Panicology
Page 6
Despite all the evidence, some people believe that the ‘war on obesity’ is over-hyped by government and health professionals, and is one of the clearest examples of an ever more intrusive ‘nanny state’. Obesity myth articles typically set out a string of ‘facts’, claiming that, among other things, nobody seems to know why the rise in obesity is happening, we are eating less fat than in the past, some statistics are ‘pure fantasy’, and a majority of children are exceeding the recommended daily physical activity levels. They also pour scorn on the so-called ‘healthy lifestyles’ solution to the problem, suggesting that badgering large numbers of people to change their lifestyles is a lost cause.
The food industry itself generally recognizes that obesity is a problem, but manufacturers consider it to be their role to provide food that the public ‘wants’, believing that eating is an individual responsibility. As the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors has said, no doubt speaking for many trade associations, ‘supermarkets are not in the health regulation business’. Although it is fashionable to attack the retailers, many slim people probably wonder in quiet moments why it is that more fat people do not address their weight status themselves.
While some people are becoming fatter, others are eating far more healthily than at any time, benefiting from a greater selection of fresh produce in the shops than ever before and the availability of cookery books and programmes and engaging in enjoyable and structured exercise. We are witnessing the emergence of a health gap in our society to rival the existing divide caused by money.
Currying Flavour
‘Cheese saltier than ocean’ Independent
‘Can flavourless food be eaten without salt?’ Job complains to God in the Bible. It’s a rhetorical question, but it goes to the heart of our difficulty with this essential commodity today. Sugar, fat and additives in junk food lead you to obesity, but not if the salt gets you first. For salt is now the ‘hidden killer lurking in your favourite Chinese and Indian takeaway meals’, according to the British tabloid Sun newspaper in an article headlined ‘Is your curry killing you?’1
The headline was prompted by tests by trading standards offices. More than half of fifty Indian and Chinese meals tested contained more than the daily adult intake of six grams of salt recommended by the government. One dish of chicken with cashew nuts in yellow bean sauce contained 15.8 grams of salt.
Salt is a simple chemical, sodium chloride, and is the body’s main source of these two elements. However, excess sodium intake has been linked to high blood pressure, a major cause of strokes and heart disease. The Sun is thus able to claim that ‘salt-related deaths’ are running at 35,000 a year in the UK, though large-scale scientific studies of diet and blood pressure find it hard to isolate salt as the decisive factor.
To clear up the confusion about salt, we need to look at why and how it finds its way into what we eat. We have used salt for millennia not only to enhance the flavour of food but also to preserve it. Chefs therefore prize salt for the same reason as the producers of junk food.
For food lovers such as Hervé This, a chemist at the National Institute of Agronomic Research in Paris and one of the founders of the culinary movement of ‘molecular gastronomy’, there are ‘two great fears: gout and a diet without salt’.2 Salt, he explains, ‘increases the ionic strength of aqueous solutions, making it easier for odorant molecules to separate themselves from food’. In other words, it is a vehicle for bringing out other tastes. This is the case whether the other tastes are subtle and delicious, as they may be in a velouté of asparagus, or faint and banal, as in a processed cheese. It may draw out elusive and exotic natural flavours or it may simply mask skimping on costly flavoursome ingredients.
Unfortunately, the high solubility of salt in water which enables it to release food flavours is also the property that effectively disguises its presence in many foods. We enjoy snack foods because their saltiness is one flavour we seek when we choose them, but then we are surprised and maybe shocked to find that corn flakes, say, contain as much salt as potato crisps because we do not think of them as salty.
It is this disguised presence of salt in Western diets that has become a major issue. Up to 80 per cent of the salt we eat is contained in processed and packaged foods such as bread and meats. ‘It’s actually very difficult to eat too little salt. This is because it’s in so many everyday foods, such as breakfast cereals, ready meals, soups, sauces and biscuits,’ according to the UK Food Standards Agency.3 So it’s not that we are choosing directly to put salt on our food. Overall UK retail sales of plain salt have actually fallen in recent years.
