Everything else makes perfect sense, but

> I also use Himalayan pink salt, because table salt has no nutritional value

It’s… salt. Himalayan pink salt also has no real nutritional value (it is probably lacking iodine tho), it’s just salt with inclusions of other mineral that you get in much larger quantities with regular food. Unless you literally eat large chunks of salt every day, I guess.

Pink salt is a fad/marketing thing, exactly as margarine was…

Then why does pink salt taste so much better in my de-ionized water and colloidal silver smoothies?

Is it the silver chloride precipitating inside your tastebuds? ;)

Try a double blind tasting. I don't knjow people who can tell pink salt from plain kitchen salt by taste, and I am familiar with a number of professional wine sommeliers.

You can totally tell the difference between sea salt, Himalayan salt and table salt.

They change the flavor profile of many foods drastically.

Even though table salt is probably better for you sure to the iodine content, pink salt is just so much better for the taste buds.

I would love to meet someone who can do it in a double blind test with distilled water.

Flavour is highly influenced by color. Tasting happens in the brain.

A lot of the taste difference with salt comes from the size it’s ground to, or at least that’s what I was told in the one cooking class. Hence why you might want to sprinkle a steak with large chunks of salt, but use finely ground somewhere else.

Did you know that professional wine sommeliers confuse white wine and red wine if tricked by visual cues?

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...

This is why tasting should be at least blind.

It’s interesting because personally I find pink salt lacking in taste and never use it in my dishes

> Pink salt is a fad/marketing thing, exactly as margarine was…

Only if you believe microplastics are harmless (you really shouldn't).

Sea salt consistently has far more plastic in it than rock salt. If I'm reading this study [0] right, it's about 10x more microplastics than rock salt, which makes sense if you think about it.

0 - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b04180

> If I'm reading this study [0] right, it's about 10x more microplastics than rock salt, which makes sense if you think about it.

Yes, it does make sense, but that’s because micro plastics are everywhere we bother to look. In the air, in the water, in the fish, in animals, etc. However, that is no evidence that the micro plastics we get from salt are significant in any way compared to other sources, particularly considering how little of the stuff we actually eat. From an ecological point of view, getting it from the sea is much better than ripping mountains apart to extract it.

Even though I don’t care for micro plastics (e.g. I don’t look into it), I also buy (perfectly white) rock salt by chance. They dig it up 10 km from here, not on the Himalaya.

It looks like you are equating pink salt, and mined salt. Mined salt usually colored in white-gray spectrum.

Given the inorganic nature of sea salt, I believe it should be feasible to remove most microplastics from it, by applying intense heat briefly, in an oxygen atmosphere, so the microplastic particles would just burn away.

99% of the time we are using salt for flavor, not for the nutritional value. So the inclusion of a small amount of minerals has value in changing the flavor of the salt. Also, iodine adds a bad metallic taste, so that's another reason to choose something besides standard table salt.

> iodine adds a bad metallic taste

I cannot disagree more! Iodine is an essential part of sea salt. Rock salt is bland and boring in comparison. That said, I agree that refined salt is much worse.

"Iodine is an essential part of sea salt."

Naturally occurring iodine (in sea salt) does not compare in dosage to fortified (table) salt.

IIRC, fortified salt is recommended because iodine is uncommon in normal diets.

Sure, if you can notice such a “different taste” (I don’t, and certainly not in a dish, but maybe that’s me) and this has value for you, go ahead.

Iodine, tho, it’s something you actually need depending on where you live, so I’ll keep buying iodated salt until I move to the seaside…

I find myself reaching for the pink one more often than not. Taste has a lot more going for it than the concentrated white dust natrium chloride. It's also interesting that you cannot taste the difference. Do you usually consume lots of the stuff?

> Do you usually consume lots of the stuff?

I mean… it’s salt? I use it to salt stuff, I don’t eat it alone. I use moderate (normal?) amounts, mostly in dishes.

For the most part it is not a topping or something that stays unmelted on top of a very bland food… but maybe it depends on what you cook and eat.

Coarser-grained salt, if it's sprinkled on top of something, can give you more of a salt taste sensation which can often be desirable. But that's the effect of the size of the grains, not any trace mineral or other elements.

Indeed, I do use coarser salt or fleur de sel, but only on few things (e.g. on top of a steak, fish, or on oven-baked potatoes), and I do notice the difference. To me, pink salt just doesn’t taste different to comparably-sized white salt in a noticeable way.

