In article
>,
Ranée at Arabian Knits > wrote:

> In article >,
> George > wrote:
>
> > It sure seems lots of folks no longer like or care about any
> > flavors/tastes except sugar and salt.
>
> The conspiracy theorist in me thinks it is deliberate. If you add
> enough sugar and salt to food, it is all that people will want. It
> takes a slow acclimatizing to it, though, as the quantities added to
> packaged foods now are jarring to people who aren't accustomed to it.

It's not a flavor per se, but I would also add fat to the mix. Witness
some of the recent culinary abominations of the fast food joints.
Mercifully, some of them have gone the way of Space Food Sticks, but
many remain to wreak havoc.

I'm sure I've told this story here before, but during my clinical
rotations I saw a patient in the hospital for raging high blood
pressure. He'd been to the Parkland (Dallas) ER several times before
for this condition, but nobody had bothered to ask about his normal
consumption of food and drink before I walked into his room. This man
drove a gravel truck around the county. He would stop and get a Big
Gulp at 7-11, drink the soda, THEN shake salt liberally into the
remaining ice and drink the resulting brine. He'd also dip fruit and
veggie slices into salt and eat them, plus add lots of salt at the
table. My back-of-the-envelope calculation estimated that he was
getting at least 7 grams of SODIUM (roughly 1 tablespoon of SALT) per
day. Even if his truck wasn't air-conditioned, nobody needs to
replenish that much sodium per day under normal conditions.

This salt-o-holic phenomenon is not limited to folks at lower income or
education levels, alas. My work partner in crime, a PhD nurse
practitioner, has a salt tooth. When I give her the hairy eyeball about
her salt consumption, her reply is "It's a Southern thing." (Girl lived
in Georgia and Texas for many years.) Is it any wonder that there is a
"Stroke Belt" that encompasses most Southern states?

Cindy, jumping off the soapbox

--
C.J. Fuller

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