Shaken By The Salt

I like food.  A lot.  I like eating it, and I love cooking it.  But I find it really difficult to suggest that one kind of diet is better than another.  You want a high-fat diet — go for it.   You want vegan — great!  I happen to eat just about anything, and that’s good too.  Everyone should make their own choices.  But there are some things that are taken out of our hands, unless you are willing to cook everything from scratch.  And the amount of sodium in processed foods is one of them.

We Canadians live in this little bubble of self-esteem that assumes that, as a country, we nearly always do “the right thing”.  Therefore, it is more than disturbing to read in the Globe & Mail:

… one cup of All-Bran cereal in Canada has 620 milligrams of sodium, but in the U.S., one cup has only 160 milligrams of sodium.

… and that this sort of difference is general across the range of food categories.  Worse, apparently we — the consumers — are the only ones to blame:

“Consumers will simply not compromise on taste,” Catherine O’Brien, director of corporate affairs at Nestlé Canada Inc.,  said. “Therefore, [taste] must be a priority alongside improved health.”

Where would we be if we had accepted this kind of logic from the cigarette manufacturers?  Regular readers will know that I am not a supporter of government intervention in our lives.  However, so long as we have this patronising system, isn’t one of their jobs supposed to be to protect consumers from this kind of profit-above-all marketing?

A Good Victory For England

Having stayed up late — for me — last night, I just managed to crawl out of bed at 5 this morning to follow the last couple of hours of England’s one-day cricket match against South Africa.  It was worth it, with England winning decisively.

Once again it was our old stalwart Paul Collingwood who was man of the match, taking wickets and a spectacular catch in the South African innings, and then knocking off an unbeated 105 runs.   He was brilliantly supported by Jonathan Trott and Eoin Morgan in the run chase.

After the up and down play in the T20s, this augers well for the rest of the ODI series and, later, for the Tests.

[Note: image is from CricInfo]