Salt in the Wound
My most recent Reddit comment will not be wildly upvoted. TLDR: I think people moralizing about the evils of high salt diets on the Internet aren't actually concerned about anyone's health and it's generally asshole behavior.
My not PC opinions in the comment above that will get no love on Reddit are the tame version of what I really think about the topic.
I think it gets vastly worse: In the US, we blame high blood pressure in Blacks on them eating too much salt and that likely is a primary source of this Internet meme.
I believe their high blood pressure is really caused by them eating too much pork. Pork is ridiculously high in selenium which doesn't get talked about and was news to me. I only ever hear Brazil nuts get cited as crazy high in selenium.
Selenium is KNOWN to cause high blood pressure. It's a stupidly easy inference to make that their high pork diet is the real cause once you have all the pieces in front of you, so the LACK of discussion about how pork is crazy high in selenium is itself suspicious as a cultural pattern.
Guess what? Foods like hog jowls and chitterlings as a part of Black American culture is rooted in historic slavery.
Slaves were not fed by their owners and had to grow their own crops on the worst strips of land after working their owner's fields all day. Hog jowls and chitterlings (intestines) were available to slaves because it was discarded by their owners as something they were not willing to eat.
Guess what else? More salt would help bring selenium levels down. If I'm correct that a high pork diet is the real culprit, then telling them to eat less salt is actively harmful, not merely "wrong and useless" advice.
And it still gets worse:
How much salt you need is impacted by how physically hard you work. Guess who in the US likely NEEDS extra salt because they work all day in the hot sun and sweat profusely on a regular basis?
No, not White People. Try again, asshole.
Yep: People of color tend to be the people filling those jobs while White desk jockies LECTURE them about eating too much salt and needing to cut back.
It's really elegantly diabolical, so much so it's difficult to believe all White doctors are really just THAT stupid and not White Supremacist jackasses looking for sneaky ways to actively harm Blacks and keep them oppressed.
So I think screeching about high salt is probably an American meme rooted in blaming Black people for their own problems. It's probably a form of denial concerning what White Supremacists have done to so many people and is in line with the phrase "colonizer moves to innocence."
In other words it's White people saying they somehow didn't really do bad things to Indigenous peoples when they know their ancestors absolutely did in fact do bad things intentionally with malice aforethought for sadistic funsies and personal gain in many many cases.
Yes, there was also misunderstandings and unfortunate happenstance at times. I've written about that previously on this same blog.
Yes, White people currently alive today didn't personally do to Natives whatever their ancestors did to Natives and it's not really reasonable to actively seek to PUNISH White people for merely being White AND a lot of SJW crap isn't really about justice or improving life for people of color, it's a demand for upper class White males to volunteer to be everyone's bitch and call that something somehow morally superior rather than abusive bullshit by angry people.
I have no idea how we improve lives for women and people of color but asking upper class White males to volunteer to be their toilet isn't it.
Let me repeat that and rephrase: Hurting other people because you are angry doesn't ACTUALLY materially improve YOUR life.
Anyway, I think the "high salt is BAD" battlecry runs deeper as toxic social BS than most people want to believe.
I think it's such a common claim on the Internet in part for the same reason my emotionally scarred mother who spent her earliest years in Nazi Germany moralized about food. She had ugly ugly baggage from living under something truly gruesome and she had a strong emotional need to distance herself from that and somehow reassure herself she wasn't part of the problem nor did she somehow deserve to suffer under that system.
Being a good person was extremely important to my mother, probably to try to wash off the stench of Nazi Germany and WW2.
So I think moralizing about high salt being bad is a practice deeply rooted in the historic practice of horrific abuse of Black slaves followed up by White people trying to say "Ongoing racism isn't why your lives suck. You ignorant assholes are hurting yourselves."
Even if true, did you miss the fact that slaves were legally denied the right to learn to read, so ignorance was actively forced upon them with malice aforethought? Or are you the ignorant one, Mr./Ms. Morally Superior White Asshole?
And it absolutely was malice aforethought because knowledge is power. Passing a law forbidding slaves from learning to read was a means to deny enslaved people power by crippling their ability to gain knowledge.
Frederick Douglass said he set out to learn to read because he heard someone say that education makes a man unsuited to slavery and he made it a goal to be the kind of person unsuitable to slavery. He started life as a slave and ultimately spent time as a US diplomat stationed in a foreign country.
In a word, moralizing about how high salt diets are BAD is a sneaky form of racism.
Hi! My "White privilege" includes a homozygous recessive predominantly Caucasian salt wasting disease and a physician prescribed me a high salt diet to try to save my life.
So I desperately wish this meme would go die in a fucking fire, please and thank you, and your quietly racist shit with plausible deniability along with it.
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