Parents, if your kids are dumb, don’t send them to university.  They might get degrees in journalism and go on to write for CBC Broadcasting, or they might get MBAs and go on to become Mayor of New York City.  Dumb kids need respectable jobs, and there are plenty of those out there.  They could be helping people, hanging drywall or writing theses on the impact of postcolonial literature on third-world sanitation systems.

They could be, in short, neither writing shit like this nor doing that about which this shit is written:

• NYC Mayor Bloomberg declares war on… salt (WCBSTV.com)

*headdesk*

So.  The short version is that Michael Bloomberg wants people to put less salt — or sodium; Marcia Kramer gets it confused in her article — in food.  Because it’s bad for you, and stuff.

I’ll give Kramer a pass on the first paragraph, because — let’s be honest here, folks — we really can’t expect a contemporary journalist to skip a chance to make even the most awkward Boomer-specific reference.  Furthermore, I’m rather pleased that she managed to stick two sentences into one paragraph, and good behaviour should be rewarded.  On, then, to the next paragraph.

It’s ironic that the war on salt began on the very day the city was spreading tons of it on the streets to fight a snow storm, but in Bloomberg’s view there is good salt … and bad salt.

Two ellipses in two paragraphs.  Oh dear.  You dot your ‘i’s and ‘j’s with hearts, don’t you.

Now let’s address the content: salt.  (Or sodium.  Regardless of what government nutritionists will try to tell you, they ain’t the same fuckin’ thing.)  Dietary sodium is unrelated to road salt.  Third-graders realize that.  Adults ought to realize that.  What’s your excuse?  You’ve just wasted two paragraphs to tell me sweet fuck-all. I’ve gained some information from this story so far: you can’t write for shit.

But what the hell, I’m in a pissy mood this evening.  Let’s continue.

City officials said that people don’t realize the salt content of the things they buy in the supermarket. For example, potato chips you would think are the saltiest thing in the store

Stop right there.  Have you ever taken a writing course?  Did you pass it?  Your prof should be shot.

but they have only 180 milligrams per serving. Turkey meatballs, on the other hand, have 660 milligrams per serving. Marble cake has 300 per serving and chicken noodle soup has nearly 1,400 milligrams of salt per serving.

“Per serving”.  Yup; according to Captain Journalism here the “serving” is a standard unit of measurement cast in platinum-iridium and placed safely in the vault beside the Standard Kilogram at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris.  A “serving” is defined as “the amount of food customarily eaten at one time”, according to the FDA.  Well, no, not really:

If one unit weighs more than 50 percent but less than 200 percent of the reference amount, the serving size is one unit. For example, the reference amount for bread is 50 g; therefore, the label of a loaf of bread in which each slice weighs more than 25 g would state a serving size of one slice.

A “serving” is anywhere between half and twice what the government thinks you’re going to eat “at one time”.  Does that strike you as vague?  Never mind — there are readers to scare and ads to be sold!

(My box of table salt claims to have 590mg of sodium “per serving”.  I guess table salt isn’t as salty as either turkey meatballs or chicken noodle soup.  That’s some fine investigative reporting, there, you fucking defective.)

But wait — where does the city come into all of this?

“Salt, when its[sic] high in the diet, increases the blood pressure and high blood pressure is a major factor for heart disease and stroke,” said Dr. Sonia Angell of NYC’s Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Program.

[...]

Thomas Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, said he wants manufacturers and restaurants to join the war on salt voluntarily. If they don’t, the city could pass legislation making it the law.

Salt.  Salt!  It’s killin’ people!  War on salt!  WAR!

(Yeah, I know; I just love that image)

This is where the municipal stupid joins our party.  As I mentioned earlier, “salt” and “sodium” are not the same beast.  Sodium — really, we’re talking about Na⁺ ions, here — is a primary electrolyte, and vital to nerve function.  As ever, the poison is in the dose, and too much (or too little) will make you acutely unhappy, or dead if you take it too far.

Table salt — the poor innocent compound under threat of regulation here — is NaCl.  It dissociates into Na⁺ and Cl^- ions in solution.  Its dietary effect is often represented (by the ignorant) simply by concentration of sodium.  It follows that anything that dissociates into Na⁺ ions will thereby increase your “salt” intake.  (Look out, lutefisk gourmands.)

It also seems reasonable to expect that the health problems attributed here to “too much salt” are in fact (if not in easily-digested* propaganda) attributable to electrolyte imbalances.  In this case the obvious work-around to NaCl regulation — salt substitutes — is just as likely to cause different electrolyte imbalances if it becomes sufficiently popular.  Should we expect that Mayor Bloomberg has done the bio and figured out that a 50% reduction in Na⁺ and Cl^- consumption** in the general population would reduce sodium consumption without adversely affecting other electrolytes?

Or should we perhaps guess that this is mere grandstanding from the centre of grass in North America?

——

* Sorry ’bout that

** Well, assuming that the food industry substitutes KCl for NaCl at a known rate… which is of course a fantastically foolish thing to assume