I’ve never written a letter to an editor or a rebuttal to an article beyond what I might do on my blog, and after reading Joshua David Stein’s piece, Super Salt Me, in the February 22 issue of New York Magazine, I can’t help but take the author to task for drawing really faulty conclusions, or at least for not looking at the whole picture before wrongly placing blame. (The accompany article, Salts of the Earth, is really cool.) His experiment:

To test the anti-sodium argument in extremis, a would-be Morgan Spurlock gorges himself on all things salty for nine straight days.

And a little bit about his normal eating habits:

I normally follow what you could call a typical New Yorker’s health regimen: lots of restaurant food, occasional guilty forays into fast-food land, plenty of exercise, and a moderate amount of drinking. So when I set out, in the name of investigative journalism, on a nine-day high-sodium bender, I was, to say the least, concerned.

Here were the menu items he listed for the week:

• Breakfast is ham and cheese on a Cheddar biscuit at Amy’s Bread.
• I start with the caramel popcorn, then order a crock of baked beans with pork fat and a larger crock of onion-and-bone-marrow soup.
• Breakfast is a sausage-and-cheese omelette with home fries from Nisos.
• The grains of salt on my French fries at Bill’s Bar & Burger loom grotesquely large.
• Total four-day tally: five green-chile cheeseburgers, five sides of fries (four straight, one curly), an order of “Tater Gems,” three breakfast burritos, one pork-shoulder tamale, six Auntie Anne’s Pretzel Stix.
• I make my last meal at Diner, where even the salads come with bacon and a fried egg on top.

His conclusion:

My sodium and chloride levels are nearing the upper range. My urine has gotten more acidic, and although I didn’t feel it, I’m dehydrated. The level of fluid in my cells is still fine, but that’s only because of my good level of health to begin with. “The really striking thing,” says Morrison, “is that you lost two pounds of muscle and gained two pounds of fat.” What if I were to continue my salt binge for, say, a year? “Every year on a high-sodium, high-saturated-fat diet,” he says, “takes three months off your life.” By that math, I may have just shortened my life expectancy by 2.25 days—my last weekend on Earth. I leave Dr. Morrison’s and head for the salad bar.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying too much salt won’t cause physical problems, hypertension, water retention, etc. But, really? He’s going to blame gaining fat on the salt? When he ate pork fat and ham & cheese and cheeseburgers & fries instead of his usual healthy food? He admits up front that he only eats fast food occasionally. That he works out a lot, drinks in moderation, eats in restaurants but rarely indulges in excess. Did he really think flipping the switch on his entire diet wasn’t going to change how he felt? Maybe a better experiment would’ve been to eat his normal diet but add SALT. Since the whole experiment was to test what an excess of SALT would do.

I’m very bad when it comes to salt – as in, everyone has to salt what I make because I don’t salt anything enough. I rarely eat chips, though am a huge fan of Keebler’s Pretzel Crackers, especially the cheddar. And the husband fed me lunches of crackers, cheese and salty olives while I was writing the CIG. I also love bacon. And I love butter. But if the ingredients I toss into a dish aren’t salty on their own, the dish itself is probably going to be a bit bland. I’m not a salter. BUT, I know exactly how it feels to go from days of eating oatmeal and grilled chicken and salad and roasted asparagus to eating cheese and bacon cheeseburgers. And that is not ONLY about the salt.

Of course excess salt is an issue, but the grease and the useless carbs and the cholesterol and the LACK of things like salad and roasted asparagus cause just as many physical side effects. Even the columnist’s doctor mentioned high-saturated fat. He didn’t dump all the blame on the salt. Did the experiment have the columnist adding additional water to flush out the salt? Did he continue to exercise to burn the calories in all that fat? Was this really about extra salt or was it more about bad eating habits, because that I will totally buy. What I don’t buy is blaming everything on the salt and ignoring the rest of the changes he made to his diet. Lazy, lopsided reporting.