Salts definitely have different flavors

Ever blind taste taste it on food where it’s not visible?

Yes, and it's noticeable. Most people don't feel the difference probably because the food they are adding it to is already extremely tasty. But trust me, put some salt on an unseasoned fish and you'll immediately taste the differences

Yeah but could you tell the difference in a blind tasting between salt A, salt B, and salt C, on food? That was the question.

What part of my reply did not answer that question? I said it depends on the food

>iodine adds a bad metallic taste

"Iodized salt in the U.S. contains 45 micrograms of iodine per gram of salt." [1]

There's no way anyone can taste that. If the iodide ion even has a distinct taste independent of its cation.

[1] https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-q-...

> There's no way anyone can taste that.

Hmm I'd check the last 'things i won't work with'.

Unless you want goiter and cretinism, iodising salt is (for inland populations, at least) a big public health win.

(tangentially related: I once heard a story that there was some deficiency disease that was only diagnosed after WWII: it turns out allied officers in japanese POW camps got white, not brown, rice — and were massively affected by the disease in question while the enlisted men in the same camps were barely affected)

I think that's Beriberi or thiamine (B1) deficiency.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...

Depends on the diet. These days it doesn't matter if you're inland or not. Seafood and seaweed are shipped worldwide.

Iodized salt was responding to a regional deficiency that was discovered 100+ years ago. The data that the decision was based on is completely obsolete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodised_salt#In_public_health_... > Worldwide, iodine deficiency affects two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual and developmental disabilities.

It is not a problem that can be fixed "forever". Iodised salt solved it, so moving away to non-iodised salts can make it resurface. One should evaluate their own personal iodine intake - if you are not getting it from salt then you should be getting it from somewhere else.

In The Netherlands, if you want your iodine dosage, all you need to do is eat bread once a day (I don't know if it counts for all bread like gluten-free). Because it is fortified with iodine. Other countries solve it differently, but you don't have to normally make up for it in The Netherlands.

One of the surprising things about the United States food safety and labelling laws, is that you're allowed to write "0 grams of trans fat" even when there is 0.5 grams! (Per serving quanta.) In countries such as Canada, there must be fewer than 0.1 grams to say 0.0 -- IOW United States processed foods really cannot be trusted. Even small amounts of trans fats are incredibly dangerous to your heart. Avoid them!

The combination of rounding rules and freedom of serving size is just ridiculous. You can buy oil in the US that lists 0 fat and 0 calories per serving, because the serving size is like 1/4 tsp or something. The EU's mandatory labeling per 100 g avoids that kind of chicanery and makes things much easier to compare.

Careful with that. Lack of cholesterol, especially at an advanced age, causes Alzheimer.

Citation required on this one. Since when do we know what does and doesn't cause Alzheimer? We don't even know what Alzheimer is beyond the symptoms.

> French people couldn't be wrong: they consume plenty of rich food and they don't have American health problems.

And you know why your average American turns into an unhealthy tub of lard ?

Simple really:

     1) Americans have a penchant for over-processed foods which in turn contain high-levels of "the wrong" fats and, of course, sugar (which in America is generally the horrible processed type, e.g. corn syrup) .
     2) American portion sizes for one meal could feed an entire African family for a week, American portions are obscene
     3) Americans are largely sedentary, and have a penchant for driving instead of walking
     4) Americans have a penchant for intensive industrial farming which reduces the quality of the raw ingredient
     

Now, you may choose to try to argue over point (4) if you feel you must be patriotic and defend US agriculture. But points (1)–(3) are, regrettably hard truths.

It's not rocket science.

Eat Less. Eat Better. Do Some Exercise. Your body will thank you.

Ah yes, American bashing. I won't go into the psychology behind it because I don't want to insult your background or whatever country you may be from.

By calling it a penchant, you make it sound like Americans choose these things. Most of us are held hostage by capitalist interests. Right now, it's much cheaper to eat processed foods than it is to make a similar meal from whole foods. Also, most of our towns over here in the New World were built with cars in mind. It's not generally feasible to walk places unless you live in a large city. Most people don't have 2+ hours to make a walking trip to the grocery store 5 miles away.

What prevents people from biking these 5 miles? Can't be capitalism, because bikes are cheaper than cars or just fuel with amortization costs for such trips.

For 2+ years I had to bike 12 km each time I needed groceries. In fact, this was in France.

