In the olden days (which were in black and white, I have photos to prove it) sailors took barrels of salt pork on voyages. Not lightly salted bits of bacon, these were whole barrels of salt with cooked pork buried in them. They didn’t die and they didn’t know why the salt worked. Remember, these people knew that drinking salt water would drive you mad while living on heavily salted pork. Nobody ever said ‘Hey, hang on a minute…’
Incidentally, as proof of my contention that all the old monochrome works of art were coloured in when colour was invented in the Seventies, they missed one. There really was no such thing as colour in those days and that’s why we oldies struggle with it even now. 64 million colours on my monitor? I’ve only just got to grips with seven – and indigo isn’t real.
Back to salt. Sailors managed to get around the planet living on seriously salted roast pork and rum without dying of saltiness. More people die of salt deprivation than of oversalting according to a study I just made up like everyone else does these days. There was a reason for all that salt.
Clostridium, the bacterial genus containing gas gangrene and botulism, can’t live in it. Food packed in salt won’t let them grow.
Not much else grows either. Microbial life is like all other life, it needs water to live and salt has this habit of sucking the water out of things. So, salty things are safe to eat.
If you wanted to kill lots of people – or rather, if you wanted lots of people to kill themselves on command, one easy way would be to make them scared of an essential nutrient. Like, perhaps, niacin. Nicotinic acid. Derived from nicotine. Vitamin B3, without which you experience pellagra. Which looks a lot like ebola. That’s probably a coincidence. Probably.
Or you can get people scared of salt. It comes out of the ground. You are eating dirt. Why not pay more for ‘pure’ dirt which is nothing of the kind? Pure sodium chloride is white. If it’s pink it probably has manganese chloride in it, which is not dangerous but you’ll soon be told it is. If it’s not white it certainly is not pure salt.
The salt scare woirks so well that people admitted to hospital with clear signs of salt deprivation are put onto a low-salt diet. And a saline drip. The irony goes ‘whoosh’ over their heads and even comes back for another flypast.
And yet, salt reduction continues. Okay, maybe there is too much salt in processed foods but it isn’t there for fun. It extends shelf life by inhibiting bacteria and enhances flavour. When I am working hours that make fresh-cooking impossible, I do not add salt to the microwave crap I live on during those times. I know they are already salted.
Salads are inedible without salt. A stick of celery is wonderful with the bitten end salted each time. Boiled eggs with no salt? Unthinkable!
Yet the drones believe salt will kill them when it is one of the most important things for keeping them alive.
What will they fear next? Sugar, perhaps? The fuel that brains run on?
Oh, right. Of course…
underdogs bite upwards 
The more distractions there are from real issues, the more the government gets away with murder because we’re all supposed to be worried about our diet and climate change and SHS and paedophiles hiding behind every pillar box and the ‘War on Terror’. It has to be hyped up to ridiculous lengths to make it plausible to the masses. They don’t need to believe in all of it. Just enough.
We used to worry about the Cold War, but that was probably fabricated too. I still don’t believe how easily the USSR ‘crumbled’ and ‘democracy’ flowed like vodka and very soon, billionaire oligarchs owned Russia’s natural resources. How did that happen when everyone had been ‘equal’?
Add to all the worry, coma-inducing modern ‘entertainment’, mainly television, which people tend to watch all evening, soaking up the fear via the ‘news’, ‘documentaries’ and constant cop shows with the added worry of what all the soap characters are going through.
What we have is “bread and circuses” on acid.
Then mix in ‘equality and diversity’ and political correctness = divide and conquer, to divert attention away from the politicians even more.
Anyway, there are only six colours – the ones on the “gay pride” flag. There’s no indigo on it, but there was on older versions (pre-1979), so it was once a colour. Probably a trial one during the transition from black and white to colour and soon rejected.
LikeLike
XX I still don’t believe how easily the USSR ‘crumbled’ and ‘democracy’ flowed like vodka and very soon, billionaire oligarchs owned Russia’s natural resources.XX
Same with the DDR. mere DAYS after the wall was opened, the place was FULL of Ossis in brand new top range BMWs and Mercs. Where the HEL did they get the money from??
