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So my experience with butter is that it was yanked away from me early in my lifetime. Our family followed all kinds of bogus dietary fads. We had fluoridated wa

So my experience with butter is that it was yanked away from me early in my lifetime. Our family followed all kinds of bogus dietary fads. We had fluoridated water, Dad had hypertension, so we had margarine, and never whole milk, only 2%, and at one point there were even "Egg Beaters" without the yolks; fat, sodium and cholesterol was like dirty bywords among us. Furthermore, Mom was an avowed bad cook, and didn't have the faintest idea how to incorporate seasonings and spices into our meals, which were uniformly bland and unappealing. Now, the sane advice is that salt and fat are not bad for you, but are essential to life and enjoyment. Of course margarine and all that other artificial, substitute crap turned out to be way more detrimental to us. A good amount of fat (and carbs) causes food to taste good and also be satisfying: you can pound a package full of rice cakes, or a giant salad and not feel full, unless you accompany it with butter or oil. Julia Childs and French people couldn't be wrong: they consume plenty of rich food and they don't have American health problems. This may be a canard, but it's true that the FDA/USDA doesn't actually advocate for consumer health; just look at the ridiculous "food group" "food pyramid" propaganda they keep sending us. Today at home I am unapologetically natural, and I love organic food. I use organic whole un-homogenized milk. I use Kerrygold unsalted. I also use Himalayan pink salt, because table salt has no nutritional value (all the nutrition is refined away and sold to supplement companies!) Conventional wisdom about food is often dead wrong, but if you sift through all the fad diets and bogus medical advice, you can sometimes find nuggets of truth.

