This Is Why You Have High Blood Pressure
Posted by bellastraniera - 13/07/10 at 04:07 pm The battle against salt has been portrayed by the city and the media as a strike against the fast food and processed foods industry, and by extension, legislation to protect the poor. But before you think you’re not affected because you don’t subsist on Cheez-Its, consider what you eat, especially if you follow food blogs like this one. Just because something is freshly-made and preservative-free doesn’t mean it’s good for you; in fact, food at restaurants and upscale take-out shops can be nearly as high in salt as that McDonald’s fare. What’s the secret ingredient in that delicious ramen soup? That succulent barbecue? That sandwich by Tom Colicchio? That smoky pork taco? You guessed it.
I learned the hard way that no one is exempt from the “salt = bad” rule this spring when I found this spring out I have the beginnings of hypertension. Even though I exercise regularly and avoid processed and fast food, I was relying on calorie counts and a general knowledge of nutrition to find the “healthy” stuff on the menu whenever I ate out, which was most of the time. But chefs tend to be heavy-handed with the salt. After all, it’s not their job to monitor your blood pressure, it’s just their job to keep you coming back for more. And it often takes salt to make food taste good.
New York chain restaurants are already under pressure to keep calories down. As the processed foods industry has found, when you take out the sugar and fat to get “healthy” food, it’s a lot harder to take out the salt. Is the same thing happening with NY restaurants? At Chipotle, where the food is made fresh daily, an order of barbarcoa hard shell tacos with lettuce, cheese and tomato salsa will only set you back 355 calories. But there are 955 milligrams of salt in that order, almost two-thirds of the recommended 1,500 mg of salt per day. Thinking of cutting back by ordering the salad instead? Don’t even go there: two tablespoons of Chipotle’s vinaigrette have 700 milligrams of salt (nutritional data from Chipotle’s website).
One restaurant Mayor Bloomberg frequents, the Palm on Second Avenue, includes calorie counts on their printed menu, as required by law, since there are more than 12 Palm restaurants across the country. But the restaurant has not made any other nutritional information public and doesn’t post calorie counts online. Steakhouse fare is particularly high in salt, as anyone who’s ever prepared creamed spinach, steak or potatoes au gratin at home can tell you.
So what’s a food-obsessed New Yorker to do? For better or worse, I found the only way to control my salt intake was to prepare almost all my food at home, avoiding all those tasty nearby restaurants that make women fat. Otherwise, the nutritional content of what you’re eating is a big question mark. Ironically, I took a few tricks from the processed foods industry to lower the salt content of prepared food without sacrificing taste. A little bit of salt added at the very end of cooking, so that the salt remains on the surface of the food, is often all you need. I didn’t give up carbohydrates or fat. (The thought of Ed Levine giving up lobster rolls in New England is rather heartbreaking.) But I did control calories and salt by measuring everything.
The shrimp remoulade and the recipes that follow in a few posts are all diet foods, though they don’t taste like it.
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bellastraniera
a.k.a. Marcy Swingle - obsessed with food and fashion.
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