LikeLike
I used to work with a guy who salted everything. And not just a few shakes of the salt pot, we’re talking a lot of salt. It didn’t seem to do him any harm at all. He even salted Indian curry carry outs.
The best advice on food etc. is always provided by Scottish Grannies. Eat reasonable sized portions and lots of differing types of food. Don’t go mental on any one type. Maybe the “clear your plate or else” advice may be a bit out of date.
If you are unlucky enough not to have a Scottish Granny due to ethnicity they can be hired out or shock…replaced with any chosen ethnicity granny who is available.
Eating cardboard box food isn’t a great choice but we ALL do it at times. I bet Queenie ah Phil sneak them in sometimes. Obviously Charlie won’t ever because he knows stuff although non of it is of any value what so ever.
LikeLike
I had a Scottish granny and an English one. Growing up in Glasgow you get loads of mince and tatties and square sausage for lunch. It’s probably still the cancer and heart attack capital of Europe. I should be OK now I’ve left…
LikeLike
Probably but given the French diet which is very unhealthy from a health point of view they don’t keel over. It must be in the genes?
LikeLike
It’s the wine.
LikeLike
I had to look up “Ossis”. You must be one of the Wessis then? Acc. to Wikipedia, “The terms can be considered disparaging,” but no offence intended.
Wikipedia also says that, “Around 11% [of Ossis] would have liked to have East Germany back.
So, it must have been good for some.
LikeLike
So, it must have been good for some.
As Orwell wrote in ‘Animal Farm’: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.
LikeLike
Absence of sufficient salt gives me terrible pains in the knee joints.
And the advantage of pork is that it has not been Halal killed.
LikeLike
With me, it’s the elbows.
I have a good stock of salt. It cannot rot and nothing grows in it. Just keep it dry and it lasts forever.
LikeLike
Not only salt, but saturated fat. I have a theory that “Alzhiemers”, is nothing more than a manifestation of a low salt/low fat diet. I mean it’s not like your brain isn’t mainly water and saturated fat or anything, or that salt being an electrolite isn’t really essential for the nervous system is it?
Let’s just think this through here, if your diet is calcium deficient, your body just sucks the calcium out your bones. Your body also uses sodium, magnesium, potassium and phosphorus in bile which neutralises stomach acid before what you’ve eaten heads on it’s way through your intestines. If your diet is deficient in these metals/minerals, your body goes looking for the next source of reactive metals, which happens to be calcium, and people wonder why the bones of old people are just crumbling away.
LikeLike
I know someone with multiple sclerosis who is on a virtually fat-free diet.
I have tried to point out that myelin is made of fat… but her doctors know best…
LikeLike
They don’t though. They don’t do enough biochemistry nor physiology to really understand things like nerve growth, nerve conduction and the like. Try synthesising a cell membrane without cholesterol. They don’t even treat MS as an infectious disease. Yet it has all the characteristics of one, but no isolatable cause. So it must have a trigger. I bet we have a herpes virus in the frame. Probably Epstein Barr. The Faroes are a case in point. Prior to WWII, no MS. Post WWII and the British forces, MS started to be diagnosed.
LikeLike
MS is a loss of myelin sheath on the nerve axons, not a failure to form myelin. A failure to form it could be genetic but a loss of the sheath does point to an outside agent. A very specific agent targeting specific cells, which, as you say, suggests a virus.
I bet it gets blamed on passive smoking though, if it hasn’t been already.
When the smokers are gone, what will the medical profession do?
LikeLike
Yes indeed, it’s demyelination. Now where do herpes viruses like to hide? I would put money on it being a herpes virus that triggers the bloody immune system to attack the nerve sheath. But there are different forms of MS. The clue is just elusive.
LikeLike
What if the different forms are caused by differences in the immune system?
An immune system that can’t cope but just keeps trying – progressive disease. How fast it progresses depends on the degree to which the immune system is active.
An immune system that periodically hammers the virus (not quite eradicating it) then steps back – relapsing-remitting.
Probably over-simplified, but it could be a case of same virus, different immune responses. I’m out of my field now, I have no idea if that could even be tested.