gattilorenz 4y ago
Everything else makes perfect sense, but > I also use Himalayan pink salt, because table salt has no nutritional value It’s… salt. Himalayan pink salt also has no real nutritional value (it is probably lacking iodine tho), it’s just salt with inclusions of other mineral that you get in much larger quantities with regular food. Unless you literally eat large chunks of salt every day, I guess. Pink salt is a fad/marketing thing, exactly as margarine was…
- xref 4y ago
  Then why does pink salt taste so much better in my de-ionized water and colloidal silver smoothies?
  - xattt 4y ago
    Is it the silver chloride precipitating inside your tastebuds? ;)
  - SergeAx 4y ago
    Try a double blind tasting. I don't knjow people who can tell pink salt from plain kitchen salt by taste, and I am familiar with a number of professional wine sommeliers.
    - harshalizee 4y ago
      You can totally tell the difference between sea salt, Himalayan salt and table salt. They change the flavor profile of many foods drastically. Even though table salt is probably better for you sure to the iodine content, pink salt is just so much better for the taste buds.
      - SergeAx 4y ago
        I would love to meet someone who can do it in a double blind test with distilled water.
      - skylurk 4y ago
        Flavour is highly influenced by color. Tasting happens in the brain.
    - yial 4y ago
      A lot of the taste difference with salt comes from the size it’s ground to, or at least that’s what I was told in the one cooking class. Hence why you might want to sprinkle a steak with large chunks of salt, but use finely ground somewhere else.
    - air7 4y ago
- mandmandam 4y ago
  > Pink salt is a fad/marketing thing, exactly as margarine was… Only if you believe microplastics are harmless (you really shouldn't). Sea salt consistently has far more plastic in it than rock salt. If I'm reading this study [0] right, it's about 10x more microplastics than rock salt, which makes sense if you think about it. 0 - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b04180 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b04180
  - gattilorenz 4y ago
    Even though I don’t care for micro plastics (e.g. I don’t look into it), I also buy (perfectly white) rock salt by chance. They dig it up 10 km from here, not on the Himalaya.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > If I'm reading this study [0] right, it's about 10x more microplastics than rock salt, which makes sense if you think about it. Yes, it does make sense, but that’s because micro plastics are everywhere we bother to look. In the air, in the water, in the fish, in animals, etc. However, that is no evidence that the micro plastics we get from salt are significant in any way compared to other sources, particularly considering how little of the stuff we actually eat. From an ecological point of view, getting it from the sea is much better than ripping mountains apart to extract it.
  - brokenkebaby 4y ago
    It looks like you are equating pink salt, and mined salt. Mined salt usually colored in white-gray spectrum.
  - Qem 4y ago
    Given the inorganic nature of sea salt, I believe it should be feasible to remove most microplastics from it, by applying intense heat briefly, in an oxygen atmosphere, so the microplastic particles would just burn away.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  99% of the time we are using salt for flavor, not for the nutritional value. So the inclusion of a small amount of minerals has value in changing the flavor of the salt. Also, iodine adds a bad metallic taste, so that's another reason to choose something besides standard table salt.
  - gattilorenz 4y ago
    Sure, if you can notice such a “different taste” (I don’t, and certainly not in a dish, but maybe that’s me) and this has value for you, go ahead. Iodine, tho, it’s something you actually need depending on where you live, so I’ll keep buying iodated salt until I move to the seaside…
    - beebeepka 4y ago
      I find myself reaching for the pink one more often than not. Taste has a lot more going for it than the concentrated white dust natrium chloride. It's also interesting that you cannot taste the difference. Do you usually consume lots of the stuff?
      - gattilorenz 4y ago
        > Do you usually consume lots of the stuff? I mean… it’s salt? I use it to salt stuff, I don’t eat it alone. I use moderate (normal?) amounts, mostly in dishes. For the most part it is not a topping or something that stays unmelted on top of a very bland food… but maybe it depends on what you cook and eat.
        ghaff 4y ago
        Coarser-grained salt, if it's sprinkled on top of something, can give you more of a salt taste sensation which can often be desirable. But that's the effect of the size of the grains, not any trace mineral or other elements.
        4y ago
- Fnoord 4y ago
  In The Netherlands, if you want your iodine dosage, all you need to do is eat bread once a day (I don't know if it counts for all bread like gluten-free). Because it is fortified with iodine. Other countries solve it differently, but you don't have to normally make up for it in The Netherlands.
purpleidea 4y ago
One of the surprising things about the United States food safety and labelling laws, is that you're allowed to write "0 grams of trans fat" even when there is 0.5 grams! (Per serving quanta.) In countries such as Canada, there must be fewer than 0.1 grams to say 0.0 -- IOW United States processed foods really cannot be trusted. Even small amounts of trans fats are incredibly dangerous to your heart. Avoid them!
