Fearmongering prevails. Fearing their diets may mean risk of chronic disease, consumers seek to lower their risks by using "healthy" foods, whose unhealthy ingredients are reduced or eliminated. But is seems there is no escape: health conscious, label-reading food purchasers should be fearful, too according to Wall Street Journal Health section reporter Melinda Beck. Beck asks "What's really in many 'healthy' foods?" She answers using salt substitutes as an example where consumers are misled into thinking "healthy" confers some health benefit to them personally. Regarding salt substitutes, she explains:

If you're trying to cut down on salt, check with your doctor before you start using a salt substitute. Most contain potassium chloride, which can exacerbate kidney problems and interact badly with some heart and liver medications.

With only a bit more research, Beck could have noted the other "healthy" additives used to replace salt. Besides potassium chloride, salt replacers include calcium chloride, magnesium sulphate (Epsom salts) and various metal ion replacers as well as various other proprietary chemicals.

Food manufacturers also try to reduce the natural salt content of their foods by using "salt enhancers" that include: 5-ribonucleotides, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, inosine 5-monophosphate, 5'-guanidylic acid, glycine monoethyl ester, L-lysine, L-arginine, lactates, Mycosent, Trehalose, L-ornithine, Ornithyl-β-alanine, monosodium glutamate and Alapyridaine (N-(1-Carboxethyl)-6-hydroxymethyl-pyridinium-3-ol).

Salt is a natural bitterness inhibitor. To give "healthy" -- but bitter -- low-sodium foods acceptable taste, food producers sometimes replace salt with 2,4-dihydroxybenzoic acid. Now that's real "health food"!

Dietary salt's use in food is as Winston Churchill said about democracy being "the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

The headline in yesterday's USA Today declared: "Food doesn't have to take up a huge chunk of your budget." Reporter Jayne O'Donnell reports that the Food Marketing Institute will release a report Sunday showing that more consumers are eating at home: 85% eat a home cooked meal three or more times a week, up from 75% in 2006 (personally, I find that astoundingly low, but, then, my wife's an excellent cook and backyard barbeque season is upon us so maybe my home-cooked lifestyle is abnormal).

Since the end of WWII, there has been a notable trend for Americans to eat more foods prepared outside the home, both in restaurants and packaged, processed foods, perhaps heated at home, but not "home cooked." Depending on FMI's definition, perhaps the country's current economic travails will blunt or reverse a parallel trend: a gradual erosion of round can sales of table salt: a reliable indicator of the amount of "home cooking" being done.