In some manufactured products a small amount of salt is almost essential. Bread and bakery items usually include a little salt for flavour. But there are more pernicious reasons for adding salt where it is not strictly needed. Salt enables some foods to hold more water, a phenomenon exploited by manufacturers cheaply to bulk up the weight of their product. A supermarket brand of bacon can contain sufficient salt that you would consume your entire daily allowance in no more than three rashers, whereas bacon from a ‘gourmet’ supplier might contain a quarter of the amount.
So how much salt do we eat? In the 1980s, before it was widely known to be associated with high blood pressure, salt consumption in the United States was between 6 and 15 grams a day, according to the American food scientist Harold McGee, ‘a dosage that probably supplies 5, 10, even 25 times as much sodium as we actually need’.4 What we need, what we want and what the food industry wants to feed us are very different things, however. The WHO target daily intake is 5 grams, but national governments are happy to sanction higher levels – 6 grams in the UK – which are reprinted on many food packets. But we still eat more salt than this. On its website the European Salt Producers’ Association proudly, if perhaps a little incautiously, touts a figure of 8 grams a day per capita salt consumption. Americans still consume around 10 grams a day.
The producers are vigorous in their defence of people’s right to consume as much salt as they want, in tones that at times recall the tobacco lobby. There is no need for healthy people to reduce their salt intake, they insist, while casting doubt on studies linking sodium to high blood pressure. In some cases, they point out, elderly people have died apparently because they have not been getting enough salt. Although the 6 gram daily allowance applies to adults of all ages, the elderly are more susceptible to high blood pressure and so presumably more likely to act on heightened fears by cutting out salt. Not all people should automatically reduce their salt intake, therefore.
But salt is not like smoking, because you aren’t always aware of it when you indulge. The recommended daily allowance is well publicized, but this information is of little use if you cannot calculate your intake. This is almost impossible to do. Packaged foods have long been obliged to list their major ingredients, which often include salt, but they do not have to declare the relative amount of salt present. More recently, in response to concerns not only about salt, but also about fats and sugar, manufacturers have begun to include panels of ‘nutrition information’, and some also give overall ‘guideline daily amounts’ of these dietary elements. In the UK, this apparently helpful gesture has been viewed as a pre-emptive measure to head off a ‘traffic lights’ scheme proposed in 2005 by the Food Standards Agency to display much more readily understood red, yellow or green gradings for these substances.
But even declaring salt content is not transparently done. Some global brands such as Heinz and Kellogg’s responsibly give figures for salt and for that salt in terms of its sodium content alone. Cereals are especially assiduous about displaying this information, perhaps because it is at breakfast that we are most likely to pause to consider our dietary health. But many products indicate salt only as sodium. In a sense, this is medically useful since sodium is the component of salt linked to high blood pressure. But it is helpful to the manufacturers too, as 5 grams of salt, for example, corresponds to just 2 grams of sodium, which makes the danger a
ppear less to consumers not fully briefed on the chemistry. In fact, although sodium and salt can be shown interchangeably on food labels, they are not necessarily equivalent at all, as other ingredients such as baking powder also contain sodium.
Unsurprisingly, it is products high in salt that prefer to focus on sodium content. There are 7.9 grams of sodium in 100 millilitres of Blue Dragon Fish Sauce, for example. This is equivalent to 20 grams of salt, well on the way to being a saturated solution of the stuff. A single stock cube may contain more than 4 grams of salt, although the information may be given in less readily interpreted form as the amount of sodium in a (small) portion of made-up stock.
