The Salt that Wasn’t

The Callous Arseholes of Spite and Hate (CASH) have declared there is far too much salt in crumpets.

I like crumpets. I doubt the salt content would be of any concern to the healthists if they saw how much butter, jam and/or golden syrup I load onto them. Anyway, I have them less than once a month, maybe two or three times a year, and I seriously doubt anyone eats them daily. The salt contents of crumpets are pretty much an irrelevance in almost everyone’s diet. You might as well whine about the saturated fat content of reindeer meat.

But read on in the article and you find they aren’t talking about salt at all. No, the culprit here is sodium bicarbonate, aka bicarbonate of soda, aka baking powder. Technically, in chemical terms, it’s ‘a salt’ but in layman’s terms it’s not ‘salt’ (sodium chloride) because it doesn’t taste salty.

So it’s not ‘salt’ they are after. It’s sodium. An essential element for a fully functioning nervous system and other metabolic things that keep you alive and conscious. You are to give up those things and leave them for the elite, they don’t want you able to think too much or move too fast.

Danish cooking uses ammonium bicarbonate. Clever really, the ammonium part becomes ammonia in cooking and goes away in the steam. Hard to get in the UK, but CynaraeStMary found it online and there’s a huge pile of cookies here as a result. I have sampled… a few   😉

CASH (apt name, isn’t it?) want to force everyone to use potassium bicarbonate instead. Because a potassium excess is exactly the same as a sodium excess and your nervous system is fucked just the same.

Actually, no.

The nervous system needs potassium and sodium and it needs them in balance. Too much of one or the other and the excess is excreted. That’s why kidneys are really useful things to have.

Too little of one or the other and there is nothing any organ in the body can do about it. The body can dump an excess but can’t replenish a shortage of an element out of thin air. That’s when nerves start failing and your brain gets fuddled and then you die. In even more pain and despair than a 500-a-day smoker with a bad case of the lumps.

CASH say salt reduction targets will fail. Of course they will fail because if they look remotely like succeeding, CASH simply start including other sodium compounds that aren’t salt. They will keep doing this until they have eliminated sodium from the diet altogether.

There will be a massive outbreak of hyponatremia and the cost to the NHS will be utterly astounding. CASH will get rich while the NHS infrastructure collapses as a result of their pronouncements.

But that’s okay. Bankrupting the NHS in a ‘good cause’ is fine.

As long as the smokers aren’t doing it.

I wonder… will we ever elect a political party that has a whole brain between them? It isn’t looking likely at the moment.