Brian Wingfield of Forbes Magazine recently wrote the following in his article, “Fat Tax Could Be Panacea For Health Reform:”

According to a 73 page study released Monday by “experts” at the Urban Institute and the University of Virginia , aggressive public policy interventions that helped bring down tobacco use could be modified and applied to fight obesity, including

• imposing excise or sales taxes on fattening food of little nutritional value, as the tax on cigarettes has proven to be the single most effective weapon in decreasing tobacco use;

• putting graphic, simple labels on the front of packaged foods showing their nutritional value in a form that consumers can easily understand and use;

What is a fattening food that should be taxed? A Twinkie at 150 calories and 5 grams of fat per serving? Perhaps we ought to go upscale and consider a serving of high end chocolate mousse pie at 247 calories and 15 grams of fat per serving - obviously deserving of a higher tax. If you're not interested in dessert, then how about a serving of fruit or vegetables. A convenient compromise would be a serving of avocado, which is botanically a fruit, but usually served as a vegetable. A serving of avocado is 240 calories with 22 grams of fat! Clearly anything with more than 20 grams of fat per serving should be dinged with a surtax above and beyond the normal fat tax.

It goes without saying that green foods (fruits and vegetable) contain the lowest levels of fat and should be exempt from tax.

Obesity is the result of consumption of calories in excess of calories expended. It is not the result of the types of foods consumed. Vegetarians and vegans are known to be very concerned about their health and are defined by the green foods they eat. Yet, obesity is a problem among this category of green food consumers as well. The June 2005 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition describes this in the article. “Risk of overweight and obesity among semivegetarian, lactovegetarian, and vegan women .” Overweight or obesity (BMI 25) was 29% among both semivegetarians and vegans, and 25% among lactovegetarians. For them, vegetarian and vegan foods are fattening. Should they be taxed?

Using the reduction in tobacco use as a model to influence food choices is an absurd notion. Tobacco use causes cancer. There is no strategy that tobacco consumers can employ to mitigate its negative health impact, other than complete cessation of use. Eating food does not cause cancer nor does it result in obesity. Eating an excess of calories over what is expended does result in obesity. It’s not the type of food that is the problem, it’s the amount that’s consumed, as demonstrated by the vegetarian/vegan example above.

Consumers have to be informed on all aspects of obesity and then be left to their own personal choices. If eating a twinkie makes me happy and I burn off any extra calories by cycling around the block a couple of extra times, then that is my priviledge. I prefer that to not eating the foods I enjoy, then getting into a dour mood and kicking the first squirrel that comes into reach. A tax on any class of food or beverage is nothing more than a sumptuary law, no different than all the other sumptuary laws enacted throughout history that have failed. Social authoritarianism does not work and can lead to dangerous unintended consequences. Taxing sugar-sweetened beverages will drive children to drink cheap concoctions laced with artificial sweeteners. Do we know the long tem consequences of a lifetime of artificial sweetener consumption or is it simply enough to put a warning label on the product (as in the case of saccharin)? Will taxing of higher fat foods drive consumers to overeat more fruits and vegetables? Fruits and vegetables have high fiber and phytic acid levels, which means that other nutrients in the diet may not be digested properly.

The fat or beverage tax is another simplistic attempt to arrive at a superficial solution to a lack of a rational food culture. It is the abandonment of confidence in the average consumer’s ability to think and make free and informed choices once they are educated.

It is far better to follow the old proverb; Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Over the past six months the public's priorities in food choices has shifted from "freshness, health and the environment" to "taste, price, healthfulness and convenience" according to dualing surveys, one by IPSOS and another by the International Food Information Council.

The IPSOS survey conducted six months ago and released June 11 was summarized by IPSOS Executive Vice President David Pring:

We are seeing a global consumer movement toward heightened consciousness of health, wellness and environmental factors in their food purchasing decisions....We are also seeing that taste, convenience and product difference – aspects that were probably more characteristic of food product drivers towards the end of the last millennium – are taking a back seat in a world now more focused on making a positive impact on freshness and health as well as the sustainability of the planet.

Wait a minute, IFIC would respond. Released slightly earlier, the 2009 IFIC survey concluded that, consistent with all past surveys, taste is the number one factor influencing food purchases, but price has increased steadily as the second most important factor. 87% of consumers consider taste to have some or great impact, price 74% (up from 64% four years ago), while healthfulness trails at 61% and convenience last of the four choices at 52%. Looking just at those who consider each factor of "great impact," taste is #1 with 53%, price next with 43% and healthfulness and convenience at 26%.

For ourselves, we see little evidence supporting the IPSOS headline that "Freshness, Health and the Environment Matter Most in the Kitchens of the World; Global Consumer Priorities Regarding Food Products Shift away from Taste, Convenience." Taste reigns!

What do you think?

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.

"The most standard of seasonings has gone gourmet," proclaims Condé Nast. The publisher of advisories for the well-heeled and well-traveled has produced a Salt Food Guide to help its upscale readers understand the variety of salts available to them through gourmet stores and, increasingly, in fine restaurants. See the slide show .

We have much to be thankful for, more than a one-day holiday allows. And we all can be thankful for the myriad benefits made possible by salt. Not only will Thanksgiving tables feature "Neptune's Gift" as families gather to celebrate, but more and more holiday chefs will be brining their turkeys this year. Try a Google search yourself: 1.8 million websites offer advice on brining. While a few offer advice more practical in the months ahead , most explain how soaking your turkey in salt brine will produce the tenderist, tastiest bird you've ever had.

As the top-listed Webervirtualbullet site explains:

Today there's a surge in popularity of "flavor brining", a term coined by Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly in the book The Complete Meat Cookbook .

