loving salt

Salty snacks have exerted a pull on me all my life.  As i child, i'd come home from school and polish off one of the inner packets of a box of saltines (mmmm, Keebler Zestas!).  In my penurious student days, i met my need through popcorn, a very frugal snack.  From time to time, i've indulged in moderate intakes of potato or corn chips, or dry-roasted peanuts.  When in the throes of a low-fat diet, i'd scrub a good-sized baking potato, slice it thickly, lay it out on a baking sheet and sprinkle with salt, pepper and parmesan cheese, then run it under the broiler to get my "fix."  Later, under Atkins' more illuminated system, i discovered macadamia nuts (*sigh of content*).

Anyone who has read this blog over the last couple of months may remember, i tried Dr. Donaldson's "Strong Medicine" regimen as written, but quickly learned that i had to modify it because the saltless meat was sitting in my stomach like a rock.  Reading more on the subject of zero-carbing taught me that a diet with a higher meat composition requires more salt in the diet.  Pretty intuitive, really -- our stomach-acid production relies on chloride being available, and i can't imagine that anything contributes it as well as the sodium chloride that garnishes my favorite foods.

Because SOME hypertensives have trouble with water retention, the dumb sheep in the medicine business made every attempt to deprive the rest of us of this important nutrient.  The dumb sheep in the magazine/newspaper-writing business, Big Food, and also the advertising field followed suit.  If the Lords of Karma have been paying attention, they'll all spend their next lives being captive eaters in an institutional milieu that leaves them lacking the specific nutritional factor they need to feel decent.

Presently, along comes a coterie in the obesity-theory business which tells us that all our problems are based on hedonism, and that eating coarse-meal bread and gruel a low-reward diet is all we need to achieve our reward in heaven....

Some people hypothesize that paleolithic humans didn't -- couldn't -- season their food (just like some "experts" are convinced that they ate a low-fat diet).  Ahem:  even animals with brains the size of a BB seek out salt.  You think that these adepts in the art of survival wouldn't observe animals at a salt-lick, and wonder what the excitement was all about?  Wouldn't taste it themselves, and find it appealing?  Wouldn't balloon up like a chicken in a corn bin because they learned to add it to other foods and found it irresistible?  Well, maybe not that last thing.

I remember a guy in the comment-section of somebody's blog, sneering at the practice of grinding up one's almonds and adding them to eggs and butter and spices to form a particularly tasty version of basic FOOD.  There is a form of puritanism in the "ancestral health" community which is absolutely ridiculous at this point of the world's intellectual development.  Like a couple of guys i know, who sneer at other men for having clean fingernails and call them effeminate on that basis alone....

There's absolutely no virtue in doing things the hard or dirty way, and no reason to, unless your psychology needs to FIND a way to make a virtue of necessity.  Why is asceticism still considered a good thing?  Self-flagellation won't make you a better person -- it never has -- and you won't be impressing anyone but yourself.  Is the earth going through a cycle of reincarnations of medieval saints?  Based on the fanaticism and illogic, it does rather look like it.