Pass the Salt

 The search for the ‘sweet spot’ of this nutritional trickster uncovers the secrets behind our salty crystal craving. 

Essential? Harmful? Or both?

Markham Street Films
presents

Pass the Salt a film by Michael McNamara

Are you salt addicted or salt sensitive?

I recently viewed this new Documentary about salt.  It was a very interesting take on salt.  Do you start shaking salt on your food before you taste it?  Do you put it on everything?  Are your cravings salt based?  Or are you salt sensitive like myself.  If I have Chinese food I expect to pay for it within a half an hour after eating it.  It doesn't always stop me from having salt but it does make me make different choices depending on my circumstances that day.  Salt and sugar are in everything these days and even things you would never think they are in.  It's now trendy to add flaked salt on top of caramel and chocolate desserts just the same way we add sugar to ketchup and tomato sauce and that is the new normal.


 For decades, salt has been labelled "bad" for us but this has recently been complicated by findings on the importance, nay the necessity, of salt in our diets. Weaving these two opposing sides together, Pass the Salt shows the complexity not of only salt but of our own bodies.

In the new documentary from Markham Street Films, veteran filmmaker Michael McNamara (Hot Docs Don Haig Award recipient, Writers Guild of Canada Award winner and Gemini/Canadian Screen Awards favourite with a combined 8 nominations and 1 Gemini win) puts salt, literally and figuratively, under the microscope.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to write this post before the film's nation-wide broadcast and streaming premiere on January 17 but I didn't want to miss providing the info about this film in case you had another opportunity to see it on the CBC or by other outlets.

I am going to try and provide you with information like this documentary sooner than this one but I took a little break on my blog posting to catch up on my life.  But one of my new years resolutions is to get back to posting timely information on my blog again.

This post is an FYI in case you get a chance to watch this documentary in the future.

Personally for me it grabbed my attention because I do have issues with the amount of sodium that goes into our food because most of it is highly processed which adds way more salt than we require in our day.

Look at the ingredient list of one of those instant Ramen packages and you will be shocked.  The recommended daily allowance for Sodium is about 1200 milligrams in total and check out the next freezer meal you pick up and see how much is in one little portion of food.  The fact that when you go to most restaurants and you have no idea what the sodium content is shocking to me but at this point in my life I can tell that it's going to be an issue for me by the type of food and how it's prepared.   IE:  I skip the soy sauce when I get Sushi.

Salt isn't the enemy but the levels of salt consumption and the knowledge of how much we consume is really important to our health/

It is streaming across Canada on CBC GEM now.