LikeLike
Couldn’t put it better myself. Sea salt has the most delightful taste and because it is so concentrated, you don’t need to use an awful lot. My food tastes completely different when I use it. Must be because of trace elements and the such like. I’m shocked at how so many peeps are taken in by this, what can only be called an indoctrination programme by the establishment. The telly is a useful tool for them. Carefully lulls you into thinking the way they want. I’m a bit more aware than most, but it’s difficult to shake it off – I’ve a large bag of sea salt in the back of the cupboard which has a sell-by date of June this year, and I’m already thinking ‘Oh I’d better throw it away then….’
LikeLike
Salt with a sell-by date? Did they include the gazillion or so years it had been sitting deep beneath the earth’s crust?
LikeLike
Everything has a sell-by date. Even salt, which is such a simple compound nothing can happen to it.
It’s to make you throw it away so you’ll buy more.
LikeLike
There is a bottled water company here, that advertises that their water comes from an iceberg and is 500,000 years old or something. THEY have a sell by date.
Phew! JUST caught THAT in time then! Another few weeks in the glacier and…. who knows who it may have poisoned??
LikeLike
Glaciers have their expiry dates barcoded into the ice, in the pattern of cracks when they break off the floe.
Tomorrow I must try to convince an idiot that’s actually true. So far, no matter how absurd I get, there’s always at least one who falls for it.
LikeLike
Where I sometimes live we get packets of sea salt. I think it is the sweepings from the places where they load massive ships with salt for Swedish roads each winter. The salt pans often have hundreds of Flamingoes wading about. This probably explains the funny black bits in the salt. Flamingo shit I suppose but safe and tasty Flamingo shit. I hope
LikeLike
Well they charge a premium for coffee that’s been sifted out of civit shit, so it looks to me like you’re getting a bargain.
LikeLike
If it’s encased in salt then there is not likely to be much left alive in it. Not even in flamingo shit.
LikeLike
It would be supremely rich irony if all the survivors of ebola were smokers. Such things should happen in real life.
LikeLike
Thinking back to Leggy’s ‘Just a Storyline’, it makes sense if you want to weaken a population’s defences 😉
LikeLike
They are trying really hard ot get rid of tobacco. When the WHO try so hard to get rid of something, you just know it has to be good for you.
LikeLike
What is skewing the salt statistics is a bastard mixture of pure Darwinian natural selection, political correctness and the saltiness of the American diet.
Most Americans are descended from Western Europeans or Eastern Siberians. Both these groups need salt in their diet, and both crave it; they include a fair proportion of peoples like us Brits who were coastal dwellers, and are adapted to a diet with lots of sea salt in it. It doesn’t do us any harm at all as long as we drink plenty of water (or beer; we’re adapted to cope with ethanol too).
Black Americans are all descended from slaves, who were all captured and traded by other Africans to slavers operating out of west Africa, which is tropical. Slave ships were peculiarly vile, but the important thing to remember is that these were trading operations operating on a shoestring budget. They didn’t have much of a security force on board, because every man on board had to be paid, thus had to be essential.
So, standard operating procedure was to keep all the slaves chained below decks until the ship was out of port and well out of sight of land, and even out of sight of signs of land. This meant that the slaves would be kept down inside a near-100% humidity hold, at temperatures over 40 celcius, for a couple of days, with minimal water. A lot died from this mistreatment, but fresh water was precious, more so than slaves were.
Crucially, the survivors were those people best at hanging onto water in their bodies. This trait maps onto the trait for holding onto salt more than is normal for humans. The African slaves were thus selected (by killing more normal individuals) for those people who excrete less salt, no matter how much is in their diet.
Black Americans suffer much, much more hypertension than do whites because of this. Black Americans suffer way more hypertension than do black South Africans (the only African group with roughly the same food and standards of living as black Americans), and this is all down to that brief, crucial natural selection by slavers.
This queers the heart disease statistics in most of America, especially because a lot of heart disease researchers are politically-correct and don’t want to treat the numerous blacks in America as an out-group (which they really ought to do). American heart disease research dominates that throughout the world, and thus queers the results all over the place.
Those slavers have a lot to answer for, but not nearly so much as politically-correct morons!
LikeLike
It makes sense. Their taking advantage of this selection also makes sense. As does their silencing of anyone pointing it out as ‘racist’.
LikeLike