While traditional brining was meant to preserve meat, the purpose of flavor brining is to improve the flavor, texture, and moisture content of lean cuts of meat. This is achieved by soaking the meat in a moderately salty solution for a few hours to a few days. Flavor brining also provides a temperature cushion during cooking--if you happen to overcook the meat a little, it will still be moist.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving.

Whether you take advantage of the salt-centered recipes on the Salt Institute's website via the home page drop-down menu or go direct to the recipes page , you'll want to check out the new page on salt roasting of fish, meats and vegetables. Then head for the kitchen with your bulk salt in hand!

Since fish are especially flavorful when salt-roasted and since fish are consumed in North America only a fraction as much as in Europe, salt -roasting -- simple, quick and easy -- may stimulate more Americans to improve the quality of their diet by increasing their intake of fish. Just today, Sally Squires in the Washington Post reported that nutritionists are concerned that more Americans aren't eating fish.

It was with great interest that I recently came across an article describing some of Benjamin Franklin's experiments on electricity. Although he was most well-known for his invention of the lightening rod and his work on condensers and batteries, he was never given proper credit for his invention of the process of tenderizing poultry by electrical stimulation.

In correspondence with his English colleagues, Franklin wrote that linking several electrical capacitance jars together allowed him to kill a 10 lb. turkey with a single jolt of high voltage electricity. "I conceit that the birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender," he noted.

More than 200 years later, US patents were awarded for "…electrically stimulating poultry carcasses in order to tenderize the poultry meat."

There really isn't very much new under the sun.

Recently, much hue and cry was raised about "enhanced poultry," as if this time-honored brining technique for improving the tenderness of poultry was a new invention of big industry. Brining originated from a method of curing called corning, although it had nothing whatsoever to do with corn. The name comes from Anglo-Saxon times. Meat was cured in coarse "corns" of salt. Pellets of salt, the size of kernels of corn, were rubbed into the beef to keep it from spoiling and to preserve it. It was a means of making tough cuts of beef, particularly briskets, tender prior to storage (since refrigeration was unavailable at the time). Corned beef became such a beloved product that it continues to be made by brining today, even though we all have refrigerators.

As I said, there really isn't very much new under the sun.

I received an interesting call the other day from a correspondent preparing story for the Chicago Tribune. She had heard from an author that so little salt was consumed in Finland that there was actually no word for it in the Finnish language. This struck me as rather odd because the Finns are known to consume among the highest levels of salt in the world. How could that be possible without having a word for the world's favorite condiment? Might a typical conversation around the kitchen table go something like this?

Olga, this soup is perfect, you added just the right amount of white stuff and pepper. Would you mind passing the white stuffine crackers, they go perfect with this soup.

Oh, I'm glad you like it Paavo, guess what's up next?

Don't tell me it's my favorite, white stuff herring or perhaps some of your excellent white stuff pork and beans? Olga, my darling, you are really the white stuff of the earth.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? In fact, it didn't take long to set the record straight. The word for salt in Finland is suola. Another urban legend destroyed!

Sometimes you have to take some authors with a pinch of suola… or white stuff!!

This from Nancy R. Fenn :

"Dr. Alan Hirsch of the smell and taste institute says after testing more than 18 thousand people, he believes food can determine a couple's compatibility… Or at least help you pick out a possible mate. Hirsch claims, "We were able to determine who you would be most romantically compatible with and 95% of the time it's correct." His book, What's Your Food Sign?, covers cocktails, breakfast foods, ice cream, fruits & veggies - even snacks. So if you love potato chips the research shows you are a competitive, high achiever. You'll go well with other chip lovers but you can mix it up with pretzel people too.Popcorn lovers are self-confident take-charge types, but are also modest, and won't show-off. You'll pop for other popcorn people and may get hot for tortilla chip lovers.Or here's another taste test for love. A severe sweet tooth means you live for the moment. People who prefer sour flavors are loyal and will stay together. Spicy food fanatics are thrill seekers who try to end a relationship quickly. And salt lovers are introverts who want to avoid a confrontation."

I don't know about you other salt-lovers, but my Myers-Briggs results are a definite "E" -- for the uninitiated, that's "extroverted" and NHLBI, I believe, would not consider me non-confrontational. On the other hand, my wife and I have been married nearly 39 years. Go figure.

What is it they say about great minds? This morning's Washington Post addresses a topic close to my post last evening -- measuring quantities of table salt. In this case, Robert L. Wolke, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, discusses how to adjust recipe amounts of salt when using the two types of kosher salt available (hint: use 1.5 times as much Morton Kosher Salt and twice as much Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt). And, says Wolke, don't bother using sea salt in cooking; if you use it, add it at the table.

You've all seen contests where people are asked to guess how many jelly beans are in a glass jar. Amaze your friends with this alternative: Pour a 26 oz. "round can" of salt into a jar and ask your friends to guess how many salt crystals are in the jar.

Ever wonder how much a single crystal of table salt weighs? The Salt Institute hadn't given that question a thought until this just-received request arrived. Thanks to Lead Research Chemist Lorrie Ann Fisher of Morton Salt, the world now knows (but your friends may not) that the average weight of a single crystal of table salt is 0.16 milligrams. Thus, a typical 26 oz. "round can" of table salt would contain over four and a half million salt crystals (4,606,800 give or take). Now you know!

Bargain? What other crystals can you buy at 10 million for a buck?

Put another way, that means the FDA's "Daily Reference Value" (FDA food labels do NOT provide a "daily recommended value") for sodium is more than 37,000 crystals of table salt.