Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [70]
THE RISKS
Health scientists are widely agreed that high salt intake markedly increases the risk of hypertension, or high blood pressure, and they estimate that as many as 40 percent of the older people in the United States are susceptible to hypertension. High blood pressure increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. High-salt diets also cause edema, or water retention, in some people.
WHERE IS THE SALT IN OUR DIET?
Again, as with fat and sugar, the problem is not so much that Americans are reaching for the saltshaker more often. The greater problem is that many Americans eat two to three times the recommended daily intake without ever seeing a grain of salt. In a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner, for example, you consume a teaspoon of salt—enough for a whole day.29
Not only does fast food come salt-laden, so do many processed foods. (See Figure 5.) A mere ounce of processed Swiss cheese—less than you might put in a sandwich—has almost one-quarter teaspoon salt. Natural Swiss cheese has one-sixth that much.30 A frozen beef dinner contains almost a full teaspoon of salt, 20 times as much as an unsalted hamburger.31 Two hot dogs give you one-half teaspoon, as does a cup of Campbell’s soup.
Almost all canned vegetables are salt-heavy. Fresh or frozen corn, for example, has almost no salt; but a cup of canned corn has 20 percent of the salt recommended for a whole day. Even processed foods that we think of as sweet are really salty, too. One piece of cake made from a devil’s food cake mix contains as much salt as a 1½-ounce bag of potato chips.32
Other salt-laden foods are cured meats, such as smoked ham, chipped beef, and corned beef, and the pickles Americans love on hamburgers.
In addition to the invisible salt in processed foods, Americans are eating more and more salted snacks. In 1980 Americans spent almost $4 billion on potato chips, nuts, corn chips, pretzels, and prepopped popcorn.
Dangerous Change No. 5: Too Little Fiber
Until very recently, most of us did not know that lack of fiber in the diet was a risk; most of us didn’t even know what fiber was. Scientists define dietary fiber as the skeletal remains of plant cells that are not digested by our bodies’ enzymes.
Figure 5. Sodium* in Fresh versus Processed Foods
As significant as any other change in the human diet over the last 20,000 years is the “fiber revolution.” The diets of our early ancestors probably contained ten times the dietary fiber of contemporary diets.33 Our long digestive tract undoubtedly evolved to handle this higher-fiber diet. The antifiber revolution has taken its most extreme form in the United States, where today 70 percent of our calories come from food containing little or no fiber.34
The fiber in fruits, grains, beans, seeds, and vegetables differs, and serves different beneficial functions. Some, for example, shorten the time it takes food to pass through the intestines; others promote the growth of bacteria useful in altering potentially harmful substances. So it is important to eat a variety of fiber.
THE RISKS
Of all the diet-disease connections, the role of dietary fiber may be hardest to pin down, since the fiber content of our diet has no direct biochemical effects but promotes physical and secondary physiological changes. Nevertheless, low-fiber diets have been implicated in heightened risk of bowel cancer and other intestinal diseases. “Dietary fiber appears to aid in reducing the onset and incidences of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, diverticulosis, colon and rectal cancer, and hemorrhoids,” states Dr. Sharon Fleming of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.35 More than one scientist believes that