Well first, the original poster is making a gross generalization about Americans. Many Americans do bike places for enjoyment and necessity. Just like France, it's the exception not the norm in places with spread out amenities. Just like France, the decision to do this or not do this is based on things like free-time, safety, money, and yes, laziness.

I'm French, 1, 3 and 4 are true here too.

There is no French miracle, it's just that we're lagging a bit with the US (usually 10 or 20 years depending on the matter).

I find that extraordinarily hard to believe. On my visits to the US from the UK, I’m always struck by how appalling to food options are in the US. Eating anything that isn’t filled with sugar, and about 3 portions too large, requires some thought, when you’re in the major cities. Outside of those cities, you need to expend real effort to find healthy food options.

Huge portions of the menus you find in many “resultants” in the US simply isn’t legal in EU because quality of food is simply too low.

The UK isn’t exactly know for it culinary expertise, but returning from the US to the UK is like finding water in the desert when it come the quality of food available.

Maybe it's just that I don't eat at restaurants a huge amount in the US and I mostly eat at better restaurants when I do. But I travel to Europe quite a bit and I just don't see the stark difference.

Yes, a lot of restaurants in the US will have a fair bit of filler (potatoes/rice/other vegetables) in a typical main course. But if I have fish and chips or a steak pie at a London pub, I'm probably not going to finish all the chips and other vegetables there either. I'm not sure I've just about ever looked at a main course in Europe and thought to myself "Oh, what a small portion."

And my experiences in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc. are similar.

I do agree that when you get out of major cities in the US, food options can be pretty limited. Even where I live, about 50 miles outside of a major city, there are only a few places I eat at or get takeout from on anything like a regular basis and I wouldn't like to subsist on food from them 7 days a week.

I find food is a lot better on the coasts too. If you're in the middle of the US, unless you're in a large city, the food is pretty abysmal.

That's probably generally true although I've also stayed in smaller towns in places like northern California and meal options were pretty limited there too. A problem is that you can devolve to fast food chains pretty quickly and the local options aren't necessarily any better. A good (pricier) restaurant in a small town probably isn't really supportable by just locals.

For the me the stark difference comes from the plentiful supply is extremely low quality food. At the better end of the food quality scale I think the US and EU are comparable.

But when you look towards the bottom end of the food quality scale, the bar for saleable food is just abysmally low compared to the EU. You simply can’t buy food of such poor quality here. As a consequence the average quality of food in EU is substantial better, not because the EU produces better food, but simply because it doesn’t accept the low quality stuff the US is happy to eat.

That may be the case. I basically never eat fast food aside from the occasional local pizza place or maybe a food truck. This is true whether at home or traveling so I don't really have a comparison scale at the low end.

We’re talking about different national cultures and their approach to food. Your personal preferences aren’t the most relevant.

I split my time between the US and UK. If the food options in the US are "appalling" relative to the UK, it makes me wonder what parts of the US you've been spending your time in.

Food and cuisine in the US is highly regional, and varies immensely. In the part of the US where I currently live (Pacific Northwest), the local food is much healthier than is typical in the UK and higher quality. Portion sizes are not uniform across the US either but I would agree that on average the UK is significantly smaller.

I wouldn't characterize typical food in the UK as particularly healthy, it reminds me much more of the diet you see in the Rust Belt of the US. The relative dearth of fresh, high-quality vegetables in the UK is particularly noticeable for people that have lived on the west coast of the US (which has amazing fresh vegetables generally by global standards).

> I'm French, 1, 3 and 4 are true here too.

I would say that in France (and Europe generally) they are only true as you (unfortunately) move down the socio-economic scale.

My experience of Europe is that people who can afford it generally do eat well.

As for the driving, I'm not sure I agree. For a start, most US cities barely have any public transport, which automatically pushes people to get in the car (either due to laziness or due to distance). Meanwhile in Europe there are normally plentiful public transport options except for the countryside.

What I meant is that the US is always more extreme but we have the same trends here.

Where I'm from if you have the choice you avoid public transport because it's not very practical: buses are crowded and trains aren't flexible enough.

Ah the classic, nobody drives in the city anymore, there’s too much traffic.

Overcrowded busses and trains are pretty strong indicator they’re doing something right.

In the US a “frequent” train service is every hour. In Europe a frequent train service is every 20min. In a major EU city, it’s every 90 seconds.

