Don't forget the salt!

My family recently realized that corn tortilla chips actually have less salt than the brand of flour tortillas we were using. I assumed incorrectly that deep fried, salted chips would have more sodium.

Different brands of chips have very different amounts of salt as well. A brand that I like, El Milagro, doesn't actually tout low sodium, yet their chips have less than half the salt (49 mg per 28 g serving) than regular Tostitos (115 mg per 28 g serving).

Tostitos are covered in a fine dust of salt. It allows for good coverage, every bit is perfectly salted but you end up consuming more salt. I prefer tortilla chips that use course salt sprinkled on top. Not every chip will be perfectly salted and some are over salted (which are more of like process issues) but you do use less salt overall. Chipotle does this. Their chips have about 2.78mg of sodium per gram of chip. Tostitos has 4.1mg of sodium per gram of chip. Using coarse salt in cooking (when not simply dissolved into the food) does lead to being able to taste the salt better as the large salt crystal takes longer to dissolve on your tongue and also lasting longer on top the food without dissolving into it.

Although I will say that sometimes some food manufacturers use sea salt that has a higher potassium chloride content in an effort to reduce the sodium. I was buying canned corn the other day, both from the same company but one listed as lower sodium. They both used "sea salt" but the original sodium version used "natural" sea salt whereas the lower sodium one made no such claim. Likely they were using modified sea salt that had higher potassium content while still keeping the overall salinity the same. They didn't say "less salt", which is what many product do say, they said "less sodium" which is technically true.

>> A 12-ounce can of HFCS sweetened soda is easier to drink than the same size, same brand, sugar sweetened beverage. The sugar sweetened version gives me feelings of done / too much that the HFCS version doesn't.

Allow me to be the counterpoint here: I can finish an equivalent amount of NFCS or Cane Sugar (pretty much the only common alternative) soda with the same ease.

My thoughts on the issue with HFCS: it's cheap as fuck, the human body loooooooooooves sweet, so lazy food developers throw that shit in everything. Yea yea yea, "the live metabolization" and all that shit, but honestly it's the prevalence not the molecule itself. Is the issue that we put HFCS in Ketchup over regular sugar...or that we put so much extra sugar into the blend at all?