> Sour is slightly different: It is detected by taste bud cells that respond to acidity, researchers recently learned.
Recently? Come, now.
> If an animal takes in too much salt, the body tries to compensate, holding on to water so the blood won’t be overly salty. In many people, that extra fluid volume raises blood pressure. The excess fluid puts strain on the arteries; over time, it can damage them and create the conditions for heart disease or stroke.
This flawed narrative was debunked years ago.
The correct one is something like this: the body can get used to a wide range of sodium intakes. Sodium-following fluid movement is temporary effect. Only certain individuals have a sensitivity linking blood pressure and sodium.
Is the blood pressure increase (with increase in sodium intake) temporary, which implies that the body gets used to the increased sodium and blood pressure drops back to some average/normal level after days or weeks of the new intakes?
If yes, why is it that a very common advice from doctors and all kinds of “health information sites” is to cut salt and sodium to manage or reduce high blood pressure? Is the sensitivity to sodium not easy to detect or is it actually more prevalent in the population?
It you eat a ton of salt, it’s likely that the source is food that isn’t healthy for you to begin with. It’s near impossible for you to overeat on salty broccoli, but most adults could easily eat an entire bag of potato chips because processed food has much less fiber and protein which are the main drivers for feeling full.
> It you eat a ton of salt, it’s likely that the source is food that isn’t healthy for you to begin with.
While generally true, I don’t think this holds good everywhere. I recall watching some episodes of “Salt Fat Acid Heat” where the amount of salt used seemed to be quite high for day-to-day cooking (even leaving aside the salt that gets drained out with water).
If I do a lot of exercise on a hot day, I can come back to the house and eat a can of anchovies and still want more salt. I wish I could uh, know how healthy this is
> But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of them detects the attractive, relatively low levels of salt that make potato chips taste delicious. The other one registers high levels of salt—enough to make overly salted food offensive and deter overconsumption.
I can imagine a future scenario where, in the interests of public health, someone figures out how to transliterate the 'too much salt' genes to 'too much sugar' genes.
Of the various ways that I could see human augmentation play out for the better rather than the worse, I'd rank that right behind tetrachromacy and hypoxia genes (particularly for Martians and Lunatics)
> I can imagine a future scenario where, in the interests of public health, someone figures out how to transliterate the 'too much salt' genes to 'too much sugar' genes.
Doing it for the masses “for their own good” is quite dystopian.
But doing it for yourself is easy and no gene therapy is required. Just cut out sweet foods and after not too long normal foods like bread will taste sweet, and sweetened foods will taste unnaturally toxic.
> Just cut out sweet foods and after not too long normal foods like bread will taste sweet
I don't really eat (or drink) that much sweet stuff at all, but I assume this is not-great industrial-scale bread you're talking about - with sugar added, not just a little salt, as a preservative; or for a shiny glazing.
There's no sugar in the regular bread I bake every few days/week, and unsurprisingly it doesn't taste sweet.
I really don't think any less sugar in my diet would change that (I'm not 'cutting' it, I just don't at all often have pudding, never sugar in my coffee, etc. I'd have to drop chutneys, fruit, wine to have much less).
Leads with a photo of 'not-great industrial-scale bread', and even explicitly calls for 'slice of cheap bread' as an ingredient... it's not doing much to convince me that the described effect is due to starches converting that quickly. I'm fairly confident the packaging for the pictured slice would have listed sugar as an ingredient.
I’ve tested it on homemade bread without sugar and noticed it. It even works when you don’t tell people ahead of time why they’re doing the experiment.
The link was chosen arbitrarily, you can find plenty of other examples if you’re concerned about its authenticity. But, it’s not a very strong flavor so you do want a bland bread.
> I can imagine a future scenario where, in the interests of public health, someone figures out how to transliterate the 'too much salt' genes to 'too much sugar' genes.
This has already been contemplated as a way to reduce consumption of red meat. [1] Just make people allergic to it. All in the name of fighting global warming of course.
I don't think the "too much sugar" crisis in the US is due to people cannot feel there is too much sugar. It's just overly sweet food is the default in so many parts of the US. Ice cream here is much sweeter than in Asia. Cup cakes in the US can send me straight to sugar coma after just one bite.
When I asked a friend if they thought the cup cake was sweet. They said that isn't cup cake supposed to be sweet? And they don't think it's overly sweet since all the cup cakes they have had were like that.
One must be careful when editing the germ line. Imagine that your gene changes were propagated but a disaster befalls the planet such that calories are now scarce as had been dozens of millennia ago. Those who couldn't eat enough food or consume enough sugar-based calories could die out, and if there are enough of those kinds of people among the population, the population size could reduce significantly.
Still kinda disturbs me that scientists will routinely do some kind of genetic or other biological modification of say, a mouse, and then when the results are in, simply kill the animal and dispose of it.
We talk about which scientists we should put in charge of AI and I think that's all wrong. The self-preserving question is which philosophers should we put in charge? And which group of developmental psychologists should be auditing their work?
I always wondered if it is the sodium or the chlorine that triggers the flavor. Unfortunately licking raw sodium would explode and elemental chlorine is a gas that burns ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
We've been coming back around to the idea it's not the sodium but the chlorine that's the problem in hypertension. Hypertension is one of those areas we like to pretend like we know what we're doing but it's half bullshit and accidental boner pills.
Also how do you tell your friend that his wife is kind of a lot and maybe his hypertension is cortisol and not congenital?
> I mean, Morton sells it as salt replacement in little salt shakers in the grocery store. It's pretty mainstream.
They also sell margarine in cute butter-like packages and sweet ‘n low or stevia in the same single-serve packets as sugar. Doesn’t mean they don’t taste absolutely foul.
> They also sell margarine in cute butter-like packages
Don't wanna call it deceiving.
People, who followed their doctors advice, and switched to margarine after a heart attack, more often had another one than those who stayed with butter.
Hm, just thought: Maybe it has to do more with the anxiety of those individuals than the trans fats in margarine. Still, i keep those plastic fats out of my body.
Ions are very different to the atomic form. For instance copper is the familiar red-brown metal. Cu2+ ions though, are blue and dissolve in water. Clearly they are entirely different species.
Both. That horrible Finnish salty liquorice is made salty by the addition of ammonium chloride, which has no sodium. Sodium acetate and sodium glutamate taste salty, despite having no chloride in.
My speculative guess would be that the salt sensor just senses ionic strength, so any substance which readily splits into ions will taste salty.
(obviously i wrote this comment before reading the article, which talks about all this stuff in modest detail!)
Except that NaCl dissolves into sodium and chloride ions in water. in any context in which you are actually tasting it, you are not tasting NaCl, you are tasting some combination of Na+ and Cl-, at which point, asking which (if either) is the one driving the experience.
Recently? Come, now.
> If an animal takes in too much salt, the body tries to compensate, holding on to water so the blood won’t be overly salty. In many people, that extra fluid volume raises blood pressure. The excess fluid puts strain on the arteries; over time, it can damage them and create the conditions for heart disease or stroke.
This flawed narrative was debunked years ago.
The correct one is something like this: the body can get used to a wide range of sodium intakes. Sodium-following fluid movement is temporary effect. Only certain individuals have a sensitivity linking blood pressure and sodium.