Newspapers have latched on to the problem, though their headlines can rather miss the point. ‘Cheese saltier than ocean’ was the Independent’s line when anti-salt campaigners looked at the label on Kraft’s Dairylea Light cheese slices. The cheese does indeed contain more salt weight for weight than seawater – a level boosted by having selected for testing the ‘Light’ variety of the cheese, which contains proportionately more salt simply because it has proportionately less fat. Its more fattening cousin brand is a little less salty than the ocean – which of course makes for a less satisfactory headline. The reader is asked to recall how disgustingly salty a mouthful of seawater tastes and to draw the inference that the cheese tastes equally salty. However, the salt in seawater is the only thing that gives it a taste, whereas the salt in the cheese is used to bring out other flavours, and the overall taste is not overwhelmingly of salt. But, whether you realize it or not, the salt is really there – 2.8 grams of it in every 100 grams.
High levels of salt can lurk within food precisely because it mingles with other flavours. This becomes a greater problem when there is no labelling. Highly flavoured curries can hide more salt than bland food. Yet if they are bought as takeaway food they are unlabelled for salt or any of their ingredients, and, as the Sun patriotically put it, ‘Brits don’t know they are eating it in such massive doses’. In cases where the takeaway food is more standardized, this situation may be about to change. McDonald’s has begun placing codes on some of its packaging that when scanned will transmit nutritional information to the consumer’s mobile phone.5
But this elaborate routine merely makes the point of food campaigners such as Joanna Blythman, who identify an Anglo-Saxon urge to see food not as a pleasure but as ‘a complex problem’ for which eager manufacturers supply ‘meal solutions’.6 Continental products tend not to display panels of ‘nutrition information’ and so give less data about salt, but their consumers tend to be more knowledgeable about food and are more likely to cook from scratch in any case.
Blythman has an unlikely ally in the food producers, who agree that ‘debate about the levels at which the UK’s food regulator has set its salt reduction targets misses the point about how healthier eating habits can be achieved’.7 They argue that it is pointless to set ‘arbitrary targets, which aren’t even enforceable by law’ when it is consumer power, and not regulation, that is demanding lower salt levels. Manufacturers might prefer to see no targets. But it is clear from the way that salt is covered by a media keen to titillate as well as to inform a largely ignorant public that the guideline daily amounts, ‘arbitrary’ though they may be, serve a vital purpose when presented alongside declared or tested levels of salt in alerting consumers to potential dangers to health.
Where does this leave the health-conscious gourmet with a craving for salt? For these people there is a whole different marketing game. Most things you buy in a grocery are more or less complex mixtures of basic ingredients. But salt is one of the simplest chemicals there is. Salt is sodium chloride, and that’s it. Despite this, there are successful brands that sell for four times the price of ordinary table salt based on their claim to be natural, pure and even health-giving. The pack of one French brand proclaims: ‘Derived from the Mediterranean Sea, Costa Fine Sea Salt has been obtained by the simple and natural evaporation of water, aided by the warm sun and wind. It is one of the vital components of taste and contains minerals which are essential to our health.’ Broste salt, another French brand extracted in the same way, miraculously contrives to contain ‘a rich balance of minerals and trace elements corresponding to the composition of our own tissue salts’. Halen Môn ‘is natural sea salt produced from the fresh Atlantic waters around the Isle of Anglesey’. Maldon sea salt omits to tell us that it is sourced from the muddy, shallow North Sea, emphasizing rather ‘the ancient craft of panning handed down by generations of salt makers’. It is ‘pure’, although not so pure that it does not contain a few (unspecified) ‘valuable sea water trace elements’. Even Blythman falls for the hype on this occasion. She feels that sea salt made by evaporation ‘is produced in a much more natural manner’ than table salt, even though the latter is frequently extracted from underground as brine and then subjected to the very same process of evaporation.8
Salt from other sources cannot compete with the romance of the sea, although one brand aims to meet the challenge with the claim that its product, mined in exactly the same way as ordinary table salt, is ‘millions of years old’. What benefit is implied by this claim to antiquity is unclear. Italkali’s iodized Sicilian salt tries to have it both ways. ‘The natural purity and richness of Sale di Sicilia with the added benefit of iodine,’ it announces, a ‘healthy and natural’ product pure as the day it was laid down in ‘subterranean Sicilian salt deposits’. So where does the iodine come from? Potassium iodate, a chemical related to weedkiller, is added in the factory.9
How is it that salt on its own can be claimed as healthy while a small percentage of it in a meal is cause for alarm? There may be traces of valuable minerals naturally present, but this does not alter the fact that it is essentially pure sodium chloride. As the Food Standards Agency warns in dispelling the myth of ‘posh salt’, It doesn’t matter how expensive salt is, where it is from, or whether it comes in grains, crystals or flakes – it still contains sodium.’10
There are alternatives to salt that do contain less sodium. Some cite medical studies adducing their benefits on the pack. But others are committed to the familiar copywriters’ nonsense. A product called Lo-Salt contains one-third of the sodium of ordinary salt because it substitutes the similar-tasting potassium chloride. Or, as the manufacturer cunningly puts it, ‘natural potassium’ in exchange for ‘sodium salt’. The implication that one chemical element is somehow more natural than another takes this deceitfulness as far as it can go.