- thfuran 4y ago
  The combination of rounding rules and freedom of serving size is just ridiculous. You can buy oil in the US that lists 0 fat and 0 calories per serving, because the serving size is like 1/4 tsp or something. The EU's mandatory labeling per 100 g avoids that kind of chicanery and makes things much easier to compare.
fafqg 4y ago
Careful with that. Lack of cholesterol, especially at an advanced age, causes Alzheimer.
- tinco 4y ago
  Citation required on this one. Since when do we know what does and doesn't cause Alzheimer? We don't even know what Alzheimer is beyond the symptoms.
traceroute66 4y ago
> French people couldn't be wrong: they consume plenty of rich food and they don't have American health problems. And you know why your average American turns into an unhealthy tub of lard ? Simple really: 1) Americans have a penchant for over-processed foods which in turn contain high-levels of "the wrong" fats and, of course, sugar (which in America is generally the horrible processed type, e.g. corn syrup) . 2) American portion sizes for one meal could feed an entire African family for a week, American portions are obscene 3) Americans are largely sedentary, and have a penchant for driving instead of walking 4) Americans have a penchant for intensive industrial farming which reduces the quality of the raw ingredient Now, you may choose to try to argue over point (4) if you feel you must be patriotic and defend US agriculture. But points (1)–(3) are, regrettably hard truths. It's not rocket science. Eat Less. Eat Better. Do Some Exercise. Your body will thank you.
- jmnicolas 4y ago
  I'm French, 1, 3 and 4 are true here too. There is no French miracle, it's just that we're lagging a bit with the US (usually 10 or 20 years depending on the matter).
  - traceroute66 4y ago
    > I'm French, 1, 3 and 4 are true here too. I would say that in France (and Europe generally) they are only true as you (unfortunately) move down the socio-economic scale. My experience of Europe is that people who can afford it generally do eat well. As for the driving, I'm not sure I agree. For a start, most US cities barely have any public transport, which automatically pushes people to get in the car (either due to laziness or due to distance). Meanwhile in Europe there are normally plentiful public transport options except for the countryside.
    - jmnicolas 4y ago
      What I meant is that the US is always more extreme but we have the same trends here. Where I'm from if you have the choice you avoid public transport because it's not very practical: buses are crowded and trains aren't flexible enough.
jmnicolas 4y ago
> Julia Childs and French people couldn't be wrong: they consume plenty of rich food and they don't have American health problems. This is BS. I'm French, born and raised and we are plenty fat / unhealthy here. I'm in my first week of the McDougall diet because I'm fat. That's the so called French diet that made me that way (for reference I ate fast food only 3 times since 2020, so junk food isn't responsible for my weight). There is no magic, you can't feast like a king everyday and stay healthy. Slim people here either don't feast everyday (they have a self control I don't have) or are doing a lot of sport (or both).
- avianlyric 4y ago
  I don’t think anybody is claiming that the “French diet” is some sort of magic trick that means you can never eat unhealthy. That obviously untrue. But the population statistics speak for themselves. People in the US far more likely to be overweight and obese, to an extreme degree, than those in France. Given that nutrition is major component in determining a person physical wellbeing, it’s seems quite reasonable to suggest that maybe the French just eat better (on average) than their US counterparts. None of that prevents individuals from shooting for gold on the weighing scales. But one overweight person doesn’t mean the entire country is doomed to obesity.
- skylurk 4y ago
  There are plenty of fat people in every country. But if you take a flight into e.g. Chicago from anywhere else in the world, you will not even need to leave the airport to see how much fatter America is. Many, many people in America are nearly physically handicapped from obesity. The word 'fat' has an inflated meaning in America.
ghaff 4y ago
There was definitely a period 20+ years ago when I was leading weekend group hiking trips when health conscious people (which most people on these trips were) would basically stage a revolt if you only supplied butter, whole milk, etc. (Eggs were mostly OK.)
darkutopiae 4y ago
My associates at MIT have switched their families to the carnivore diet. Apparently sugar molecules are like little daggers which stab into and get stuck to the arteries and the fat gets clogged in the arteries because of sugar. No sugar no problems.
frereubu 4y ago
This is uncannily like my own upbringing. Dad with hypertension, mum hated cooking (and was therefore a bad cook), margarine, the works. And it sounds that like me it meant you discovered an explicit pleasure in food. I often wonder if in fact I should be thanking my mother for setting that up for me! I married into a Spanish family who are all foodies even by Spanish standards, and I love the fact that when we're eating together we talk about the food we're eating, the last time we ate this food, the meal that reminds us of, oh and remember those amazing roast peppers we had in Rioja etc. etc. etc. I've had semi-spiritual experiences from my mother-in-law's cooking (peppers stuffed with salt cod is a particular highlight).

