Death by sodium

Ever get thirst after eating a meal just because it had far too much salt in it? Yeah, that happens to me all the time. Luckily I can spend my entire work day chugging out of my water/baby bottle. So what if you could find food that could insert so much salt in to your system that your heart would seize up and your tongue would curl and shrivel like a slug? Personally, I'd write about it on my website!

A couple short weeks ago Gavin and I ate our post-jazz choir dinner at PLU's Bistro (AKA the only food place open on campus past 7pm). He got me my usual personal pizza with pepperoni and either extra cheese or jalapenos. As he swiped his card for our food I gathered the usual condiments and headed back to our table. That night I tried something different — I imagined how terrible the packet of Taste Pleasers Gourmet Fat Free Buttermilk Ranch must be for me. I rotated the soft packet and thoroughly read through the nutrition factoids on its back. No fat: good thing 'cause it's fat free. No cholesteral. Wee! I'm riding safe with THIS stuff! 700g of sodium. Alri— hey, wait just a darn minute!

Something was terribly wrong with what I just read. The number, so daftly out of proportion, blew my the scale of what I knew to be the metric system out of wack. I started to second guess my intellect by rationalizing that, "A gram isn't very much so the number could be right. But... I normally see measurements in milligrams. Of course, 700g is just 300g shy of a kilogram. And I KNOW that's a lot!"

So hither and yonder my mind swung until finally I decided to laugh histerically at the blunder. Sure enough, in bold-faced, nutrition-factual print, this package of ranch dressing was loaded with over 300 times your recommended daily intake of sodium! My hat goes off to Taste Pleasers and PLU for offering such an amazing product—all packed in a handy pocket size! Now I can carry more lethal doses of sodium than could revive and then kill off the population of a third world nation.

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