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.

The Gluten Free Garage at Wychwood Barns - Event

Wychwood Barns

There seems to be a trend for a lot of people to be switching to Gluten Free foods lately when they aren't even gluten intolerant.  Why? Well because they have heard that people lose weight when they go gluten free.   Well this is true when you are diagnosed with celiac disease and you give up gluten free food then you will lose weight but there is no real proof that it's beneficial to you to go gluten free if you don't have any related health issues.   While I do believe we aren't eating what we did over 30 years ago when it comes to wheat based products because of the new farming technologies that have stripped the land of the soil benefits that would produce a full healthful benefit in the wheat we used to grow that doesn't seem to exist anymore unless you are getting it from a small organic farm.

Joy McCarthy Joyous Health

I have a friend that has been gluten free for years but this by no means makes her more healthy it just means she gets really sick when she eats wheat products.   I have another baker friend who was advised by her nutritionist to eliminate gluten products and she has seen results in weight loss and feeling better when she doesn't consume gluten products.  And there is a third friend who has diabetes and wants to switch to a higher protein and low sugar based bread and eliminate more white based foods that spike his blood sugar.  He is on a mission to find a bread that he can eat every day.   We made an attempt to make a recipe found in the Wheat Belly book but it was a horrible substitute for bread.  He said it was better when toasted but if I had to eat it I would give up bread altogether.   I myself don't have a gluten intolerance but I know that it's in my best interest to investigate healthy and tasty products and I feel like it's information that might be helpful to the people that read this blog.   While I am not a certified nutritionist or healthcare provider I did work in a hospital for 14 years and saw a lot of the effects of what happens to people that struggle with pain and health issues.  I learned a lot while working in the hospital because at the time I decided to lose weight by going to weight watchers and used the information available at the hospital to learn some things and then over the years I have been open to learning about diet related issues from either books or from some of the documentaries I have watched.

In the never ending quest to find better foods and to see if I could find products that would help my friends I decided to go to the GLUTEN FREE GARAGE event that was held at Wychwood Barns this past sunday.   I brought my friend who is in search for bread with me to see if he could find some things.  

We tried many samples but unfortunately there weren't any samples of bread for him to try but there were a lot of crackers.  It's easy to make a cracker taste good because you can use flax seeds and dried herbs to make a crispy cracker.  It's a lot harder to make a light and tasty bread that rises without the gluten.   He did find a vendor that sold various flours and had a multi grain bread mix which my friend bought to try out.  He paid $5 for the package and will get 2 loaves from that.  We will see how they turn out as soon as he tries it.

The other thing that I have tried in the past that was never very good was Pasta.  I'm a purist and just prefer the taste of regular pasta, but I must say that I was impressed with the taste of Ital Pasta's penne in tomato sauce that they sampled at the event.  It just tasted good.  A pleasant surprise.  They were also sampling polenta which I suppose a lot of people use to instead of some other things.  That was tasty as well.

There were many bakery products but I didn't try much of them,  I only tried the samples.

One thing I must say is that there are companies trying to cash in on the gluten free trend where they really shouldn't be marketing it that way because the products have probably always been gluten free like the use of corn in products and say a tomato sauce that doesn't have a flour or cornstarch thickener.

You need to be careful still when buying some products because they may increase the fats or sugars to make the products taste better when they take out the gluten.   It's the same as yoghurt, when it says zero fat it has increased the sugar content for flavour.

At the event there was also Tonica Kombucha which I have written about before and there were other Kombucha and smoothie drinks.  There were dips and spreads, and falafels which are probably normally gluten free as well.  

But I have to say that most of the food I sampled tasted very good.   There was only a couple of things that I tried that I didn't love but I suppose there are people that get used to some of the products when it's the only thing they can eat.

I sat in on one demo with the owner of Bunner's Bakery which just opened a location in Kensington Market.   She made a really tasty granola and a breakfast waffle that would be a great breakfast substitute item.  She had a beautiful cookbook on display and a large booth where my other friend tried a cinnamon bun and said you couldn't tell that it wasn't gluten free.

So all in all I would say the event was very successful and I am sure it helped a lot of people find products in one place instead of searching all over town.  It enabled them to sample before buying a lot of the products so it would save them a lot of time and money which is always a good thing these days.

And for me I learned a few new products that I can recommend to my gluten struggling friends and I know that if I have a dinner party that there are options out there that will accommodate people's ever changing diets.

for more info about the show and the vendors check out the website www.glutenfreegarage.ca