In the same vein, salt.
Try to stay under the daily recommended amount of 2500mg of sodium and see how limited your food options are.
Everything is loaded with salt now. Especially fast food. For example, my previous go-to meal at Zaxby’s (the boneless wings and things plate) is over 4000mg of sodium for one meal. Add on a 1300mg sausage, egg, and cheese mcgriddle and a fried rice with soy sauce for dinner and I had several days worth of sodium without totally blowing my calorie budget.
You’re not supposed to eat any of those things on any regular basis. Those are def cheat meals to eat sparingly when you’ve planned to go a little crazy with your diet
Fried rice is not a cheat meal and a lot of people in the world eat it daily.
That isn’t addiction though, that’s lack of options. If you cut out sugar or sodium from your diet you probably aren’t going to go through withdrawal. Unless you’re meaning more of a psychological addiction.
I’m a filthy vegan and former tobacco smoker that doesn’t indulge in sweets. I’m scared to actually calculate my salt intake as I over season everything I eat. For a while I thought I was being healthy not using table salt on anything, until I realized hot sauce and tamari are essentially liquid sodium.
Yep. My favorite hot sauce has 1200mg of sodium per two tablespoons… And I would drench my food in that shit.
Same with soy sauce. Each of those little packets you get from your favorite Chinese place is probably at least 300mg of sodium.
Yeah I got through a… whatever, a giant jug of Frank’s hot sauce, I guess half a gallon. Every time I used it I’d visibly bloat up from the sodium, but was probably using a quarter cup minimum every time.
Tried my best to use USA measurements for American people’s benefit. The jug was >2 litres and we’re talking 60ml a pop, absolute minimum. Apparently that’s five grams of salt, nearly 2000mg sodium. Wow.
Reminds me of my favorite food, the KFC Double Down. That bad boy had so much sodium they had to take it off the permanent menu (much to my salt-loving dismay) due to the number of warnings about its salt and fat content.
Still pissed that my local KFC shut down and that I missed the month that it was brought back for (only saw the commercial for it 3 days before it ended when the nearest KFC was like an hour or so away).
2500mg is also just not a lot of sodium. 2000 calories is also a recommended daily amount but it’s far too low for a lot of people.
2000 Cal is probably within 30% of what most people should have daily. But your typical American food is going to be 100-200% higher than the daily recommended amount. A Panera Bread French Onion soup in a bread bowl is literally 90% of the daily sodium, but not even half of the daily calories. Remove the bread bowl and it’s still more than 1200mg of sodium for less than 400 calories.
The biggest thing I look at now when picking out meals is the sodium to calorie ratio. Anything over 1.2 is probably not good.