The US isn’t just an extreme, it’s an entirely different, almost incomparable, ballgame.

Sitting in a bus is still sitting, offering no health benefits vs sitting in a car (arguably, it's even less healthy when crowded). If the topic is health, the opposite here is walking, or (to lesser extent) cycling.

Well, you do need to walk to/from your bus stop. Might be marginal, though.

That being said, I'm in Europe and I typically cycle at least 1h per day from/to work/shopping/etc.

And for the bus you might be standing instead of sitting, you might have to change lines, etc. This is hyper easy to test with a $5 pedometer.

I'm willing to bet $100 that if you buy the pedometer and compare both commutes, the bus commute will mean that you have at least 2x the number of steps when you commute by bus versus when you commute by car (for the actual commute).

It's nitpicking. You can make 500 steps vs 100, and make a headline-like claim that it's five times more. In real life difference is negligible. Your organism requires walking in significant doses, and for you to practice it, you have to live in a walkable space (it includes infrastracture, and safety). A city can be driven by public transport, and not be pedestrian-friendly. A city can be private-car driven, and not be pedestrian-friendly.

> Sitting in a bus is still sitting, offering no health benefits vs sitting in a car

Actually no.

With a car, you get into the car outside your house, and you typically aim to park the car as close to physically possible to your destination.

With public transport, you have to walk to the nearest stop near your house, and you have to walk to your destination from the destination stop.

In addition, with trains you will have the opportunity to walk up and down stairs.

You might also walk to run errands around the local area, for example, walking to/from grocery shopping with a few bags, instead of driving to the supermarket, dumping the bags in the back of the car and only walking/carrying the limited distance between your car and the kitchen.

You might also opt to walk a slightly longer route if for example it takes you through a local park.

Walking to/from bus stop surely doesn't sound impressive. You can practice a smallscale shopping with every sort of transport (it depends more on available shopping infrastracture, and economical reasons). And you surely can walk more by choice irrespective of transport (it depends on available pedestrian-friendly infrastructure). Choice is choice, and sitting is still sitting.

France is going shit in this regard as do most developed countries, that's true, but my friend if you want to equate US and FR when it comes to diet and results on current population, they are not in the same league, heck its a different universe. French are much more conscious about quality of the food, fine taste and other aspects that cheap junk food doesn't provide.

Walk around any french town, you will see crowds of tall, slender thin people with few overweight folks. Sports are a priority and source of pride, alpinism, climbing or paragliding are deemed as national sports, not some extreme fringe stuff for few adrenaline junkies. Do the same exercise randomly in US, and chances are very good what you will see will be dramatically different. That being said, there are (were at least in 2003) many faces of US - I've spent that summer working blue collar jobs in US as part of work&travel programme US was providing, and already LA was exactly as we discuss. Then I moved to rural Maine and it was night & day, I've met maybe 5 fat people in 5 weeks spent there (but its true racial diversity back there was 0, I've seen 1 black guy in 5 weeks and maybe 2-3 of asian origin, rest looked just like they arrived from Scandinavia).

But judging by various articles and feedback from friends that Maine experience was much less common than LA one, and over time even more so. US portions are simply needlessly big and often unhealthy. The logic is to eat till full, instead of just warding off hunger and enjoying few very finely tasting bites.

Because French culture and English culture also gets overburdened by American brands such as McDonald's and Coca Cola.

I like the example of the American pizza. Its not even crunchy, its more dough than anything else. Its pizza with topping, instead of the other way around.

I’m danish (but lives in LA briefly) and just like My french neighbour i Can totally relate to ^

I remember being 17 and visiting the USA with my family. We were 4 people. The waitress very nicely picked up that we were tourists (from Sweden) and told us to only order 2 dishes and share them. We were full from that.

So USA, just cut your portions in half.

It is pretty normal in the US to share dishes between people at restaurants. Some restaurants also offer half portions even if it isn't listed on the menu.

America has to find a way to keep all the sugar plantations and beef/dairy land we violently established relevant so sugar, dairy, meat and corn go in everything. Anything less would be communism /s

> 2) American portion sizes for one meal could feed an entire African family for a week, American portions are obscene

I don't get why people get so up in arms about this, especially as it's socially acceptable to take out leftovers (unlike, say, Italy). Personally, I'm a tallish, moderately active guy and I need some 3.5k-4k kcal a day, and America is the only country I've been to that I don't have to worry about being hungry after a meal out.