gattilorenz 4y ago

Everything else makes perfect sense, but > I also use Himalayan pink salt, because table salt has no nutritional value It’s… salt. Himalayan pink salt also has no real nutritional value (it is probably lacking iodine tho), it’s just salt with inclusions of other mineral that you get in much larger quantities with regular food. Unless you literally eat large chunks of salt every day, I guess. Pink salt is a fad/marketing thing, exactly as margarine was…

xref 4y ago
Then why does pink salt taste so much better in my de-ionized water and colloidal silver smoothies?
- xattt 4y ago
  Is it the silver chloride precipitating inside your tastebuds? ;)
- SergeAx 4y ago
  Try a double blind tasting. I don't knjow people who can tell pink salt from plain kitchen salt by taste, and I am familiar with a number of professional wine sommeliers.
  - harshalizee 4y ago
    You can totally tell the difference between sea salt, Himalayan salt and table salt. They change the flavor profile of many foods drastically. Even though table salt is probably better for you sure to the iodine content, pink salt is just so much better for the taste buds.
    - SergeAx 4y ago
      I would love to meet someone who can do it in a double blind test with distilled water.
    - skylurk 4y ago
      Flavour is highly influenced by color. Tasting happens in the brain.
  - yial 4y ago
    A lot of the taste difference with salt comes from the size it’s ground to, or at least that’s what I was told in the one cooking class. Hence why you might want to sprinkle a steak with large chunks of salt, but use finely ground somewhere else.
  - air7 4y ago
mandmandam 4y ago
> Pink salt is a fad/marketing thing, exactly as margarine was… Only if you believe microplastics are harmless (you really shouldn't). Sea salt consistently has far more plastic in it than rock salt. If I'm reading this study [0] right, it's about 10x more microplastics than rock salt, which makes sense if you think about it. 0 - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b04180 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b04180
- gattilorenz 4y ago
  Even though I don’t care for micro plastics (e.g. I don’t look into it), I also buy (perfectly white) rock salt by chance. They dig it up 10 km from here, not on the Himalaya.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > If I'm reading this study [0] right, it's about 10x more microplastics than rock salt, which makes sense if you think about it. Yes, it does make sense, but that’s because micro plastics are everywhere we bother to look. In the air, in the water, in the fish, in animals, etc. However, that is no evidence that the micro plastics we get from salt are significant in any way compared to other sources, particularly considering how little of the stuff we actually eat. From an ecological point of view, getting it from the sea is much better than ripping mountains apart to extract it.
- brokenkebaby 4y ago
  It looks like you are equating pink salt, and mined salt. Mined salt usually colored in white-gray spectrum.
- Qem 4y ago
  Given the inorganic nature of sea salt, I believe it should be feasible to remove most microplastics from it, by applying intense heat briefly, in an oxygen atmosphere, so the microplastic particles would just burn away.
WillPostForFood 4y ago
99% of the time we are using salt for flavor, not for the nutritional value. So the inclusion of a small amount of minerals has value in changing the flavor of the salt. Also, iodine adds a bad metallic taste, so that's another reason to choose something besides standard table salt.
- gattilorenz 4y ago
  Sure, if you can notice such a “different taste” (I don’t, and certainly not in a dish, but maybe that’s me) and this has value for you, go ahead. Iodine, tho, it’s something you actually need depending on where you live, so I’ll keep buying iodated salt until I move to the seaside…
  - beebeepka 4y ago
    I find myself reaching for the pink one more often than not. Taste has a lot more going for it than the concentrated white dust natrium chloride. It's also interesting that you cannot taste the difference. Do you usually consume lots of the stuff?
    - gattilorenz 4y ago
      > Do you usually consume lots of the stuff? I mean… it’s salt? I use it to salt stuff, I don’t eat it alone. I use moderate (normal?) amounts, mostly in dishes. For the most part it is not a topping or something that stays unmelted on top of a very bland food… but maybe it depends on what you cook and eat.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Coarser-grained salt, if it's sprinkled on top of something, can give you more of a salt taste sensation which can often be desirable. But that's the effect of the size of the grains, not any trace mineral or other elements.
        4y ago
Fnoord 4y ago
In The Netherlands, if you want your iodine dosage, all you need to do is eat bread once a day (I don't know if it counts for all bread like gluten-free). Because it is fortified with iodine. Other countries solve it differently, but you don't have to normally make up for it in The Netherlands.

purpleidea 4y ago

One of the surprising things about the United States food safety and labelling laws, is that you're allowed to write "0 grams of trans fat" even when there is 0.5 grams! (Per serving quanta.) In countries such as Canada, there must be fewer than 0.1 grams to say 0.0 -- IOW United States processed foods really cannot be trusted. Even small amounts of trans fats are incredibly dangerous to your heart. Avoid them!

thfuran 4y ago
The combination of rounding rules and freedom of serving size is just ridiculous. You can buy oil in the US that lists 0 fat and 0 calories per serving, because the serving size is like 1/4 tsp or something. The EU's mandatory labeling per 100 g avoids that kind of chicanery and makes things much easier to compare.

fafqg 4y ago

Careful with that. Lack of cholesterol, especially at an advanced age, causes Alzheimer.

tinco 4y ago
Citation required on this one. Since when do we know what does and doesn't cause Alzheimer? We don't even know what Alzheimer is beyond the symptoms.

