Steve slams salt.

If you're one of the Fitness Nerd Herd, you're probably also a Steve Edwards devotee, so you've already seen his tirade on added salts and his commentary on a recent New York Times article, but if you haven't, it's worth checking out.

Most processed foods aren’t really food. They’re just amalgamations of chemicals that bind together that are flavored in a way that some scientists have figured out will cause you to crave them. For example:

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

The main addictive qualities of these foods come from salt, sugar, and fat; incidentally (or not) the three culprits of the obesity epidemic. There’s not much nutrition in these foods, which are fortified with a few “essential vitamins.” This may sound great on TV to kids but is done, essentially, to keep you from dying quickly. Real food has all the vitamins, minerals, macronutrients, micronutrients, and phytonutrients you need to be healthy and doesn’t need to be fortified with anything.

While I find Steve's post and the NY Times article fascinating, the whole conversation's a bit of the old much-ado-about-nothing, frankly. These giant corporations own this country. If our government can barely issue a hand slap to BP for destroying the Gulf of effing Mexico, how the hell are they going to chastise Cargill for giving us something that, in our infinite ignorance, we actually want? If, through some miracle, the government actually managed to hold Cargill and Kellogg accountable, they'd be accused of "nanny politics" by the loud, belligerent masses. And even if that weren't the case, and there was some shift in the public's attitude whereas we actually demanded less salt in our Cheez-Its (which is absurd, given people smart enough to avoid excess salt generally don't eat Cheez-Its), Cargill would just invent some horrific salt substitute, a sodium saccharin if you will, that would just kill us in different ways.

So let these companies make their salty salted salt mix or whatever and just focus on yourself. You don't want all that sodium in your diet? Don't buy all that crap. Yes, I know that after a lifetime of chips, dips, and pickled pig lips, your taste buds have been completely enslaved. You have a mouthful of little crack addicts demanding their fix. Well, guess what? They'll adapt, if you give them a little time.

Or just die from hypertension. It's up to you.