The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [86]
Pregnant women should also be cautious, given the effects of alcohol on the fetus. But almost nothing is known about the effects of light alcohol intake during pregnancy. Most research has been done with severely alcoholic women; an occasional drink does not appear to be a problem.
People who have stopped taking one or two drinks a day because they believed that alcohol was hazardous to their health, and particularly bad for their hearts, can certainly resume, especially if it brings them pleasure. Anybody like me who currently averages one or two drinks a day should feel elated and smug. And if you don’t drink now but don’t know why, you might begin by taking a few sips of good red wine or old malt Scotch. A little alcohol now and then has always made the world a more endurable place.
April 1992
Salt
The Yanomamo Indians of northern Brazil have the most famous blood pressure in the world because it is the lowest. You can hardly read an article about blood pressure these days that doesn’t drag in the Yanomamo Indians of northern Brazil. I am amazed that the Yanomami can stay so calm surrounded by giant bugs, snakes, and investigators forever taking their blood pressure, which at last report averaged an amazingly low 95 over 61. The average blood pressure in the United States is 120 over 80—halfway between the Yanomami and hypertension, which is another word for high blood pressure and starts at 140 over 90. A fifth of all Americans are hypertensive, but none of the Yanomami are. This is lucky for the Yanomami because high blood pressure multiplies your chances of having a heart attack, kidney disease, or a stroke.
The Yanomami eat incredibly tiny amounts of salt, and we eat lots of it, which has led some doctors to imagine that eating salt causes hypertension. The Yanomami consume about 87 milligrams of salt a day, which occurs naturally in their food and equals two shakes from a standard saltshaker. This minuscule amount, among the lowest in the world, is explained by the Yanomami’s isolation from commerce, the briny sea, and mineral salt deposits. Americans eat 12,000 milligrams of salt a day, about 266 shakes, most of it added in cooking and processing.
(The weight of an average shake has, to my knowledge, never before been investigated. To compute it, I loaded my saltshaker with 15 grams of salt, counted 330 shakes before it was empty, did it again for accuracy’s sake, reached the same result, divided 330 shakes into 15 grams and arrived at 45 milligrams per shake.)
Does eating salt cause high blood pressure? Mankind has a great deal riding on this question, because—no matter what some people may tell you—salt is indispensable to good food and good cooking. It sharpens and defines the inherent flavors of foods and magnifies their natural aromas. Salt unites the diverse tastes in a dish, marries the sauce with the meat, and turns the pallid sweetness of vegetables into something complex and savory. Salt also deepens the color of most fruits and vegetables and keeps cauliflower white. Salt controls the ripening of cheese and improves its texture, strengthens the gluten in bread, and can preserve meat and fish, while transforming its texture. Cooked without salt, most dishes taste dull, lifeless, and lacking in complexity; in some, flavors are unbalanced and sweetness predominates, according to Michael Bauer in a terrific article on salt in the August 30, 1989, San Francisco Chronicle, reporting in part on a series of blind taste tests that he and Marion Cunningham had arranged. And in a recent issue of Cook’s magazine, a vast majority of America’s leading chefs lined up behind the culinary value