Chicken in red wine is a delicious traditional dish of France. People who have the privilege to prepare this delicacy simmering know that when the sauce thickens, it is not necessary to add virtually any more salt.
This recipe shows how salt is everywhere: in wine sauce, vegetables and sauté in the muscles of the chicken. Once reduced, the sauce contains salt concentration in all its ingredients.
Salt is essential for life, but can be a double-edged sword, because it also kills.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of deaths worldwide. The great angel of death rides a horse called hypertension.
Although the exact causes of hypertension are unknown, many studies indicate that up to a third of cases due to the high salt intake.
To make this situation even worse, recent research has shown that eating too much salt causes the body to attack itself, like an immune response to the rebellion, leading to diseases such as cancer and multiple sclerosis. In a nutshell, more than five grams of salt per day kill. And very quickly.
Silent disease
One of the great ironies of this silent disease that is killing so many people we had already managed to reduce salt consumption in the twentieth century.
In the nineteenth century, the daily food was extremely salty. Before transporting bulk food and the invention of refrigeration, salt and dehydration methods frequently constituted for food preservation.
Coincidentally, while I was writing this article, my brother brought home a big bag of chips. When I read the label, I found that the product contained six grams of salt – 20% more than the recommended daily allowance!
Although the nutritional data printed on the packaging to inform that the package contained 19 servings, eagerly watched that my brother ate all content while watching television.
Although excessively salty popcorn buckets that we bought at the cinema are for six people, we eat them alone. There is nothing more euphemistic and useless than a nutritional label for foods with high calorie and low nutrient (junk food).
The problem is that salt creates addiction and encourages increased consumption. The food industry has known this for a long time.
A life less salty
Once the taste of young people get used to the extremely salty foods, any food will seem tasteless. Fortunately, the same way that we can quickly develop a taste for excess salt, the process of detoxification of this addiction is very time consuming either.
People who try to use less salt initially complain that what they are eating “does not seem like anything”, but soon begin to discover flavors that they had escaped earlier.
At home, the obvious solution involves two steps: understand that eating too much salt can lead to dangerous consequences and decide to eat it in smaller quantities, which in principle is as difficult as overcoming any addiction.
In culinary terms, there are tricks to reduce salt intake by using, for example, more herbs in food, reducing sauces thicken before, buying smaller packages of junk food or decreasing the use of canned foods (cheeses, olives, bacon , anchovies, etc.). revenue.
However, the long-term solution is in the hands of the government.
The best example is Finland, which has been implementing an educational campaign in this direction since 1975. The campaign led to an average reduction of 22% salt intake among men and 43% among women in a single generation.
In Argentina, Buenos Aires is another interesting case. The restaurants in the capital are prohibited from placing salt shakers on the tables. This is a smart initiative because everyone knows that if there is a salt shaker available, people addicted to salt tend to add it to the meal before tasting the food.
A home with five people should not consume a total of more than 750g of salt per month (the amount includes cheeses, sausages, preserves, etc..). If in your are buying more than that per month, I can say without mincing words, that their life expectancy will decrease. Luckily, the solution is simple … And far less dull than it seems.