> Personally, I'm a tallish, moderately active guy and I need some 3.5k-4k kcal a day

No you don't. Unless you're an incredibly athletic giant you definitely don't need twice as many calories as an average man.

I simply observed that I lose weight if I eat <3k kcal over long stretches. I think human metabolism has a very wide variance, though it's hard to find good quality studies about it.

You went from 4K to 3K in a single post. Needless to say you're not exactly reliable.

I count my calories and I eat between 3.5k and 4k. I had a few periods where I ate <3k. These are two separate things. The latter is significant because the fact that I lost weight makes me think that I need my usual intake to retain my weight.

Dude you need to be a 6"5 320lbs monster to lose weight on less than 3,000 calories a day.

https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html?ctype=standar...

Metabolism varies widely among individuals, and there is no clear understanding on the relationship between calorie intake and weight. All the calculators and estimates you find on the internet are based on surface level low-quality estimates that don't (and can't) take into account all of the variances at work. That said I am aware that I'm a bit of an extreme case (always been teased for that) but that's how random variables work, sometimes there are data points outside of the bulk.

The 2000 kcal reference (which I assume you're referring to) isn't for "an average man", but for an average person. For an average man, the reference value would be somewhere between 2.5k to 3k.

Because, at the end of the day, calories are what cause weight gain.

Consider if you had a pet and you were to put out twice as much food for every feeding.

It gets even worse if you think about cultural aspects, like teaching kids to make a "happy plate", which condition them to eat everything served to them.

Sure, studies have not been able to show strong evidence of a causal link between portion size and obesity.[1][2][3]

But it's hard to ignore that American obesity rates and portion sizes have increased over the same period of time.

And, at the very least, decreasing portion size probably helps with maintaining weight. [4]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4224223/

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/nutrition/pdf/portion_size_...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4105579/

[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35387692/

I don't doubt that #4 is probably technically true and environmentally relevant, but I suspect most people's health issues are far more excess-related than deficiency related, even if there's a few specific things most people might not have enough of, so 1-3 are probably a far bigger deal.

> Julia Childs and French people couldn't be wrong: they consume plenty of rich food and they don't have American health problems.

This is BS. I'm French, born and raised and we are plenty fat / unhealthy here.

I'm in my first week of the McDougall diet because I'm fat. That's the so called French diet that made me that way (for reference I ate fast food only 3 times since 2020, so junk food isn't responsible for my weight).

There is no magic, you can't feast like a king everyday and stay healthy. Slim people here either don't feast everyday (they have a self control I don't have) or are doing a lot of sport (or both).

I don’t think anybody is claiming that the “French diet” is some sort of magic trick that means you can never eat unhealthy. That obviously untrue.

But the population statistics speak for themselves. People in the US far more likely to be overweight and obese, to an extreme degree, than those in France. Given that nutrition is major component in determining a person physical wellbeing, it’s seems quite reasonable to suggest that maybe the French just eat better (on average) than their US counterparts.

None of that prevents individuals from shooting for gold on the weighing scales. But one overweight person doesn’t mean the entire country is doomed to obesity.

There are plenty of fat people in every country. But if you take a flight into e.g. Chicago from anywhere else in the world, you will not even need to leave the airport to see how much fatter America is. Many, many people in America are nearly physically handicapped from obesity. The word 'fat' has an inflated meaning in America.

There was definitely a period 20+ years ago when I was leading weekend group hiking trips when health conscious people (which most people on these trips were) would basically stage a revolt if you only supplied butter, whole milk, etc. (Eggs were mostly OK.)

My associates at MIT have switched their families to the carnivore diet. Apparently sugar molecules are like little daggers which stab into and get stuck to the arteries and the fat gets clogged in the arteries because of sugar. No sugar no problems.

This is uncannily like my own upbringing. Dad with hypertension, mum hated cooking (and was therefore a bad cook), margarine, the works. And it sounds that like me it meant you discovered an explicit pleasure in food. I often wonder if in fact I should be thanking my mother for setting that up for me! I married into a Spanish family who are all foodies even by Spanish standards, and I love the fact that when we're eating together we talk about the food we're eating, the last time we ate this food, the meal that reminds us of, oh and remember those amazing roast peppers we had in Rioja etc. etc. etc. I've had semi-spiritual experiences from my mother-in-law's cooking (peppers stuffed with salt cod is a particular highlight).