A Dead Duck
‘Bird flu “could be in our shops” ’ Daily Mail
After a winter of increasingly hysterical press coverage of the risk of a human pandemic, Britain at last experienced the reality of bird flu when, at the end of March 2006, a single dead swan washed up on to the beach at Cellardyke on the east coast of Scotland. The bird tested positive for the type of the virus designated H5N1, present in many bird populations and which had led to dozens of human fatalities across Asia. It was with almost palpable relief that the Daily Telegraph was able to declare on its front page ‘Britain’s first bird flu zone’, complete with a map showing a ‘1,000 square mile area at risk’. Like Chekhov’s seagull or Ibsen’s wild duck, the bird was surely an omen: the next autumn migration season would bring squadrons of sickly foreign birds plummeting from the skies to spread their deadly infection to anything and anyone within range. More than a year on, we are still waiting.
The story of bird flu as a real hazard to human health began in 1997 in Hong Kong, where eighteen people were infected and six died after coming into close contact with birds at the city’s live markets. The outbreak took epidemiologists – the scientists who study the spread of diseases – by surprise as it had been thought that the virus could not jump from birds to humans without the help of an intermediary species such as pigs. Despite the unpreparedness, further spread of the disease and loss of life was prevented by the rapid cull of all poultry in the city. In 2003, the H5N1 virus resurfaced, now sl
ightly altered and more dangerous, ‘like the doomsday bug in Michael Crichton’s old thriller, The Andromeda Strain’, according to Mike Davis’s warning book, The Monster at Our Door.1 This time several members of a Chinese family died after having visited relatives who kept chickens. Similar cases began to be reported from Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, and the World Health Organization announced a pandemic alert.
Through the autumn and winter of 2005, human cases spread westward, recorded with mounting agitation by the European press. Russia, Kazakhstan, Kurdistan and Turkey were hit in turn, as the European Union banned the import of live birds and feathers. All the human casualties were found to have been in close proximity to birds – five Azerbaijani teenagers died after plucking a dead swan. Shortly before the Cellardyke swan made its final landfall, a German cat was found to have contracted the disease; cat-owners were told to keep their pets indoors. One British newspaper was on the point of demanding that the government distribute face masks to the population until it was pointed out that they would actually be useless against the spread of the virus.
Why such expansive coverage for a disease that had killed a little over a hundred people around the world in three years – about a quarter of the number who die annually in England from resurgent tuberculosis? The main reason may be what the media habitually refers to as the ‘spectre’ of the influenza pandemic that struck at the end of the First World War, perhaps infecting as many as a billion people and claiming 60 million lives. There have been human flu pandemics since – in 1933, 1950, 1957, 1968 and 1977 – but none as virulent as in 1918. Add to this the vague, residual fear that what we sloppily call ‘flu’ may not be simply the common cold that happens to be heavy enough to allow us to claim a few days off work but something altogether more serious.