering function: Salt counteracts the oxidation of fats in animal flesh, and thereby helps eliminate the “warmed-over flavour” (WOF is a well-established acronym in the processed-food industry, Moss reports) that repels our taste buds whenever they encounter old meat.

The title of Moss’ book suggests a sort of corporate conspiracy against our bodies. Yet it’s important to remember that the food industry isn’t the real villain here: It’s our weakwilled selves. All those scientists pumping salt, sugar and fat into foods are really just giving our bodies what they superficially crave. It’s up to us to push back — even if it means the sort of desperate get-this-crapaway-from-me tactics that Seinfeld puts into his shtick. Reading Moss’ book might help stiffen our spines in this regard.

Salt, Sugar, Fat had that effect on me, at any rate. At the very least, I’m keeping the Hot Rods out of the grocery cart.