traceroute66 4y ago

> French people couldn't be wrong: they consume plenty of rich food and they don't have American health problems. And you know why your average American turns into an unhealthy tub of lard ? Simple really: 1) Americans have a penchant for over-processed foods which in turn contain high-levels of "the wrong" fats and, of course, sugar (which in America is generally the horrible processed type, e.g. corn syrup) . 2) American portion sizes for one meal could feed an entire African family for a week, American portions are obscene 3) Americans are largely sedentary, and have a penchant for driving instead of walking 4) Americans have a penchant for intensive industrial farming which reduces the quality of the raw ingredient Now, you may choose to try to argue over point (4) if you feel you must be patriotic and defend US agriculture. But points (1)–(3) are, regrettably hard truths. It's not rocket science. Eat Less. Eat Better. Do Some Exercise. Your body will thank you.

jmnicolas 4y ago
I'm French, 1, 3 and 4 are true here too. There is no French miracle, it's just that we're lagging a bit with the US (usually 10 or 20 years depending on the matter).
- traceroute66 4y ago
  > I'm French, 1, 3 and 4 are true here too. I would say that in France (and Europe generally) they are only true as you (unfortunately) move down the socio-economic scale. My experience of Europe is that people who can afford it generally do eat well. As for the driving, I'm not sure I agree. For a start, most US cities barely have any public transport, which automatically pushes people to get in the car (either due to laziness or due to distance). Meanwhile in Europe there are normally plentiful public transport options except for the countryside.
  - jmnicolas 4y ago
    What I meant is that the US is always more extreme but we have the same trends here. Where I'm from if you have the choice you avoid public transport because it's not very practical: buses are crowded and trains aren't flexible enough.

jmnicolas 4y ago

> Julia Childs and French people couldn't be wrong: they consume plenty of rich food and they don't have American health problems. This is BS. I'm French, born and raised and we are plenty fat / unhealthy here. I'm in my first week of the McDougall diet because I'm fat. That's the so called French diet that made me that way (for reference I ate fast food only 3 times since 2020, so junk food isn't responsible for my weight). There is no magic, you can't feast like a king everyday and stay healthy. Slim people here either don't feast everyday (they have a self control I don't have) or are doing a lot of sport (or both).

avianlyric 4y ago
I don’t think anybody is claiming that the “French diet” is some sort of magic trick that means you can never eat unhealthy. That obviously untrue. But the population statistics speak for themselves. People in the US far more likely to be overweight and obese, to an extreme degree, than those in France. Given that nutrition is major component in determining a person physical wellbeing, it’s seems quite reasonable to suggest that maybe the French just eat better (on average) than their US counterparts. None of that prevents individuals from shooting for gold on the weighing scales. But one overweight person doesn’t mean the entire country is doomed to obesity.
skylurk 4y ago
There are plenty of fat people in every country. But if you take a flight into e.g. Chicago from anywhere else in the world, you will not even need to leave the airport to see how much fatter America is. Many, many people in America are nearly physically handicapped from obesity. The word 'fat' has an inflated meaning in America.

ghaff 4y ago

There was definitely a period 20+ years ago when I was leading weekend group hiking trips when health conscious people (which most people on these trips were) would basically stage a revolt if you only supplied butter, whole milk, etc. (Eggs were mostly OK.)

darkutopiae 4y ago

My associates at MIT have switched their families to the carnivore diet. Apparently sugar molecules are like little daggers which stab into and get stuck to the arteries and the fat gets clogged in the arteries because of sugar. No sugar no problems.

frereubu 4y ago

This is uncannily like my own upbringing. Dad with hypertension, mum hated cooking (and was therefore a bad cook), margarine, the works. And it sounds that like me it meant you discovered an explicit pleasure in food. I often wonder if in fact I should be thanking my mother for setting that up for me! I married into a Spanish family who are all foodies even by Spanish standards, and I love the fact that when we're eating together we talk about the food we're eating, the last time we ate this food, the meal that reminds us of, oh and remember those amazing roast peppers we had in Rioja etc. etc. etc. I've had semi-spiritual experiences from my mother-in-law's cooking (peppers stuffed with salt cod is a particular highlight).