You might never have had traditional old-fashioned Eastern European peasant food. Lotsa peeled, boiled potatoes (and their various, uh, variants.)
Salt, sure.
Pepper … maaaybe. (Don’t go nuts, though.)
Paprika, depending on the region, okay.
Not a whole lotta else, except maybe caraway and rye seeds.
Thanks to some recent heart issues, I’m watching the sodium levels in the food I buy for basically the first time. And I’ve been genuinely floored by some of what I’ve read! My favorite Velveeta shells and cheese dinner was particularly jarring. If you eat the whole box (which I typically would), it puts you at, like, 115% of your recommended daily sodium intake. And I would salt it pretty liberally on top of that! But I’m making my way. I was thrilled to see that unsalted peanuts are a good low-sodium choice. And I found a line of frozen dinners called Forks Over Knives with some shockingly low options.
I actually got into a fight with my cardiologist’s Fellow visiting from the UK. He brought paperwork for me to read and sign. He told me that if the attempt at a stent failed, I’d go straight for the bypass.
I told him that a bypass wasn’t something I’d consent to. He told me I didn’t really have a choice. I freaked out, screaming and telling him to get the fuck away from me. Nurses came running and eventually my cardiologist came and settled me down. He told his UK Fellow that in the US patients had rights.
My stent procedure went beautifully. Had it not worked, my artery occlusion would have been managed with drugs and I likely wouldn’t be here today. Sobering.
It’s scary to realize that stenting procedures can sometimes fail, and in other cases wouldn’t even be attempted. Also, when the technology was still in its infancy, stents themselves could become blocked. In my case, it took a consultation among three different doctors to decide that stenting was viable – the attending cardiologist, the bypass surgeon, and the head of the PCI lab. I ended up with three stents. I had no idea of the bad shape I was in.
I was brought up on it. But so were the vast majority of everybody else. The upper classes ate the foods of upper class Brits (except for the Indian stuff). The joke was that all the food on the plate had to be white. Nationally-distributed canned and frozen foods followed these rules. “Ethnic” restaurants existed in a few large cities. When I first started writing about health in the 1980s, the nutrition information on foods didn’t even include sodium.
What cultures used a plenitude of spices? Jamaican, for one, since that was what I replied to. Korean, French, Italian, Indian, Greek, and Mexican, just to name a fraction of the spice blends available in any modern supermarket. Basically a vast arc surrounding Northern Europe and former British colonies, the majority of the world.
Sure, some Americans used spices, and sure, some cultures didn’t. This isn’t a “name-one-exception-and-I-win” game. I gave a general truth, speaking as someone who lived through the giant change in the possibilities of the average American diet.
And yet, we still eat too much salt. Americans love salt. I’ll bet most “ethnic” restaurants, the ones who serve Americanized versions of foods, use more salt than one would find in their countries. Maybe that will change since we’re living through yet another gigantic change, the acceptance of increasingly spicy hot peppers in a growing variety of foods. Or do Americans want both?
James Lileks’ famous Gallery of Regrettable Food features some real horrors from around the 1950s and perhaps later. Among the quirks of the food of that era, besides the inclination to encase everything in Jello, was a real aversion to spices.
That, plus the fact that most ethnic foods were virtually unknown in the US, made American diets at the time bland and boring, and poor understanding of nutrition and health hazards made a lot of it downright unhealthy.
Welp, that country chicken with mashed and gravy was very tasty.
Narrator: “Of course it was! It contained enough sodium to sink a battleship – see OP.”
While poking around in the freezer I thought to check my favourite frozen wood-fired pizza. The verdict? 47% daily value of sodium. But wait! Was that for the whole pizza? No, it was not, it was for half. But it’s a small thin-crust pizza and it’s not unreasonable for one hungry person to eat the whole thing – it’s only about 390 grams. So the whole thing delivers 94% of the maximum DV of sodium! This seemingly innocuous food turns out to be the worst yet!
You can’t get away from this scourge! With one Caesar today and the chicken for a late lunch/dinner combo I’m already up to 91% of the maximum DV for someone not sodium-restricted! And the night is young!
I used to think I could eat salty foods and then balance it out with eating a few pounds of potassium-rich vegetables. I don’t have any cites but think I was wrong anyway.
What other foods besides a whole frozen pizza are seemingly innocuous sodium bombs? A family-size bag of potato chips? A heaping bowl of salt?
Utz makes a remarkably tasty no-salt potato chip. Other brands were inedible.
Finding high salt products can be done blindfolded. Decent low- or no-salt foods only appear after searching the shelves forever.
