Have you seen Sleeper? One of Woody Allen’s funniest movies. He plays, well, himself as always, and he gets put into suspended animation and wakes up 200 hundred years from now. Everything is very silly. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the relevant bit:
Ha ha! Because all the stuff modern science tells us is unhealthy is actually harmless, if not beneficial! It’s a wacky humor joke.
Except it’s not. We already know that the more you follow the food pyramid, the more you take on its shape. Everything you’ve been told about food your whole life is wrong. Well, mostly. And now, even seasonings aren’t safe from being declared safe.
A recent report commissioned by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reviewed the health benefits of reducing salt intake and the take-home message is that salt, in the quantities consumed by most Americans, is no longer considered a substantial health hazard. What the CDC study reported explicitly is that there is no benefit, and may be a danger, from reducing our salt intake below 1 tsp per day. What was absent about the report was is the difference between healthy mineral salts and iodized table salt…
Salt is the most common and readily available nonmetallic mineral in the world. So how could a mineral which we’ve bathed in and absorbed in all foods since our existence be so harmful for the human body? Two words. It isn’t. Actually, the opposite is true. A low salt diet will actually increase your risk of death.
I know what you’re thinking, but no, Michael Bloomberg is in no danger. It’s not like he follows the same rules as us commoners!
The NYT even called him out for his sodium sanctimony back in ’09:
Under his watch, the city has declared sodium an enemy, asking restaurants and food manufacturers to voluntarily cut the salt in their dishes by 20 percent or more, and encouraging diners to “shake the habit” by asking waiters for food without added salt.
But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.
Not even pizza is spared a coat of sodium. When the mayor sat down to eat a slice at Denino’s Pizzeria Tavern on Staten Island recently, this reporter spotted him applying six dashes of salt to it.
That’s because salt is delicious. It makes food taste better. So eat it. Eat all you want of it. Go nuts! In fact, eat nuts with salt on them, because they taste better that way. (Get your mind out of the gutter, you.)
Somebody should design a salt shaker in the shape of Bloomberg’s stupid head. The salt could pour out of his soulless eyes. I don’t know who the food-fascist on the pepper shaker would be… Michelle Obama? Nah, that’d be racist. Well, we’ll figure it out, I’m just throwing out ideas here.
Update: Taking omega-3 fish oil supplements may increase the risk of aggressive prostate cancer by 70%. Yay!
Update: ICYMI, the other day Labash said the same thing I just did, except funny.
