We all are in love with this Bride. It’s too hard to leave her and live. But now the situation is terrible. This love is going to kill us slowly and secretly while we are in love with her. She is not a normal bride, but one which is so much familiar to most of us. So this is the Bride of the Kitchen which is also crowned as “Queen of the Spices”, the one and only Common Salt….
As we all know Salt is a one out of the 5 tastes which has a long term history. It is used as a flavoring agent, a preservative and also a drug from early times. Old books state that there are 8 types of salts including the chemical compound Sodium Chloride, Common Salt which we are adding to the food. Salt has grabbed not only in our meal, but also it has been used to show the social status of a person in 18th century. But it’s too dangerous too addict to salt flavor although it’s an essential component for a healthy life. Addiction to Salt can even end up with deadly diseases and disorders. People are not considerate about the salt consumption as well as sugar and sweet according to the health records. This helps the Bride of the Kitchen to take us to the death. It’s better to find out what is the daily requirement of salt for a person. The essential element we are obtaining from salt is Sodium, which is necessary about a pinch daily. We should keep in mind!!!!! We already get this amount from the vegetables and fruits we eat. WHO emphasizes that adult should take up only 5g of salt, for children its half of that and infants should not be given salt. A research carried out by a group of British doctors proved that for every 5 persons one gets a heart attack who are using more than recommended amount of salt. Here, the worst case is subjecting to these heart attacks in the young ages. Especially immature kidneys of children can be damaged by using high amounts of salt and adults have a risk of subjecting to high blood pressure, strokes, paralysis and even cancers. In addition doctors warn that people would get inflammation of liver, scratching of skin, defects in eye sight, excessive thirst, urinary diseases and kidney disorders. Countries like USA, UK, Germany and France have the highest consumption of salt. When talking about America one out of 10 deaths is caused due to excessive salt consumption. When the situation in the world is like this, Sri Lankan’s too tend to show an increase in addicting to salt.
In old Sri Lankan kitchen salt, Chilies and other spices were added to the meals in adequate and require amounts. Our grannies knew the correct amount by practice or by use. But now we eat salt endlessly with fried rice, hot dogs, pizza, submarine etc. Well, health authorities have found a method to check our salt consumption is good or bad. Accordingly an iodized salt packet of 400g should be adequate for a family of 5 members for 28 days. If this is NOT applicable to you, you are OUT of the game. Sometimes we take in salt with food without knowing. For example things like baking powder have a considerable amount of salt, but we can’t detect it as it doesn’t have the salt flavor we used to know. People usually get easily addicted to bad habits and it’s so hard to get rid of it. This too goes under that category. So people should get used to check out the ingredients of what they eat essentially. Finally it’s good to remind TOO much of anything is BAD. So THINK and EAT…. Bride is awaiting to kill you.