There’s no reason that a pizza needs to be intrinsically unhealthy. In its most common formulation it’s bread, tomato sauce, cheese, and toppings that can all be fresh and healthy, free of preservatives and excess sodium. I would naturally expect lower quality and more crap ingredients in mass-produced pizza, but I was shocked at the shameless extent of the craptitude in what was supposed to be a premium product.
.
I’m just poking mild fun here, but a lot of the stuff mentioned just tastes to me like it’s loaded with salt.
I love salty foods and have no need yet to limit my intake. Sometimes I like so much salt on my fries that it stings my mouth. But it tastes super salty to me, just like canned soup tastes super salty and really just about any processed food. Soup and most other things can be made with less salt, but it tastes different.
Maybe it’s just a difference in perception. I think frozen pizza is likely a sodium bomb because all the brands I’ve tried have tasted that way, so it doesn’t trigger any sense of being “seemingly innocuous”. And I know the RDV of sodium is really low and you almost certainly aren’t hitting it without extreme effort unless you make all your own food from basic ingredients, so pretty much any processed item will blow past the limit.
Since I still really like that particular wood-fired pizza, I guess I’m just going to have to limit myself to no more than half. In truth, I usually don’t finish it all anyway and leave two or three slices for the next day, but sometimes I do.
So no more than half, and if I’m still hungry something healthy like fruit. But for me “fruit” often means something like strawberries with Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. Ha! Ever have a close look at the label of Haagen-Dazs vanilla? It contains 78% of the maximum DV of saturated and trans fats in just 3/4 of a cup (188 g) and a good dose of sodium to boot!
I do have a solution to healthy eating, though – one that I’ve been following all along. After my Caesar today with all its sodium and other nasties, I had vodka martinis which have none! I’m currently enjoying my second Bacardi Gold rum (no sodium, no fat) with my second Lindt Lindor chocolate truffle ball (1% DV sodium). Yes – vodka and rum, and the occasional chocolate – the key to healthy eating! 
Professor “a lot of fun at parties”, right?
“Here’s my shelf of cup a soup styrofoam. I can’t taste salt, and had no idea how much salt was in a cup a soup container, until I read the label 32 cups in…”
“Professor, we’re having a party… nevermind. I misspoke. We’re having a part… of… pizza… alone, later. Ha ha.”
This is a thing. I’m a horrible judge of saltiness, to the point where I will have my gf taste my cooking and adjust salt if necessary. I’ve never picked up a salt shaker in a restaurant, while my gf always needs to add some.
Last year I decided to lose weight and clean up my eating habits, and lowering the amount of salt and carbohydrates I consumed was a big part of it. As soon as I started reading labels, it became clear that most packaged foods had added salt and sugar to make it more palatable for consumers. Food manufacturers know very well that most people don’t read labels.
I learned that high salt intake leads to high blood pressure (cite) and high blood pressure can lead to heart disease and stroke (cite). High blood sugar leads to insulin resistance, which along with excess body weight can lead to diabetes (cite).
I am now on a plant-based, whole food and low carbohydrate diet, and rarely add salt to any food I am preparing or eating. I avoid eating anything with added sugar and steer away from ultra-processed foods. I’m on intermittent fasting, exercise regularly, and get eight hours of quality sleep every night.
I’ve been able to maintain my lower weight for a year now and my health is better than it’s been in a long time. It’s not easy losing weight and fixing your diet, but I think it’s well worth it in the long run.
Here’s a label (sorry for the poor photography) from an import noodle bowl I got crossing the 100% mark for sodium:
I couldn’t find an existing copy/pic of that label and the product itself seems hard to find online. I don’t remember where I got it but one of the local Asian markets we have around. It’s like the one below but with a cardboard sleeve and 85 grams net. I also have a white curry version that’s a few hundred milligrams lighter on the salt, only 96%DV.
I see that it has a warning label about its butylated hydroxyanisole content, but not about the massive amount of sodium. I must say the “harm me” part of the name seems most appropriate! 
Decades ago I read an article in Consumer Reports that compared a businessman’s “typical” lunch in the US and Japan. The US lunch was a Big Mac, fries, and soda (size forgotten on the last two) and the Japanese was a bento box.
Looking at things like fat content, carbohydrate to protein ratio, and other dietary factors, again forgotten, the Japanese lunch was superior to the US lunch in every way save one: sodium content. Between the main protein, pickled vegetables, rice ball with a salted plum inside, and packets of soy sauce it had more than twice as much sodium than even MickeyDee.
At the time stroke was the leading cause of death in Japan. Since then statistics have improved.
There’s even a Scandinavia and the World comic about potatoes in European peasant food. Potatoes and salt.
